In the previous post, we considered the cosmological argument (that the Big Bang theory is an affirmation of a God) and a teleological argument (that the highly improbable fine-tuning of the universe proves the existence of intelligent creation). We saw that the cosmological argument is nothing more than an admission of our ignorance, although it may be presented in any number of fancy forms (such as the cause of the universe is an uncaused cause, which is God, for instance). The teleological argument comes from a potentially wilful distortion of the anthropic principle. The next one that Dr. Craig puts forward is the origin of morality, which has no grounding if you assume that atheism is true.
Category Archives: Topical
Includes posts on physics, philosophy, sciences, quantitative finance, economics, environment etc.
Atheism – Christian God, or Lack Thereof
Prof. William Lane Craig is way more than a deist; he is certainly a theist. In fact, he is more than that; he believes that God is as described in the scriptures of his flavor of Christianity. I am not an expert in that field, so I don’t know exactly what that flavor is. But the arguments he gave do not go much farther than the deism. He gave five arguments to prove that God exists, and he invited Hitchens to refute them. Hitchens did not; at least, not in an enumerated and sequential fashion I plan to do here.
Atheism – Is There a God?
Recently, I have been listening to some debates on atheism by Christopher Hitchens, as recommended by a friend. Although I agree with almost everything Hitchens says (said rather, because he is no longer with us), I find his tone bit too flippant and derisive for my taste, much like The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. I am an atheist, as those who have been following my writings may know. Given that an overwhelming majority of people do believe in some sort of a supreme being, at times I feel kind of compelled to answer the question why I don’t believe in one.
How to Start an Internet Business
Starting a business online is easier than you think. Succeeding in one is another story, of course. First of all, you need a product or service, which had better be something that people want. In my experience, what people want most is to make money. Anything that helps them make money is a good product. Second, you need a way of collecting money and delivering the product or providing the service in return for payment. Third, you need to get visibility.
Trinity in Hinduism
In Hinduism, there is a fundamental trinity of gods – Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva. They are to be understood as birth, existence and death. They are the gods of creation, well-being and destruction, as our grandmothers told us.
How Greece Got Quantitatively Eased
One thing we need to understand about bailouts is this – those who get bailed out don’t really get any money. So it was for Greece; she did’t get any either. Where did the money go? To the rightful owners of all the money, of course, the bankers. I used to work for a bank, so I know a little bit about it, although my station in the pecking order was way below the billion dollar bailout levels.
MySQL on Mac OSX Yosemite
If you use XAMPP for dev work on your Mac at home, and updated your OS to Yosemite, you may be temporarily distressed when you find that your MySQLd doesn’t start up. The fix is fairly simple.
Edit /Applications/XAMPP/xamppfiles/xampp. (You may have to use sudo to do this.)
Look for:
$XAMPP_ROOT/bin/mysql.server start > /dev/null &
And add unset DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH on top of it. It should look like:
unset DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH
$XAMPP_ROOT/bin/mysql.server start > /dev/null &
Restart MySQLd and you it should work.
Philanthropy of Mother Teresa and Other Spiritual Leaders
Philanthropy comes in two flavors. One is where you make a lot of money doing whatever it is that you do, and then spend a large part of it in directly helping other people. Bill Gates is a philanthropist of this kind. The second kind is where you collect money from a large number of people and put it to good use. Organizational charities do philanthropy of this kind. So do spiritual leaders, like the god men of India.
Richard Feynman — How Much Can We Know?
We open our eyes, we see the world, we discern patterns. We theorize, formalize; we use and rationality and mathematics to understand and describe everything. How much can we really know, though?
To illustrate what I mean, let me use an analogy. I wish I had the imagination to come up with it, but it was Richard Feynman who did. He was, by the way, quirky enough to compare physics with sex.
Indian Politics – the Last Resort
In India, they say politics is the last resort of a scoundrel. And it does seem to hold true there; Indian politicians are, by and large, corrupt crooks and bullies.
A quick Google research shows that it was Dr. Samuel Johnson who said, “Patriotism is the last resort of the scoundrel.” I guess our colonial rulers modified to suit the Indian condition. In any case, Indians staying out of politics suited the colonial rulers just fine. What is sad is that the Indian politics still attracts mostly scoundrels even after almost seventy years of independence.