2/29/12

Being in this class is starting to make me question everything that I have been taught since I was young! Because I went to a Catholic school until 8th grade I was taught to be ourselves but God has a plan for everyone and is all knowing. But today I learned that is a paradox because we are saying that God created us with a plan but yet we have free will and can do whatever we want. We this really was true than God's powers would be limited by the choices that we made and when we made them. If that was the case than how would that God be all powerful if what we did was the deciding factor in what he could do? The question came up today that if God create a boulder that was even to big for him to move? All of this is questioning if the the God that we think is a God and how much of a God he really could be. I never thought that it would be okay to question anything bigger than me.

2/28/12

How do you know if an amazing act is a coincidence or a miracle? When something is considered a miracle, it means that a higher power like God intervening in a situation that we as humans can't explain. When believing in a miracle, along with that comes faith. Faith is believing what you hear, not on something that you experience yourself. The believing in things that we can't see or explain helps us make sense of the world in a way that we can understand because there are so many unknowns. A good example of this statement is the belief in religion. The belief in religion can save us from the real world momentarily. As Karl Marx said, "Religion is like a drug, but it is also the heart of a heartless world". Because we as humans fear the unknown, we look for anything that will help us make a little more sense of a world that we will never be able to fully understand. 

2/27/12

Today we talked about the unnatural and supernatural. The basest of supernatural knowledge is the religious texts that full the basest of our knowledge on the things that we can't see or explain. Our belief in the supernatural is the belief that we are getting things right compared to what the religious text tells us. Our tradition makes us believe things like what color a wedding dress should be or what we should eat for Thanksgiving, but what makes us think that way? Is it the fear of the unknown, of how things would work if we didn't have these set "guidelines" that everyone around us seams to live by? Naturalist believe based on observation, so that we act and believe based on what we see in our everyday lives and that there is always an explanation. But when it comes to religious things like faith, we are believing because we choose to believe, not because there is any concrete evidence that there is something to believe in.

2/23/12

As an American, we hear the word free will a lot. We live in country that allows us to feel how we want to feel and say what we want to say. But in a more philosophical view free will is the humans ability to chose out of more than one option without the laws of physics interfering. It also means that nothing in our lives is determined, that the choices that we make determine what is to happen next. But to take it a step deeper, what if our thoughts and actions are determined but we just don't think they are? Like we think that we are making decisions on our own but really the world had it already determined that we would think that way. If this idea that our thoughts are already determined, there is no way we would be able to know because we cant tell the future. We can't reason our way though the illusion of free will and because of that we will never know if free will really does exist.

2/22/12

I learned today that determinism is that belief that humans do not have free will, that what we believe we choose is actually somt ething that is pre determined by the world. In the universe we have no choice which is something that is kind of scary to think about. Things change over time, and andifferent way to think about it is if time stopped, stopped all the elements of the world only then nothing would change because time isn' moving. Because we live in a world where things are always changing than there is no way to know what the future is unless you knew everything about an object like a piece of chalk than you could predict would would happen if it were to fall. Time doesn't only flow backwards, it only flows foward. In determinism it is believed that the basic laws of the world govern our thoughts even if we have no idea. This idea means that the world runs every decision that we make and we have no idea! We have no control over any thought or action even though we might think we do. Whoa.

2/21/12

So I was reading a story about how a little girl is a survivor of cancer of more than 3 years now and she wasn't supposed to live more than a year. I don't know why this struck me so deep, but it got me thinking about this class. I know it's not what we're talking about now but earlier in the class we were talking about how philosophers want an explination for almost anything and that is why we look into how we act as humans and what makes us act that way. But how could anyone explain how that little girl is still breathing? I know when we look into the world there are going to be things that accure that we will not be able to explain because we do not know everything in the world that we live in, but than why are we looking for an explination? There is going to be so much that we will never understand but yet we pick at some of the greatest minds in history in hopes that there will be some claification, I just don't understand why we toucher ourselves.

2/20/12

This weeks question was wether or not I would consider myself a compatibilist or an incompatibilist. I had no idea what either of these terms meant, so the defination I got off of Wikipedia.com is that compatibilism si the belief that free will and determinism can happen at the same time, and that it is possiable to believe both without being logically inconsistent. Incompatibilism is defined as the view that a deterministic universe is completly at odds with the notion that people have free will. It took me a long time to have an opinion on what I believed in, considering that I never really put much thought into it. But I came to the conclusion that I would consider myself a compatibilist because I feel that free will and determinism can coexist and help us make the decisions that lead us in our lives. The way that I see it is that without free will we would fully depend on other people to do something as simple as making a decision and determism gives us the drive to take the risks that help us learn and grow to lead better lives.