To add a few thoughts to my colleague's response: We could use the following as a rough working definition of a miracle: a miracle is an intervention in the course of nature by the deity in which the usual regularities are suspended or over-ridden. There's lots of room to refine and polish that, but it gets around one objection to the very idea of a miracle, namely that laws of nature aren't really laws of nature if they have exceptions. Laws of nature would encode the way the world works when God doesn't intervene. But of course, even if we can come up with an intelligible notion of "miracle," it's a long ways from there to having reasons to believe that there actually are miracles, let alone that any particular occurrence is a miracle. The fact that we don't have an explanation for something at the moment provides more or less no reason by itself to think that it's a case of divine intervention. "Magic" is a more complicated concept than "miracle," in my view. If you go back and look at how...

I'm not sure what the difference between the philosophical and the mathematical sense of "determinism" is supposed to be, but I think that the answer will be the same in any case. And that answer is: it depends on how you think quantum theory should be understood. On what we might describe broadly as the "orthodox interpretation" of quantum theory, the answer is no: the decay is not a deterministic event. Roughly put, this means that the state of the world before the decay doesn't determine whether the atom will decay. There are some complications here about relativity and about so-called entangled states, but we can leave them aside. On this way of looking at quantum theory, sometimes the "wave function" or "quantum state" changes unpredictably and discontinuously, and these changes are genuine chance events. Radioactive decay is a special case. According to Bohmian mechanics, the most important of the so-called "hidden variable" views, quantum systems are thoroughly deterministic. What happens in the...

A couple of thoughts. First, lying is bad, and it's not any less bad when it's done by a politician trying to whip up his supporters. No need for philosophy here. That's not the same as saying that it should be against the law for politicians to tell bald-faced lies, but there are moral limits on what people should say. Donald Trump hasn't given evidence that he cares much about those limits. Second, you write that there's no evidence against the claim that millions of ineligible aliens voted. If you mean that no one has done an extensive view of the voting records, then perhaps that's true. But that doesn't mean it's reasonable to suspend judgment until someone decides to do a review. The evidence in general is that voter fraud is rare. Even when zealous politicians go looking for it, the pattern is that they don't find it. ( Of course there are isolated cases, but that's not what's at issue here.) So we have a general reason to be very suspicious of what Donald Trump has said, and no...

Defeating Rommel's plan amounted to defeating Rommel because there was something Rommel was trying to accomplish and defeating his plan kept him from doing that. Stopping someone from carrying out their plans is a straightforward case of defeating someone. But evolution isn't something that stops God from doing what he was trying to do and so it doesn't "defeat" God. If we can show that evolution is true, we've defeated a view about God, but God isn't a view. In fact, however, I think your question really is the one in your last sentence: does showing that evolution is true show that there's no God? The answer is somewhat controversial, but I'd say no. It shows that a particular view of God is not true, but it doesn't show that there's no God. There are plenty of believers who think that evolution is true and that nonetheless, there's a God. Maybe no reasonable notion of God can be consistent with evolution, but this isn't nearly as obvious as it's sometimes assumed to be.* ---------------------...

There's no purely intrinsic reason, but there's still a reason overall. Here's a comparison. In the US, it's not just illegal but also wrong to drive on the left side of the road. In South Africa, the opposite is true. What makes it wrong to drive on the left in the US and the right in South Africa is that there is a widely-accepted practice --- in fact, a rule in this case --- about how we drive, and violating this particular practice puts others at risk. Now in the case of the late-night piano-player, there may be no literal risk created by the disturbance the piano player creates. But there's still what's sometimes called a coordination problem here, and there's a way of getting on that solves the problem. Most people sleep at night. Most people also need a reasonably quiet environment to sleep. And so we have a combination of custom and, in many jurisdictions, law to make it possible for people to do things like practice the piano and for people to sleep. Since most humans are wired to sleep at...

I have to admit: I'm as puzzled as you are. Let's suppose I'm trying to decide which flavor of ice cream I want. My choices are chocolate and rum raisin. I like them both, and there's nothing unreasonable about eating either. What would make the author of the article treat my ending up with rum raisin amount to a free choice? That I did an exhaustive utility calculation? In the circumstances, how is this better than picking rum raisin because at that moment I'm feeling nostalgic and I'm struck by a warm memory of the big scoops of rum raisin I used to get from the ice cream shop in my home town when I was a boy? More generally, what's the issue? Did my momentary emotion compel me to pick the rum-raisin? That doesn't seem plausible. What reason was there for not giving in to my emotion? I'd go a bit further. In a case like this, wouldn't it be a bit unreasonable to second-guess my urge? What's the issue? If it's supposed to be that there's an explanation for how I came to pick what I picked,...

Yes. From "Very probably not-X" it simply doesn't follow that X is false. Of course, that doesn't mean it's reasonable to ignore probabilities...

You're right to be suspicious of the idea that we somehow "obstruct natural selection." That way of putting things assumes a dubious notion of "natural" and suggests that if we influence evolution (which we do) this is somehow a bad thing. As you point out, medicine and other human inventions are natural in a perfectly good sense: we are part of nature and we create these things. Of course, there are also perfectly good uses of the word "natural" according to which medicines, computers, cars and so on aren't natural. But whether something is "natural" in that sense and whether it's good or bad are two very different questions. So is the question of whether these "unnatural" things have a place in evolution. Some people think that because we can manipulate our environment, evolution doesn't apply to humans. This is confusion. Natural selection is a matter of differences in how likely an organism is to reproduce because of features of the environment it finds itself in. Even if we shape the...

I often find the words "duty" and "rights" confusing outside of legal contexts, because they're weighted with theoretical overtones that don't always help us think clearly about how we should act and what we should do. So let me refocus the question: are the things we should and should't do when it comes to institutions? I think the answer is yes. Suppose that I find a way to hack into the Red Cross bank accounts and steal money. I shouldn't do that. It's not just that it's against the law (though it certainly is). It's just wrong. It's not wrong just because it may hurt the CEO of the Red Cross, or any of the people who work for the Red Cross. Those people come and go, and it may even be that they aren't actually harmed by my act of theft. What I'm doing is wrong because (dare I say?) it harms the Red Cross itself. We could provide lots of related examples. And when it comes to the fundamental question, that's a pretty good way to answer it, I think. We can do things that help or harm organizations...

When we look at arguments, we have two broad questions in mind. One is whether the conclusion follows from the premises, whether or not the premises are true. The other is whether the premises are actually true. So with that in mind, let's turn to the argument. It's often possible by restating premises and adding other premises that are assumed but not stated to make an argument valid even if it's not valid as stated. Your argument is more or less this, I think If God exists, then necessarily God is perfectly good, knows all, and is all-powerful, Suppose God exists. Since God is all-powerful, God can give us free will. Since God is perfectly good, God wants us to have free will. God does anything God wants to do. Therefore, we have free will. Since God knows all, God knows what we are going to do before we do it. If God knows what we're going to do before we do it, then we don't have free will. Therefore, we don't have free will. CONTRADICTION. Therefore, God doesn't exist. We could clean things...