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2/20/2018 7:41 am  #1


What have you changed your mind on?

Off the top of my head, I can think of the following:

- I was an atheistic materialist until very recently; now I’m a theistic dualist (hylemorphic)

- I was anti-Christian; now I’m Christian

- I was a climate alarmist; now I’m a “lukewarmer”

- I was a Marxist; now I think the Austrian school of economics is the closest to the truth (on economic issues, anyway)

- I was “pro-choice”; now I think abortion is gravely immoral

- I supported same-sex marriage and the social acceptance of homosexual behavior; now I don’t (although I don’t think homosexual behavior should be illegal)

What about you?

 

2/20/2018 11:35 am  #2


Re: What have you changed your mind on?

Milan Kundera was a major factor to attract me into philosophy, but I have hardly ever mentioned him this century. Somewhere along the line I learned to distinguish between metaphysics where conclusions follow from premises and estheticism where life has value as long as you avoid kitsch. Basically, when I learned the difference between philosophy and art commentary, I sided with philosophy, and discovered that theist philosophy is its best part.

 

2/20/2018 1:04 pm  #3


Re: What have you changed your mind on?

Dry and Uninspired wrote:

Off the top of my head, I can think of the following:

- I was an atheistic materialist until very recently; now I’m a theistic dualist (hylemorphic)

- I was anti-Christian; now I’m Christian

- I was a climate alarmist; now I’m a “lukewarmer”

- I was a Marxist; now I think the Austrian school of economics is the closest to the truth (on economic issues, anyway)

- I was “pro-choice”; now I think abortion is gravely immoral

- I supported same-sex marriage and the social acceptance of homosexual behavior; now I don’t (although I don’t think homosexual behavior should be illegal)

What about you?

I'm always curious about these things. What prompted your conversion from atheism to theism and why did you decide to become Christian as opposed to just being a philosophical theist?

 

2/20/2018 2:27 pm  #4


Re: What have you changed your mind on?

- I was a panentheist

- I was a non-dualist

- At one point I was considering Eastern Orthodoxy but have since became more of a committed non-Christian theist.

- I once looked far more favourably on Natural Law but nowadays tend to think it’s a form of biological reductionism (more importantly I would only consider it if human nature is explicitly Godlike - the moral argument was one of my first theistic intuitions and I still agree with Nietzsche on the relationship between morality and atheism).

- I am now moving more towards substance dualism than Thomistic hylemorphism (as I don’t endorse Cartesian account of matter it’s not so much of a problem).

- Overall I have became more critical of Thomism whilst maintaining a generally scholastic background (ironically I find that Scotus beat me to it with many of the criticisms)

- I care less about the distinction between classical theism and theistic personalism. I still uphold and defend divine simplicity but no longer consider it a matter of top priority. Preferred approach is: establish there is a necessary being, then establish there is a perfect necessary being then establish that said being is divinely simple (which at minimum means that all its essential properties are identical, regardless of whether we allow it contingent accidents).

- Unless they are giving a positive criticism of one of its formulations I no longer care about responding to PSR deniers. If they are willing just to shrug and say X things just can’t have an explanation they’ve given up on rationality and this philosophy anyway.

- I consider Libertarian Free Will and the Principle of Alternative Possibilities more important than I once did.

 

2/20/2018 5:47 pm  #5


Re: What have you changed your mind on?

- I was a new atheist. Now I'm a generic sort of philosophical theist.

- I thought ethics didn't real, now I'm a realist. Sort of swing back and forth between intuitionism or pluralism and classical virtue ethics, so I don't have a settled normative theory of ethics at this point.

- I was a pretty typical social democrat, now I'm a classical liberal.

- Formally I thought foundationalism was obviously true, more recently Sellars' myth of the given has given me reason to take coherence theories more seriously.

- I thought libertarian free will was more attractive than compatibilism; now it's precisely the other way around.

- Related to the above, I thought libertarian free will was the only way to blunt the modal fatalism argument against PSR. But I've come to see this is clearly false, and in fact there's an obvious sense in which modal collapse arguments typically equivocate on the meaning of necessity (e.g. see Martin Lin's paper Rationalism and Necessitarianism).

 

2/20/2018 5:50 pm  #6


Re: What have you changed your mind on?

@DanielCC

Who do you think provides the best defenses or formulations of the moral argument? Lately, I've been thinking about the moral argument. Any recommended works would be of great appreciation. 

 

2/20/2018 11:27 pm  #7


Re: What have you changed your mind on?

I was once an atheist, materialist/naturalist, moral anti-realist. Now I'm a Catholic.

I used to find neo-Thomist apologetics more respectable than I now find it. I am now in considerable sympathy with the opening paragraphs of Elizabeth Anscombe's paper "Faith" (collected in Faith in a Hard Ground). A sample:

The passing away of these opinions is not to be regretted. They attached the character of 'rationality' entirely to what were called the preambles and to the passage from the preambles to faith itself. But both these preambles and that passage were in fact an 'ideal' construction--and by 'ideal' I don't mean one which would have been a good development of thinking, if it had occurred in an individual; I mean rather 'fanciful', indeed dreamed up according to prejudices: prejudices, that is, about what it is to be reasonable in holding a belief.

I am less confident about the precise structure ethics should take. I am more confident than I was a few years ago that almost all writing on natural law ethics is quite bad. I am more committed to a variety of more provisional claims about action, the nature of the good, obligation, etc., but I approach most questions in applied ethics unsystematically. I am more inclined to think that, in a large number of cases, there is no standard for the good course of action outside of what the virtuous person would recognize.

 

2/21/2018 8:45 am  #8


Re: What have you changed your mind on?

1 - I used to be an anti-philosophical theist. The schools I attended portrayed philosophy as evil and heretical. It was only after I secretly borrowed Plato from my grandpa as a teenager that I realized philosophy was imperative. Now I believe its study in a religious imperative for those who are capable.

2 - I used to be radically right-wing. Now I'm still extremely socially conservative, but I've shifted leftwards on certain aspects of fiscal policy. What I realized was: what's best for the "economy" (read: a few people making all the money) is not always the most moral.

3 - I've grown alot more humanist with regards to the status of those who profess the other Abrahamic Religions.

Last edited by Etzelnik (2/21/2018 8:46 am)


Noli turbare circulos meos.
 

2/21/2018 2:01 pm  #9


Re: What have you changed your mind on?

-Way back, I used to be more open to anti-realist views, but gradually became more and more convinced of realism and our capacity to know objective reality. Now I'm a committed realist.

-I was always leery of atheism, especially New Atheism, as it seemed to me too reductionist and frankly ignorant in many cases; thought agnosticism was more sensible but always kind of sided with Christian theism as it seemed to make more sense of existentialist issues, morality, the beginning of the universe etc. I became more and more convinced that theism was true, and started both atheism and agnosticism seemed to me less and less plausible with every book and article I read. Now I'm a committed theist and Catholic.

-At one point I used to be a substance dualist, and I thought our souls could only be different from one another by virtue of their having different sets of innate ideas (pretty leibnizian view actually); I was also sympathetic with the idea of monads. Now I'm a hylemorphic dualist with a broadly thomistic metaphysic.

-Used to think objective morality depended directly on God, now I accept natural law and no longer accept most forms of the moral argument (though I find some plausibility in arguments from Conscience as a "divine voice" or something similar, etc). However, I still think "meaning" in the existentialist sense requires God.

-Used to focus mainly only on cosmological and teleological arguments for God, now I think arguments from the soul may be as powerful as some of the best standard theistic arguments, and also provide a useful additional bridge between "first cause" and "God", and "bare/unspecified theism" and theism.

-Used to think Christian theism had to be established through miracles, historical arguments etc. Now, while I still find these arguments to be very powerful, I also think something like the Incarnation can be reasonably expected of a perfect God who wants to share love with His creation.

-Used to focus mainly on analytic philosophy and classical/medieval philosophy. Recently I became interested in phenomenology as complementary to a thomistic metaphysic, especially the works of Edith Stein, Wojtyla, etc.

-Used to be something close to a distributist in economics, now I'm closer to classical liberals and the Austrian school.

-Used to be way more leery of modern forms of government (especially democracy) and more favorable to monarchy; now I'm more critical of monarchy, and I favor democracy

Last edited by Miguel (2/21/2018 2:27 pm)

 

2/21/2018 5:58 pm  #10


Re: What have you changed your mind on?

@RomanJoe

Long story short:

I actually started to reconsider my views when I was exposed to psychologists and other experts in related fields (all of them secular thinkers, by the way) who question the dominant reductionist biomedical paradigm of mental illness and addiction (I’m still very interested in this issue). Gradually, this led to an interest in philosophy of mind in a wider sense.

The shift in my broader philosophical views started with me abandoning materialism. By reading the works of Rupert Sheldrake, Bernardo Kastrup and others, I realized just how absurd the position is.

For a while then, I flirted with panpsychism, and then with idealism. I wasn’t even all that interested in questions of theism until I discovered William Lane Craig, and it was his work that also got me intersted in philosophy of religion. I was convinced by the Kalam argument.

The views I had at that point could be described as “theistic idealism”, I suppose. I saw the interaction problem as a fatal blow to dualism, but I wasn’t aware of the existence of hylemorphic dualism at that time yet.

Eventually, I also started reading the works of other theistic philosophers. I was convinced by Dr. Gary Hambermas’ arguments for the Resurrection. I still think he is the best scholar on this issue, and highly recommend his works: http://www.garyhabermas.com

It was after that that I heard about Dr. Edward Feser and I abandoned my ontological idealism as a result of Thomistic thought.

Last edited by Dry and Uninspired (2/21/2018 6:00 pm)

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