Simon Blackburn: Chance is as relentless as necessity.

The gods we make in our own image are tribal gods. They tell you how very, very little you should tolerate outsiders, who are less favoured of the Lord. Amazingly, there are no recorded cases of the holy man going up the mountain and finding that it's the others who are right. It always turns out that God wants unbelievers to suffer, and what could be more noble than to help him a little? When religion rules, toleration disappears, for you cannot cherish the verdict of death to the infidels, yet also tolerate those who disagree - for those are the very same infidels.

Simon Blackburn

mountain suffering men

People who have cut their teeth on philosophical problems of rationality, knowledge, perception, free will and other minds are well placed to think better about problems of evidence, decision making, responsibility and ethics that life throws up.

Simon Blackburn

philosophical cutting responsibility

This doctrine, that of the ghost in the machine, strictly separates the mind or soul from the body. And by doing so it takes the soul outside the sphere of mechanical or scientific explanation. It splits the world of the mind from the world of science. It is often supposed to protect our cherished free will.

Simon Blackburn

machines soul mind

A god that created the world and then walked off the site leaving it to its own devices is not a fit object of worship, nor a source of moral authority.

Simon Blackburn

moral leaving world

There are normal times when it is wholly admirable to be steadfast, resolute, unconflicted, and therefore when integrity is unmistakenly a virtue. The person of integrity knows what to do, and does it. But as we have been exploring, there are also times when certainty and single-mindedness indicate something less admirable: a deafness to voices that should be heard or a blindness to aspects of a situation that need to be considered.

Simon Blackburn

voice doe integrity

Nobody ever inferred from the multiple infirmities of Windows that Bill Gates was infinitely benevolent, omniscient, and able to fix everything.

Simon Blackburn

bills able window

Myself, I have never seen a bumper sticker saying " Hate if you Love Jesus ", but I sometimes wonder why not. It would be a good slogan for the religious Right.

Simon Blackburn

hate religious jesus

There may be rhetoric about the socially constructed nature of Western science, but wherever it matters, there is no alternative. There are no specifically Hindu or Taoist designs for mobile phones, faxes or televisions. There are no satellites based on feminist alternatives to quantum theory. Even that great public sceptic about the value of science, Prince Charles, never flies a helicopter burning homeopathically diluted petrol, that is, water with only a memory of benzine molecules, maintained by a schedule derived from reading tea leaves, and navigated by a crystal ball.

Simon Blackburn

tea-leaves reading memories

Perhaps to restore human freedom we should deny determinism ?

Simon Blackburn

determinism deny should

The fantasist in whom the reality barrier has broken down is unreliable, believing things when he should not, and telling things as true when they are not.

Simon Blackburn

broken believe reality

Thoughts are strange things. they have 'representational' powers: a thought typically represents the world as being one way or another. A sensation, by contrast, seems to just sit there.

Simon Blackburn

strange way world

If our best efforts come to nothing often enough, we need consolation, and thoughts of unfolding, infinite destiny, or karma , are sometimes consoling.

Simon Blackburn

best-effort karma destiny

It can seem an amazing fact that laws of nature keep on holding, that the frame of nature does not fall apart.

Simon Blackburn

law doe fall

Respect, of course is a tricky term. I may respect your gardening by just letting you get on with it. Or, I may respect it by admiring it and regarding it as a superior way to garden.

Simon Blackburn

garden may way

The absolutist takes himself to read nature in her very own language, but the relativist insists that nature does not speak, and we hear only what we have elected to hear.

Simon Blackburn

absolutism language doe

The word " philosophy " carries unfortunate connotations: impractical, unworldly, weird.

Simon Blackburn

connotation unfortunate philosophy

Induction is the process of taking things within our experience to be representative of the world outside our experience. It is a process of projection or extrapolation.

Simon Blackburn

projection process world

In Michigan recently a man won a lawsuit for substantial damages because, he claimed, a rear-end collision in his car had made him a homosexual.

Simon Blackburn

michigan car men

Finding a mechanism does not bypass the problem of induction.

Simon Blackburn

bypass problem doe

Why should thinkers mock the simple pieties of the people?

Simon Blackburn

simple should people