I don't have a lot to add to what Peter had to say, except that I'd like to emphasize that, while I don't know to what sort of Church you belong, it is absolutely central to the entire Protestant reformation that each of us is entitled, and indeed required, to come to our own decisions on these sorts of questions, in a reverential and prayerful fashion, to be sure, but to our own decisions, nonetheless. And it is an understatement indeed to say that there is "hot debate" about the significance of the Biblical passages that seem to condemn homosexuality. But perhaps the larger and much more important question is how we read and respond to the Bible. The obsession with sexuality in conservative churches is nearly as puzzling as their obsession with "literal" interpretations of the Bible---interpretations that are hardly literal---and with regarding those few hundred pages as representing everything God might have cared to say to us. Well, as we like to say at my church, God is still speaking, and we'd...

It seems to me that anyone who would wish to state that the reasons people have to believe in God are "on a par" with the reasons they have to believe in fairies owes a bit more than just an expression of opinion. I don't know of any remotely good reason to believe in fairies, nor of any books (or even articles) written on the subject by intelligent people. You may think the many reasons people have given over the centuries---folks like Anselm, Aquinas, Descartes, and Leibniz, just to mention the obvious authors in the western philosophical tradition---aren't ultimately convincing. But to compare their arguments to the sort of reasons people have to believe in fairies is frankly just silly. But then, I'm probably just upset or aggravated. So let us be thoughtful for a moment. First, belief in God and belief in fairies could presumably be compared in various ways. But the intention is surely to compare the two beliefs on the basis of why people believe in God. Now, outright to compare the...

Just a brief comment, which is that, even if one always does have a moral right not to do things one regards as morally objectionable, it does not follow that one has a legal or political right to do so, i.e., that one cannot legitimately face legal consequences for not doing so. It is fairly easy to come up with counter-examples by thinking of people whose moral views are themselves pretty objectionable. I don't know which issue the questioner probably had in mind, but both seem worth considering. For what it is worth, I think similar such examples make Aquinas's view very doubtful. If one thinks a thing is morally abhorrent, say, when it is, in fact, morally obligatory, then it is not at all clear that one has a moral right not to do the thing. Indeed, it seems almost contradictory to say one does: One has a moral right not to do something that is morally obligatory? Presumably, the resolution of this "paradox" lies in distinguishing subjective from objective elements of this, as is now...

I think science can probably tell us lots of things about how people reason morally, that is, how they think about what they ought to do. And it might well be interesting to look at cross-cultural differences, and perhaps even more interesting to look for cross-cultural similarities, that is, "moral universals", in the sense of moral principles, or forms of reasoning, that are in some sense universal. Psychologists and philosophers have been doing just this in recent years. But it seems important to recognize the contrast you cite at the end of your question: No such investigation could possibly tell us what moral behavior ought to be, that is, tell us what one actually ought to do. Suppose there turn out to be certain "moral universals". It would be a coherent position that these are just wrong, that is, that, by reasoning in accord with them, one will not typically arrive at the thing one ought to do. One cannot just assume otherwise. That is not to say that it would not be interesting, even on...

Without meaning to take a stand on anything, I think it is worth mentioning that, in most actual "polyamorous" relationships, things are not as Eric describes, where one partner "receive[s] 100% of the relational attention from two [others],while they each have to settle for about 50% of" the former's. Rather, people who enter into such relationships are very often bi-sexual and bi-amorous, and so each partner distributes his or her attention to both of the other two. Of course, that probably makes the relationship even more emotionally complicated. The other remark it may be worth making here echoes one of Allen's. One often hears it asked: If we allow gay marriage, why not polygamous marriage? Partial answer: The laws on marriage really do assume, in ever so many ways, that a marriage is a relationship between two people. There are, for example, no provisions whatsoever for the dissolution of part of a marriage, in which two of the married parties might decide to continue without the other....

Thank you for this wonderful question. I don't myself know whether to say that mathematics is something divine, but the idea that it is has a long history, going back at least to the early modern Rationalists. Many of them suggest, directly or indirectly, that, in uncovering the (as they saw it) fundamentally mathematical principles that describe the operation of the universe—this is the very birth of mathematical physics—one is thereby limning the very thoughts of the Creator, which gave birth to, and continually sustain, the universe. Even today, one often reads remarks by physicists (and other scientists) that have a similar bent: that there is an astonishing beauty to the fundamental laws that, in some way, seems to provide a glimpse of the divine. Note that this essentially aesthetic response needs to be sharply distinguished from any form of the argument from design. It is not that people think, "Well, this is all so incredible, someone had to design it". It's more, "Wow", followed by an...

You aren't the only one who finds mathematical fictionalism puzzling. But the nature of the analogy between mathematics and fiction needs to be spelled out carefully and, once it has been, I think a sensible fictionalist will have the resources to deny that there is an equally good fiction in which 2+2=5. Simple equations like this one are in fact a good case for fictionalism, because there is a clear sense in which their content can be reduced to pure logic. Fictionalists ask us to think about the application of such statements. So how is "2+2=4" applied? Well, if you have two apples, and you have two oranges, and no other fruit, then you have four pieces of fruit. More generally, if you have two Fs, and you have two Gs, and none of the Fs are G, then you have four things that are either F or G. (That can be written out in logical notation fairly easily.) The thought, then, is that our talk of numbers as objects is a fiction that we build on top of these sorts of simple equational facts, one that...

Suppose I ask, pointing out into empty space: What color is that apple? I take it that the question cannot be answered, that, to borrow a phrase from Sir Peter Strawson, "the question just doesn't arise". This is because the word "that" is not, in this utterance, used to refer to anything, so there isn't anything of which it has been asked what its color is. It is like asking: What color is OobaDooba? The ruler case is the same: If there is no ruler, than you can't ask how long "it" is, because there is no "it" about which to ask. I take it that this means the answer, in your terms, is "N/A". I can see why you might think it could also be 0. After all, couldn't there be a ruler with no length? In principle (though not in fact), I suppose there could be: But it would have to be a ruler nonetheless, which might mean that it had width and breadth, but no length. (Think of a plane stood on end.)

I'm afraid I don't know the answer to this question. But the discussion of the paradox on Wikipedia is pretty good and might somehow lead to an answer. If anyone does know or find out the answer, email me and I'll post it here.

This is the effect of a successful political movement, one that sought to replace the use of "he" and "his", as "gender-neutral" pronouns, with the use of something else. The reason was that people thought that the use of "he" and "his", at least in certain contexts, made readers liable to assume that the pronoun referred to a person of the male persuasion, when it need not. One option is to use something that is truly gender-neutral, such as "he or she", but that is rather verbose. Some people therefore use "s/he", but that is ugly. I've taken to using "s'he", but I'm lonely. And there is a case to be made for "she" and "her", unaltered, as well, namely that it makes one conscious of something of which one might not otherwise have been conscious.