Status Updates From Sense and Goodness Without ...

"in ordinary life we always define ourselves, our fundamental identities, by our aggregate personality—our skills, hopes, dreams, thoughts—and never by some other thing that excludes all of this and that no one can observe or ever has observed. Are “you” an ever-growing and changing personality, or a strange, invisible, unchanging causal power devoid of all personality?"

Naturalism rules!

"Existence is like a comic strip, which has a beginning and a middle and an end. It really does manifest causal change from each step to the next, as we read the cells of the strip from left to right. Yet, in a sense, this is also an illusion: for though we read it one cell at a time in that order, the whole comic strip already exists—how it ends is a foregone conclusion."

"In ancient Greece and Rome, the motions of the planets were found to be incredibly intricate and orderly, uniquely specific and astonishingly elegant. This was a mystery so great that even the best minds of the time could only struggle to describe how the system worked. No one had a clue[...]
The obvious and most popular answer was “God did it.” After all, how else could such an inexplicable, complex order arise"

"if the [Cartesian] demon were really this consistent in giving us results, through which we satisfy our every goal and desire, there would hardly be any intelligible difference between what we call “reality” and the world the demon is inventing for us. [We'd] have just as much reason to pursue the [better working] methods for discovering [the demon's] plan, and to abandon the bad ones"

What are words worth?

Philosophy is therefore no idle pastime, but a serious business, fundamental to our lives. It should be our first if not our only religion: a religion wherein worship is replaced with curiosity, devotion with diligence, holiness with sincerity, ritual with study, and scripture with the whole world and the whole of human learning.

Though compiled with the wisdom of maturity and hindsight, this book helps to explain the intellectual journey just described, and my arrival at a humanistic atheism.