Surely there could be evidence for this kind of claim. Maybe we'd find when we went to Mars that there were some super-smart aliens working on the creation of life, and then we'd find when we returned evidence to back up their story that they'd done the same thing here. But, at the moment, there doesn't seem to be any prospect of such evidence. But, as the judge in Pennsylvania clearly recognized, Intelligent Design isn't really a scientific hypothesis. It's a religious doctrine. That, to my mind, isn't a bad thing. What's unfortunate is that so many people on both sides of this debate seem to think science and religion are fundamentally opposed.

Perhaps the best way to approach this question would be to ask: Inwhat ways is your epistemic situation different when you are readingsomething you wrote yesterday? We writers are in thissituation all the time. One of its dangers is that one can fail to recognizepotential ambiguities. Suppose I were to write: Fighting administrators can be distracting. I may know that what I meant was that administrators who are fighting can be distracting, and so the sentence just reads that way to me. But it is ambiguous: It could also mean that fighting with administrators can be distracting. What the example shows is that, when one is reading something one wrote oneself, one has access to more (or at least different) information that someone elsewould, but it's not obvious that one has access to better informationthan others do. Now, if you don't remember writing something, then presumably it is, to you, as if you didn't write it, though I suppose you might find yourself just understanding...

A relational property is a property a thing has only in virtue of how it is related to something else. A common example is fatherhood . Whether I'm a father depends upon my relation to something else, namely, my child (if I have one). So the claim is that, in so far as the car appears to be small, its apparent size is merely a relational property. It is, for example, a matter of how large a portion of your visual field the car occupies. Moore's point was that it's not the car itself whose size changes as it recedes, but only how large a portion of your visual field the car occupies. Now, it's certainly true that one is given to describing this phenomenon by saying that the car gets smaller. But, of course, one doesn't really think the car itself gets smaller, and there is an obvious sense in which it seems to remain the same size but to get farther away. To suppose there is some contradiction here is to suppose that how large an object appears to be is a direct function of how much of the visual...

Nothing, in my view. But there are approaches to philosophy that regard any question on which empirical facts might bear as somehow not really philosophical. This conception of philosophy is, it should be said, very much a recent invention. Certainly Aristotle did not make this kind of division between philosophy and the "merely empirical". Nor did Descartes, or Leibniz, or Hume, or Kant. It's an interesting question where and why it originates.

I'm not sure there's much "logic" there, frankly. First, the relevant doctrine is that of transubstantiation , not transfiguration. The latter term refers to the events described in e.g. Luke 9, when Jesus appears "transfigured" in the presence of Elijah and Moses. Second, I'm not entirely sure why it is so obvious to you, or to your friend, that the consecration does not transform the elements into the body and blood of Christ. The fact that they do not look much like flesh and blood has nothing to do with it. (The Wikipedia article on the topic is excellent, by the way.) That said, transubstantiation is controversial within Christianity. It is, as was said, a pillar of the Catholic faith, but it is not widely accepted outside Catholicism. I see no reason to suppose that all "dogmatic doctrine[s] canonized by the [Catholic] church" must stand or fall together. One might reason thus: If one of them turns out to be wrong, that diminishes whatever general reason one had to suppose that official...

This depends a great deal upon how one reads the Bible. Frankly, I think there are many people whose views on this kind of question are inconsistent, even incoherent, just as you suggest. Take, for example, Pat Robertson, who recently suggested that God had caused Ariel Sharon to have a stroke because he had withdrawn from Gaza, or Ray Nagin, who suggested that God had sent hurricanes to the Gulf Coast because God was upset about how the US treats the poor. One might find these suggestions pathetic for all kinds of reasons. (The latter suggestion is particularly bizarre, seeing how it waslargely the poor who were trapped in New Orleans, the wealthy havingmanaged to get out.) But, indeed, I find it difficult to see how anyone who was prepared to take them seriously could also regard God "as a supreme being of love and compassion". It rather makes God out to be a vengeful despot. If, then, by "believe in the authenticity of the Bible", you mean "regard every word of it as literal truth", then there is...

So far as I know, there isn't really such an award, but I don't believe that's because we all disagree. One wouldn't have to give such an award for a "discovery". Rather, one might give the award for some other sort of contribution, and philosophers do agree, to a significant extent, about whose work is good and worth reading. Of course, there are disagreements there, too, but there are also such disagreements on the cutting edges of the sciences. That's one reason the Nobel Prizes tend to be given to work done quite a while ago. It's not always obvious at the time what work will last. And so, if we were to look backwards, say, thirty years, I think you'd find very broad agreement about what work done in the mid-1970s is still worth reading.

Some comparisons may be possible, but I don't seen any particular reason to suppose that relative difficulty, for sports, is what mathematicians would call a total order : There may be questions of the form "Is A more difficult than B?" that simply do not have answers. The case of golf and football may well be such a case: Golfers and football players (and footballers, for that matter) use very different sets of skills. Perhaps one could ask whether it is more difficult to perfect the one set of skills than the other, but even that question might not have an answer. What is involved in perfecting the relevant sets of skills might, again, be very different.

I don't know that it is considered morally wrong, simply in virtue of the age difference. It's true, to be sure, that people are often inclined to speculate about the reasons a younger person might be involved with an older one, but such speculation is typically just gossip. It's also true that such relationships can pose certain kinds of challenges. But, as I said, I don't know of any general reason to regard such relationships as immoral simply in virtue of the age difference. Of course, it is another matter when we are talking about minors, but I don't take the question to concern that kind of relationship.

One way to think of why this might seem puzzling is in terms of the type-token distinction. To understand that distinction, consider the question how many words there are on the next line: The The The The You could answer "four" or you could answer "one", and both are correct. It's just that when you answer "four", you're talking about word- tokens , and when you answer "one", you're talking about word- types . This distinction applies to lots of different kinds of things: words, sentences, musical compositions, and, indeed, computer programs. As we normally talk of computer programs, they are types . You and I might install the very same program on our computers, just as we might write the very same word. But there are also program tokens , and our computers have different tokens of the program sitting on their hard drives, or in memory, or what have you. When you copy a program, you create a new token of it, and so you do "add something", as it were, even though, in another...