AKG wrote:

Sorry if this sounds too much like teenage angst, but I'm only 18:
How do you guys cope with loneliness as classical theist?  In my school I do have friends but I feel like I can't really connect with them or other people in my grade that well as on the week-ends they like to go to parties and smoke pot, drink, hook up with people for sex et cetera and I don't go with them as having been researching the ethics of people like Aristotle, Plato, Plotinus, and some Stoics(along with being Muslim), I find all this to be a waste of time which merely is hazardous to the soul. Since it is doing so which allows most people in my grade to make connections and know each other better, I feel pretty lonely sometimes which really gets to me sometimes and makes me think of myself as a big loser(and some characterize me as anti-social). Reading Plato helps alleviate this feeling sometimes, but otherwise its pretty bothersome. Sorry again if this is too wangsty. 

That's a great question that I don't really have an answer to either, since I'm more or less in the same boat; I've just entered my twenties this year, and I had the same problems being a Christian in high school, even in a fairly religious state likeTexas.

College has alleviated it somewhat, because a lot of those feelings are artificially created by spending so much dead time just sitting around in the old 8-hour public school system, but I still have few close friends, and spend more time than I would like by myself.

If you have any siblings, you might try striking a close relationship to them, since unlike friends, family is eternal; I know this would probably be harder for most people than for me though, since me and my sister have always been very close and never have really fought, unlike a lot of siblings especially nowadays.

Unfortunately, I don't think this problem with finding good friendships is an exclusively Classical Theist or INTP problem; rather, I think our society today really abho

KevinScharp wrote:

iwpoe wrote:

Kevin, this is the usual sort of argument for God that we here subscribe to:




That might be helpful.

Note also:

http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2012/07/cosmological-argument-roundup.html

Thanks, that's helpful. Let's look at versions of the cosmological argument that depend on principles of causation.

The problem is that armchair reasoning about causation is completely unreliable because cause and effect are two very old and imprecise concepts. Our intuitions about them can easily be led astray; for example, that causation is transitive—if a causes b and b causes c then a causes c. But it’s easy to come up with counterexamples to this—a hiker sees a boulder bouncing toward her and ducks to avoid it. The threat of the boulder caused her to duck and her ducking caused her to survive but the threat of the boulder didn’t cause her to survive. Moreover, there are other principles about causation that seem to go against this argument—causes are governed by natural laws, causes and effects are events, causes precede their effects. None of these is compatible with God’s agency causing the universe.

Trying to uncritically use the concepts of cause and effect in the context of general relativity and quantum field theory would be like if Aristotle were transported to a contemporary chemistry conference and complained that fire isn’t on the periodic table.  “Don’t you believe in fire?” “Yes, we do, but we just don’t think it’s fundamental any more.”


Causation is not a conceptual tool of advanced scientific theories. For example, in the statement of Quantum Mechanics, the word ‘cause’ doesn't appear at all, nor does it in the statement of general relativity. Instead, what you have is a complicated mathematical structure (e.g., an infinite dimensional, separable, Hilbert space that has inner products—this is a particular kind of object commonly studied in the branch of

…