“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Saturday, August 13, 2011

Meillassoux's God

Many have pre-emptively decided that speculative realism underwrites materialist atheism. So Meillassoux's rigorous and counter-intuitive argument in The Divine Inexistence may be shocking to them. Graham:

If you do accept his views on these issues, then the doctrine of the virtual God makes a surprising amount of sense. With all probabilities removed from the picture, we have little choice but to focus on the most important possibilities rather than the “likely” ones, and he has a point (as stated in the interview in my book) that the appearance of a unicorn or a spaghetti monster simply wouldn’t change very much, ontologically speaking. It could indeed happen, but who cares? All that matters is the emergence of the fourth world, the World of Justice, and the salvation of the dead.

It’s one of the most audacious arguments to appear in philosophy in a good long time. And though I can’t accept it (I’m a Principle of Sufficient Reason man, myself) I really warmed to it during the course of writing that book. And it’s an argument that takes a lot of courage to make in the basically atheist-materialist environment in which he and the rest of us operate.


From his recent post.



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