Book Review: Knowledge and Christian Belief (part 2)

November 1, 2019November 1, 2019 / Thomas Harper / 3 Comments

Here I am going to give a chapter-by-chapter breakdown of Alvin Plantinga’s 2015 book Knowledge and Christian Belief. In the first post I covered the first four chapters; this post will cover all of the remaining chapters.

This book is meant as a layman’s version of Plantinga’s much longer and more technical 2000 book Warranted Christian Belief. and so it is possible that some of my criticisms are addressed in the more thorough treatise. Here I will only be taking the shorter book into consideration.

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Has Memetic Evolution Halted?

July 2, 2019July 2, 2019 / Thomas Harper / 1 Comment

Memes are not just the captioned images shared on Facebook and Twitter. The original conception of the term was to conceptualize the propagation of propositional and cultural information between human minds. But has human society reached a point where the natural selection of memes has stalled, thereby halting memetic evolution?

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Knowledge, Belief, and Action

June 11, 2019June 11, 2019 / Thomas Harper / 3 Comments

Can propositional beliefs (belief about the truth or falsehood of a that P statement) be held without it influencing behavior? It’s difficult to say whether a belief is really a belief if it doesn’t change behavior, or if beliefs, by their very nature, necessarily change behavior. I think one can argue that a belief is more justified if it changes behavior in a particular way. That is what I’ll discuss here.

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