Persuasiveness is pretty clearly a relative matter here! After having spent a few decades thinking about quantum theory, I don't find myself much bothered by the idea of indeterminism. Even if I front that "something can't come from nothing" it's a long way from there to the conclusion that all events are governed by deterministic laws. And in any case, when it comes to questions about how the universe really works, I'm not inclined to take my mere hunches and intuitions too seriously. In particular, it's hard to see why I would five my intuitions about nature priority over the painstaking theoretical and experimental work of the sciences. The world has surprised us many times before. I'd bet that it will continue to do so.

It's quite possible to spend too much time in your own head, too caught up in thought. It's also possible to be too quick to resort to analysis and "reason" in cases where a different sort of response will serve better. I'd guess that most philosophers (among other sorts of intellectuals) have seen this tendency in themselves from time to time and could tell stories on their colleagues. That said, most of the philosophers I know are pretty sane and balanced. They can take their shoes off, so to speak, and don't feel the need to spend all their time analyzing. People who go into philosophy are probably inclined by temperament to be more analytical than most, but philosophy isn't necessarily the culprit. After all, it would be hard to make a good philosophical case for spending all one's time doing philosophy!

I'm afraid that I don't know the answer, and whatever credentials I have as a philosopher won't help much. It's a question about human psychology/behavior and really good answers will have to come from the social and biological sciences. Philosophers might offer plausible speculations, but those speculations might be wrong. That said, you've certainly put your finger on something real. In fact, psychologists have a name for at least a part of it: the Fundamental Attribution Error. It amounts to this: when we see other people acting badly or foolishly or inappropriately, we tend to put it down to character traits. But when it comes to our own bad or foolish or inappropriate behavior, we tend to excuse it as the result of some passing circumstances. Put another way: my mistakes are simply a result of a passing state; yours are products of some unfortunate but more-or-less permanent trait. We make excuses for ourselves even in cases where we aren't inclined to do so for others. Why are we...

Let me start by saying that on any plausible scenario, I agree with Prof. Smith. There are plenty of good grounds -- he offers three excellent ones -- for thinking that sacrificing your children to the gods is really just wrong, period. The fact that some people think otherwise doesn't by itself amount to a reason for doubting this. (In fact, this is one of the points that trips people up when they think about moral relativism. They forget that mere disagreement isn't a reason for taking both sides to have equally good reasons or equally plausible beliefs.) But I'd like to probe a wee bit further, because there is a sticky little point here worth exploring. I may think someone is horribly wrong without thinking they are to be condemned morally . Suppose someone deeply and sincerely believes that casting a spell rather than a blood transfusion will save their child's life. I think they are wildly, tragically wrong, but I have a very different moral evaluation of them than of someone who, say,...

Arguments can have probabilistic premises. Some such arguments are inductive -- merely be intended to show that their conclusions are likely. Others can be deductive. For example: here's a deductively valid argument with probabilistic premises: 1. It's likely that X 2. If it's likely that X, then it's likely that Y. 3. Therefore, it's likely that Y But this doesn't have a lot to do with your worry. Let's start with the first argument. The problem here, intuitively, is that just because something is observable with a telescope, we can't conclude that it would have been or even likely would have been observed . Put another way: if alien spaceship visitations are rare events, then even if they could be observed, it would be no surprise if they weren't. And so from the mere fact that they could be observed by someone lucky enough to point a telescope in the right direction at the right time, it doesn't follow that they would have been observed, nor even that they ...

It's hard to give a simple yes-or-no answer to the question, not least because it's by no means clear that if there is a God, this is the sort of thing that science can establish. Atheists such as Dawkins often treat belief in God as though it were simply on the same playing field as evolution, for example -- as though it's a sort of science-like hypothesis intended to explain something about the empirical facts. There are several problems with that view, but one important problem is this: to the extent that religious claims are meant to "explain" things, it's not clear that they're intended to do it at the same level or in the same way as scientific hypotheses. Rather, they seem to function as views about what's necessary to make sense of things at all. A comparison may help here. Consider mathematical truths. Some philosophers think that the only way to account for them is to say that there really are such things as numbers. Other philosophers try to show that we can make sense of mathematics...

What a lovely question! The first thing to ask is whether the story is internally consistent -- unlike a story in which John kills his grandfather before Grandfather fathers John's mother. That appears not to be a problem here; there's no obvious hint of an event having to have happened and not happened. Instead, we simply have surprising set of internally consistent occurrences. On, then, to responsibility. Since we have a causal loop here, there's no clear way to say which of Peter or Kurt is causally responsible for the theorem's having come to be stated and proved. If pressed, we might say that each gets equal causal credit,m though your mileage might vary on the apportionment. Indeed, neither is the originator or initiator; the most that can be said is that both were crucial parts of the process through which the theorem came to be. What of intellectual credit? Well, Peter didn't think the ideas up on his own. He learned them by reading about them, having been taught them,...

It's an interesting question, and to answer it, I'm inclined to turn things around. Let's start with what's clear: the fact that the rapist committed the rape seven years ago (supposing for the moment that this is the magic number) isn't a reason to let him off. In fact, the very way you pose the question makes the point. You ask about "the rapist" who committed "his crime" long ago. You've already take it for granted that we can say: this man is the one who committed the crime. And we can say it without worrying about how many cells have come and gone. So yes: there is something more -- or something other -- to the notion of a person than just the idea of a collection of cells. The something needn't be anything spooky. After all, a corporation can exist for a hundred years, even though all the people have changed and all the buildings and equipment it owns have gradually been replaced. Although saying exactly what sameness amounts to here is complicated, it won't call for talking about...

Interesting question, but the illusion here is to think that atheists face any special problem. Let's take the issues in turn. On morality: suppose God exists. How would that make morality objective? Someone might think that if God commands something, that makes it morally right. But it's long been pointed out (at least since Plato's Euthyphro ) that this way of thinking about things is problem-ridden. What if God commanded torturing all blue-eyed babies? Would that make it right? Hard to see why anyone should agree. Someone might say that God would never command any such thing. But why not? Presumably because God, if there is one, doesn't command evil deeds. In fact, if the theist wants to make sense of the idea that God is praiseworthy partly because he is good, there will have to be a standard of good and bad, right and wrong, separate from what God happens to will. This may still leave it puzzling how there can be objective moral truths. That's too big an issue to tackle here, but it...

No fallacy that I can see. People have a striking tendency to give their own casual and uniformed opinions a lot more weight than they deserve. Asking someone whether there's good reason to believe what they're saying is perfectly appropriate, though doing it too bluntly may not be the best rhetorical strategy.