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Well, you've made me reconsider. I don't think it's fair to have the word "justification" meaning nothing (as I get the sense Gettier interprets it), but having it mean anything calls into question exactly what it means. Perhaps we shouldn't be speaking of categorical justification after all...

That is the claim that I would dispute

Good question creativesoul, happy to reply. The first thing we can note about this case is that, contrary to Gettier's claim, propositions (g), (h), and (i) are not entailed by proposition (f), at least if Gettier is using "or" in the disjunctive sense. We can demonstrate this intuitively be...

Someone mentioned Gettier cases. I hold that the triparite theory of knowledge (knowledge as justified true belief) is true and that these "cases" are a bunch of nonsense. I will make my case: All of the Gettier cases rely on thought experiments in which a person possesses some amount of...

Well said. To respond to OP, there have been many theists before and aside you who have attempted to hijack the infinite regress paradox in service of their delusion, but the refutation, in the abstract, is as simple as two questions. Has everything that has ever existed had a cause that...

PM me if you are or become seriously interested in doing this. Some kinks would have to be worked out (to say the least), like how the same religion could integrate methodological empiricism and the promise of eternal life. We'd have to favor methodological empiricism. We would have to...

The simplest way is in this case also the stupidest way, because when you leave any trace, any single precocious individual of proper motivation who cannot be traced or stamped out, his ideas will bring back the old idea in a more virulent form then ever there was before. The point I intended...

How about a plausible explanation for this one : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyatlov_Pass_incident

Being that mirandansa has argued so well here, I am going to dredge up something I wrote awhile ago. It was originally intended as a script for a YouTube video, but it didn't come out so well in video format (maybe I just wasn't satisfied with it because I knew it was kind of an alien thing for...

Have you ever considered that perhaps the notion of an esoteric serpentine agent that spreads both disbelief and disharmony is a narrative construct designed to create a cognitive metaphorical link between the two phenomena in your mind? That imputing a patron to honest anti-theistic endeavors...

My answer is absolutely. The book I'm reading right now, Xenocide, by Orson Scott Card (who oddly enough is a Mormon I believe, still) is a giving great narrative arguments against belief in God through the example of a planet full of OCD super-theists who are essentially unwitting slaves of a...

I challenge you to prove the first sentence in this direct quote. Read Zuckerman's "Society without God". I haven't yet, but the reviews are enough. Also, the words "end religion" are not synonymous with either "end the lives of the religious", or "censor the religious". It is entirely...

I agree. That makes the most important question, "what is?" Let's (attempt to) imagine all of humanity's current and potential worldviews from a memeological perspective. Setting aside such vain and superficial disputes as the great schism betwixt atheisms strong and weak, and between atheism...

A person cannot "decide" to believe or disbelieve. If you believe the sun is going to rise tomorrow, then you believe it. Also, this modern distinction between "belief" and "knowledge" that makes debates like this possible is beginning to annoy me. You cannot possibly believe in something you...

Okay so there there are some on this thread who would like to have "Religious Education" to refer to things like Jesus Camp and the things they probably teach you at a school with a name like "St. John's" or "New Life Christian School" (from the top of my head), where there is one primary...

I consider myself an ignostic atheist. By this I mean that I am gnostic or agnostic in my atheism depending upon the God in question. The God of the bible who is omnipotent yet can't defeat the armies of the plains peoples because they had Iron Chariots, is an account of a God that has an...

Religion is a conceit to be deconstructed, though not in any sense an exclusively intellectual one. The question of whether people do or don't have "revelatory or religious experiences" without being inspired by an existing scripture is a good one. Clearly they do. Most of those are either...

You're certainly welcome, I had only recently persuaded myself as well. 8-)

Stopping religion (either halting it's progress, or eliminating it completely) can be accomplished by the same measures that would be necessary to destroy any meme (inherently self-replicating idea). Two broad categories in no particular order: 1. Educating people about what religion is and...

There are no "real" or "permanent" definitions. There are only individually relevant meanings. Even (especially) dictionaries understand this. Their authors understand that they are incomplete compilations of meanings always in flux, always in need of updates, revisions and new editions...