I'm not quite sure I understand what his has to do with performance-enhancing drugs. But, as I in effect said in response to a different question , if it turned out that the Red Sox won the World Series in 2004 only because God had intervened, I don't think I'd feel quite the same about it. The nuns at Sunday School always taught me that it is wrong to pray for that kind of help. One may pray that one does one's best, that no-one is injured, and the like. But one may not pray for one's opponent's to do badly, nor for victory. God does not play favorites, and to ask God to do so is the height of arrogance. That God does not play favorites is something with which it is difficult to come to terms, if one really considers its full implications. And, as a result, this viewpoint is, clearly enough, not universally shared. That is a tragic fact, one that is at the root of many of history's most regrettable episodes, not to mention a good number of the present's.

There's an old arugment called the "Cosmological Argument". (I guess it's actually many related arguments.) Roughly: Something had to cause all this stuff; that's God. There are two kinds of objections to this argument. One is that there's just no good argument that something had to cause all this stuff. In this context: How does one know that anything caused the Big Bang? Why can't it just have been uncaused? It's important not to answer: Well, everything has to have a cause. If so, then presumably God has to have a cause, too. The other objection is that, even if there were, the "God" whose existence the argument would prove need not be much like the God of religion. And, indeed, in this case, too, that is pretty clear. Hume pushes both forms of argument in Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion , if I remember correctly.

As well as the important question of principle (which I shall largely leave to others), there are ipmortant practical questions here: Exactly which religious sensitivities should be given legal standing? What counts as offense? How should it be determined whether publication serves a particular public interest? Perhaps more importantly, by whom should it be determined? And why limit it to speech? To borrow from a recent column in the Boston Globe by Jeff Jacoby (with whose overall point I do not actually agree), should the eating of beef be banned on the ground that it is offensive to Hindus? Should women be forced to "cover up" on the ground that the display of female flesh is offensive to many extreme traditionalists? Quite apart from the question of principle, this does not seem a road down which one really wants to travel. For that matter, why limit it to religious sensibilities? There's a lot that offends me, some for religious reasons, some not. Why privilege the former? None of...

I think it's not just that we take joy in "high levelsof skill and human achievement" that are the result of "extraordinaryand undeserved pieces of luck" but, perhaps even more so, in such performances that are the result of extraordinary dedication. Suppose it turned out that, shortly after he was diagnosed with cancern, Lance Armstrong sold his soul to Satan in exchange for the cycling skills requried for a sequence of Tour de France victories. (Obviously, I am not suggesting that any such thing might have happend.) Speaking just for myself, I'd regard that as a form of cheating, and I'd take no pleasure whatsoever in Armstrong's accomplishments. They wouldn't have been his accomplishments, in the relevant sense. What makes his story gripping is precisely the fact that he was able to return from death's door to dominate his sport because of his dedication to doing so and not because Satan was giving him an unfair advantage. Now obviously, if Armstrong took "performance-enchancing" drugs ...

As in many fields of western art, in the twentieth century there was a great deal of experimentation at the boundaries of what we call "music". The early twentieth century saw a kind of revolution against established conceptions of tonality, the most famous figure here being Arnold Schoenberg . Some years later, people began to experiment in a serious way with elements of chance in music, the most famous figure here being John Cage . Two examples of Cage's approach are "Fontana Mix" , whose score for each performance is created by superimposing transparencies, and the truly brilliant 4'33" , in which (as I hear the piece) the "music" is actually the response of the audience, which typically involves a good deal of laughter. It's an interesting piece, in that one can only really hear it the second time. The first time, one is almost by necessity a performer. As it says in the Wikipedia article, 4'33" challenges our very understanding of what music is. And that, too, is a recurring theme in...

There are a couple different attitudes towards this kind of question. One takes the idea of variables very seriously: There really are things that are called "variables". It's not that we don't know various things about them. A variable number, for example, reallly is intrinsically not any number in particular. That, however, is a minority view nowadays, though it has a distinguished history. See Kit Fine's Arbitrary Objects for a recent defense of it. The more common view, which originates with Gottlob Frege, is that variables are like pronouns. Consider "Everyone who met someone liked her". Here, the word "her" does not stand for anyone in particular: Rather, it stands for the person each person in question met. So, if we're talking about the people on the team, and those people are Bill, Dick, and Harry, and Bill met Betty, Dick met Jane, and Harry met Sally, then what "her" refers to "v aries" as we consider the different people: It refers to Betty when we consider Bill; to Jane when we...

In a sense, the answer, strictly speaking, is "no". Infinity isn't a number. It's a property of sets. Some sets are infinite; some are not. But in a more interesting sense, the answer is "yes": There are infinite numbers. There are many ways to see this. Here's one, borrowed from Frege. What do we mean by a "number"? Well, a number is the kind of thing one can give as an answer to a question like, "How many books/dolls/cars/whatever are there?" (These are so-called "cardinal" numbers.) There are lots of such numbers, and some of them we call "finite". These are the ordinary natural numbers, zero, one, two, and so forth. Now, notice the following. Every natural number is the number of natural numbers less than it. Thus, each natural number is one less than the number of natural numbers less than or equal to it, which is to say that each natural number is strictly less than—that is, less than and not equal to—the number of numbers less than or equal to it. Now: How many natural numbers...

Of course evolution could be proven wrong. Maybe we will find out that our planet was actually created by an alien race. Once you dig deep enough, you can actually see the scaffolding they set up. Maybe our ancestors were middlemen on a distant planet who were sent away on a spaceship because they were unwanted, and then they crash landed on the earth and created human society. Just as The Hitchhiker's Guide says. Or maybe human beings came into existence pretty much as they are, roughly 6000 years ago, as fundamentalists think. In some vague sense, just about any such thing could have happened. But until there is strong empirical evidence to the contrary, scientists will continue to presume the truth of some form of the theory of evolution.

A few points. First, I don't understand why you think one can't suffer without reflecting on the reasons for one's pain. That just seems false, and the OED seems to agree with me: suffer (v.) To have (something painful, distressing, or injurious) inflicted orimposed upon one; to submit to with pain, distress, or grief. Nor do I see why one cannot be tortured if one cannot reflect in this way. And again, the OED would seem to agree: torture (v.) 2. To inflict severe pain or suffering upon; to torment; to distress orafflict grievously; also, to exercise the mind severely, to puzzle orperplex greatly. Also absol. to cause extreme pain. That said, it's an interesting empirical question to what extent animals are capable of " reflect[ing] upon the reasons for or context of the pains they experience". So far as I know, however, the view you ascribe to "some researchers" is not a majority view.

There are a lot of questions here, but not many of them are philosophical in content. Nonetheless, I'll have a shot. Plainly there are many people throughout the world who subscribe to faiths other than Christianity, including faiths, such as Judaism, that are older than it. As to the question about the Bible, I'm not sure what "questionable origins" it has. Last I checked, a great deal was known about who wrote its various parts, when, where, and under what circumstances. The fact that Isaiah, for example, was written by three (maybe more) different people at different times makes it no less interesting to me. In fact, it helps me understand it better. Perhaps a certain sort of fundamentalist would reject this kind of historical research or find it threatening. But not all Christians (or Jews, or Muslims, or...) are fundamentalists. Indeed, in Christianity, anyway, fundamentalism is a recent invention, and fundamentalists a distinct minority, despite the success they've had convincing so many...