“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.” – Richard Feynman In 1999, psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger published a seminal paper titled Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments. Testing participants on grammar, logic, and humor, the researchers found that those who performed the worst also dramatically overestimated their own performance. While the bottom performers’ actual test scores placed them in the 12th percentile, they wildly overestimated thei ..read more

Hurling the word “cult” at a person, organization, school, movement, or religion is a serious accusation, not to be taken lightly. Whereas certain movements—like Heaven’s Gate or the People’s Temple church—are clear-cut examples of murderous/suicidal cults, other religious and secular movements do not ultimately cross the line between a more-or-less benign life philosophy and harmful, totalitarian mind control.  So we must begin with this key qualification: not all religions are cults, and, more specifically, Christianity, as it is practiced in most churches, is not a cult, nor are most C ..read more

The intellectual contest between Plato and Democritus was lopsided from the very start. Plato was born in Athens—the intellectual capital of the ancient world—to a wealthy, aristocratic family. Democritus, on the other hand, was born in relative obscurity in the city of Abdera in Thrace, and, by his own account, had said, “I came to Athens and no one knew me.”  Plato therefore already had an advantage, irrespective of philosophical merit, that would be difficult for Democritus—or any other philosopher in Plato’s shadow not directly tied to the Academy—to overcome.  This probably expl ..read more

Atheism and agnosticism—in other words, either a lack of belief in god(s) or an admission of ignorance concerning the existence or nature of god(s)—is not a recent phenomenon. In fact, it’s almost certainly the case that nonbelievers throughout history were underrepresented, and that they mostly kept quiet, as expressions of atheism almost always led to ridicule, ostracism, exile, imprisonment, or death.  But while the expression of atheism can be suppressed, the force of the idea cannot. And already, as far back as the Presocratic philosophers, we can see the rudiments of atheistic think ..read more

Supernaturalism, broadly considered, is the default, universal predilection of the human mind. Humans, simply put, are god-creating animals, and the list of invented deities is truly enormous, numbering in the thousands, possibly in the tens of thousands. Across time and place, within virtually every civilization, you will find gods, goddesses, spirits, ghosts, angels, demons, and all manner of mystical forces. In fact, anthropologists have estimated that at least 18,000 different gods, goddesses, animals, and objects have been worshiped by the human race.  From an individual perspective ..read more

Thales of Miletus, a Presocratic philosopher born in 626 BCE, proposed that the underlying, fundamental substance of all matter was water, while his student Anaximander thought the substance was an indefinite material called Apeiron. Anaximenes, Anaximander’s student, disagreed with both and thought the fundamental substance was air, while Heraclitus, following later, disagreed with everyone and thought the substance was fire. Hidden within the scientific irrelevancy of their conclusions, Western history’s first three philosophers—known as the Milesians—initiated a revolution in Western though ..read more

“Enlightenment is man’s leaving his self-caused immaturity. Immaturity is the incapacity to use one’s intelligence without the guidance of another. Such immaturity is self-caused if it is not caused by lack of intelligence, but by lack of determination and courage to use one’s intelligence without being guided by another. Sapere Aude! [Dare to know!] ‘Have the courage to use your own intelligence’ is therefore the motto of the enlightenment.” – Immanuel Kant, What Is Enlightenment? In Book VII of Plato’s Republic, Socrates presents to his interlocutor Glaucon the following scenario: Imagine, S ..read more

As far as arguments for god’s existence go, most are, admittedly, not very persuasive. Ontological arguments—or the idea that you can simply define things into existence—were exposed for their absurdity almost a thousand years ago (by Gaunilo of Marmoutiers), and teleological or design arguments lost their explanatory power ever since Darwin gave us better and simpler explanations grounded in evolution (some people still refute this, of course, which will be covered in a later post). But one type of argument remains compelling to a larger number of people—namely, cosmological arguments, the su ..read more

You’ve got to hand it to him; it’s nothing if not bold to believe you can prove—with nothing but unadulterated reason—the existence of the supreme being of the universe. Whereas others at least make the attempt to utilize empirical evidence to prove the existence of God (e.g., arguments from design), St. Anselm, the Archbishop of Canterbury (1033-1109), thought God’s existence was self-evident and required nothing other than an evaluation of a definition.  In what came to be known as the Ontological Argument, Anselm argued for God’s existence as follows (the formulation below comes from t ..read more

“Most of the problems with the bodies and minds of the folks occupying the current culture involve an unwillingness to do anything hard, or anything that they’d rather not do. I applaud your resolve, and I welcome you to the community of people who have decided that EASY will no longer suffice.” — Mark Rippetoe “The reality of millions of years of adaptation to a ruggedly physical existence will not just go away because desks were invented.” — Mark Rippetoe Strength training is another topic that benefits from some distance from the modern world. The modern fitness industry, after all, simply ..read more