Dave True's List: 210: Religion and Science

• Last week Steven Pinker

• some being in the world, the maximum instance, if you want, of the category of "being."
• serious thinkers
• esse ipsum subsistens, the sheer act of being itself.
• It might be helpful here to distinguish God from the gods.
• God is the sheer ocean of being from whose fullness the universe in its entirety exists.
• It is absolutely right to say that the advance of the modern physical sciences has eliminated the gods.
• the reason
• God is not a being within the natural order.
• category mistake
• real religion begins with a particular type of wonder
• "contingency."
• Therefore, unless we permanently postpone the explanation, we have to come, by logical deduction, to some reality which is not contingent and whose very nature is to exist.
• intuiting
• why is there something rather than nothing? Why should the universe exist at all?

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