Not necessarily. On the one hand, if a world view disagrees with Christianity, then it's obviously inconsistent with Christianity . However, it need not be internally inconsistent. And if it is internally inconsistent, then this can be shown without assuming Christianity. A bit more generally, however: a Christian apologist might have more than one logical goal. One goal might be to show that some rival view is incoherent, thereby eliminating it from contention. Another goal might be to point out some not-so-obvious inconsistency between some claim of a rival view and the core doctrines of Christianity. The second sort of enterprise doesn't beg the question either, though the inconsistency by itself wouldn't have to count in favor of Christianity.

One quick note on credentials. We rely on them because they are, in general, pretty reliable and they save an enormous amount of time. This bears on your question. Suppose you applied for a beginning-level assistant professor job at my institution, having no degree. I would need to decide if it was worth the time to investigate whether you have the skills and knowledge needed, and a good deal of past experience with people from outside the academy who think of themselves as philosophers would make it a poor bet. You would probably get sorted very quickly to the "Reject" file in the triage process. That might be a mistake. But academics, like most everyone else, are busy people, and given the (literally) hundreds of applications that a job ad might generate, we have no serious choice but to rely on heuristics of this sort. We'd also wonder -- if we got around to it -- whether anyone who claims to be so averse to the academy as a student is likely to do well there as a faculty member. That said, it...

Saying just what emotional suffering amounts to wouldn't be easy, but there may be no need. Even if we find it hard to spell out what it is , all of us know emotional suffering from the inside. Some emotional suffering may be internally generated -- endogenous, as it's sometimes put -- but whether or not we understand the mechanisms, it's clear that things in the outer world can cause emotional pain. When you think about it, this isn't really so strange. Our emotional states are deeply dependent on the states of our brains, and our brains, after all, are physical things, in interaction with other physical things. We simply accept this for perception: our perceptual experiences are caused by the interaction between things in the outer world and our perceptual systems, including (not least!) our brains. The details of how all this works are best left to the scientific experts, but for example, if I see someone I care about being hurt, and if I can do nothing about it, feeling distressed would seem...

I guess it depends on what you mean by "celebrate Christmas." Suppose the atheist likes the traditions of exchanging gifts, getting together with family and so on and that's why s/he "celebrates" Christmas. I dare say there are a good many people who fit that description. Hard to see any ethical problem so far. Suppose the atheist pretends to be an observant Christian in her celebrations. Is that a problem? Perhaps. But the atheist needn't pretend and even if she does, just how "bad" the deceit is would depend on the reasons and circumstances. Perhaps the worry is that the atheist's celebrating helps add stature or credibility to religion, which she rejects. But being an atheist doesn't have to mean being hostile to religion. An atheist might be indifferent about other people's theism. So if there's an ethical problem here, it would seem not to be a very obvious one nor -- most likely -- a very deep one.

We can at least make relative sense of a claim like this. For a native English speaker , Chinese is harder than Spanish. How so? Because English speakers can achieve a high level of mastery of Spanish much more quickly, on average, than they can with Chinese. Obviously other such comparisons among various languages are possible. Could one language be "absolutely" more difficult than another? Though I'm not a linguist, I'd think the answer is yes. Since I can't cite a fully real case (simply because I don't know enough), a slightly idealized one will do. IGNORING PRONUNCIATION, compare German and Afrikaans. They are related languages and there is a good deal of similarity between them. Knowing one will give you a leg up on understanding the other. (I have an intermediate knowledge of German. That lets me make elementary sense of a certain amount of written Afrikaans.) But anyone who has some familiarity with both languages will see that the grammar of Afrikaans is much simpler. In particular, there...

A good question.One way of looking at it is to make a comparison with fictions within fiction -- say, the play-within-a-play that we have in Hamlet. The whole shebang is fiction: both the play-within-the-play and the play itself, but we can still sensibly ask what's true within the "fictional world" of Hamlet. (Philosophers have written a good deal on "truth in fiction," but the details needn't detain us.) Our question is about the inner structure or logic of the overarching fiction we call Hamlet. We can obviously say similar things about dreams. Dreams have (more or less coherent) plots or story lines, and the "logic" of those story lines is plausibly not so different from the "logic" of stories, plays and the like. It's clearly possible (and probably pretty common) to have a dream that includes "waking up" from a dream within the story line. There's only one real dreamer -- the flesh and blood person lying in the bed. But the story line of the dream includes a fictionalized (dreamatized?)...

Let's try a related question: is physics ever wrong? The answer is pretty clearly yes in one sense. Physicists can be wrong. And if enough physicists are wrong about the answer to some physics question, then Physics as a discipline is wrong. It's happened before and will no doubt happen again. Nonetheless, it's perfectly natural to say things like "I wonder if we really have the physics of black holes right." When we talk that way, we use the word "physics" to mean "the principles that provide the true descriptions of physical systems." Those principles, of course, can't be wrong because the right principles, whatever they may be, aren't wrong. Same goes for logic. There are logicians. They can make mistakes. And there is a discipline of Logic. It could end up in some collective error about something or other. But there's lots of room for the other sort of usage. Someone might insist that logic dictates a certain conclusion when in fact the conclusion doesn't really follow from the premises....

If I set my pet up for a treatment that I know won't cure my pet and won't make the animal feel any better, then that might be somewhere in the ballpark of torture, though depending on what we have in mind, "torture" might be too strong a word. But that's not the typical case, is it? First, people who take their pets to the acupuncturist or whatnot typically believe that they're doing good; torturers seldom see things that way. Second, in at least some cases, the pet owners may be right. What you say about the science is too strong. For some conditions, we actually have evidence that some "alternative" treatments can help. And we can add: absence of scientific evidence isn't the same as evidence of inefficacy. Not all alternative remedies have been laboratory-tested. Some of the ones that haven't may work, and it may even be that the anecdotal evidence is good enough to make it reasonable to try the treatment. Of course, in some cases, the evidence is in and anyone who checks it will...

On Thoreau: Meh! Thoreau apparently thought of "philosopher" as an honorific, meaning something like "wise person." If that's right, then I'm reasonably sure he was wrong in his day, and I'm reasonably sure that he'd be wrong today. There were, there are and with luck there will continue to be wise people. But (psst!...) being wise and being a philosopher aren't the same thing. Many people who are wise wouldn't be good at philosophy. Many people who are good at philosophy aren't all that wise. Even though the word "philosophy" literally translates as "love of wisdom," philosophy has never, from its very inception, been solely concerned with what most of us think of as wisdom. That's because what we think of as wisdom is importantly a matter of having the discernment needed to live what, for shorthand, we might call "a good life, " and philosophy has always been concerned with more than that. By the way: I'm not offering a definition of wisdom, but I think my little comment gets us into...

You didn't disturb my dreams at all. But what you've offered up is a fair bit of bald assertion and rhetorical questioning that doesn't exactly move me to offer detailed comments. There is no one object of philosophy, and there is no one method. I don't believe that philosophy is a science (nor do I know any philosophers who do), but I also don't believe that it's an entirely different kind of beast. The idea that philosophy is a feel-good activity would seem pretty funny to most philosophers. We're an argumentative lot who spend a good deal of time beating our heads against hard arguments. As for "giving sense to life," whether philosophy or art is up to that task, there's a difference between "shaping" our lives and giving sense to them. (I'll set aside the rhetoric about science and oblivion.) Some philosophy is indeed excessively hair splitting, though some unruly and overgrown hairs really do need a trim. What the vague accusation of "prostitution to successful science" is...