materialism

A Priori Materialism

/ kevingdrendel / 1 Comment
Photo by Beth Drendel

Photo by Beth Drendel

Materialism is defined in in the Mirriam-Webster Dictionary as “a theory that physical matter is the only or fundamental reality and that all being and processes and phenomena can be explained as manifestations or results of matter.” Science is the study of the material world, so it may come as no surprise that many (most?) scientists are materialists.

If materialism is reality (nothing exists but matter), then science is the study of everything that exists or cold possibly exist. In fact, that is what the scientific community, generally, claims, and many in the academic community have accepted that claim. But is that claim something that is proven by science?

Continue reading →

Atheism and Freethinking

/ kevingdrendel / 21 Comments
Photo by Tim Butterfield

Photo by Tim Butterfield

Atheists like to call themselves freethinkers. Many of them have thrown off the shackles of religious and cultural bondage, and escaped the herd mentality, the taboos of religion and even culture, and pride themselves in their independent thinking and daring to strike out from the shores of conventional thought. New Atheism is even religious about it, but that is a topic for another day.

It seems that atheism and freethinking go together, at least by the declarations of the atheists I have known and read. But do they go together?

Can they go together?

Continue reading →

End of Reason: Leap of Faith

/ kevingdrendel / 1 Comment

Gainer 2

I listened to an interesting series of hard questions about Christianity posed to Tim Keller by some heavy hitting interviewers. I got sidetracked by the first question: Are not faith and reason contradictory terms? The question took me back to college when I first began to wrestle with faith in the academic world. Continue reading →