u/joshuaponce2008

I had invited some of my friends over to meet up, but I realized that I had forgotten to order food in advance. We were playing on my Wii at the time, when I remembered that I had installed the Food Channel, an app that allows one to place an order for Domino's Pizza directly from the Wii. It was created as a community continuation of a Japan-exclusive food delivery channel from 2007. Therefore, I placed the order. I can now proudly say that I did in fact order pizza from my Nintendo Wii. AMA.

Do you guys believe that there are objective functions for biological systems? For instance, an example would be the fact that a heart is supposed to pump blood is not simply a mental projection we impose upon it, but rather an actual fact about the heart itself. If so, what do you believe grounds that function?

I purchased a MyHeritage DNA + Traits kit a week ago, which would suggest they would use the WGS procedure to process my DNA. However, the kit tracking page tells me that one of the steps coming up is "Microarray process in progress." Also, it’s giving the option to upgrade to Health, which shouldn’t be available for WGS kits. What’s going on here?

I’d assume that the rise of communitarianism would have brought Confucian ideas to the West, but I’d like to know whether, and if so, to what extent, that has actually happened.

Ray Comfort, in his response to Forrest Valkai, said (about Forrest's evolution experiments in his graduate studies) that "[There was no change in kinds, because] his fruit flies remain fruit flies, and his bacteria remain bacteria."

To any creationists here, do you guys think bacteria constitute a "kind"? If so, then why does the word "kind" seem like it can refer to basically any level of the taxonomic hierarchy?

It seems like we hear about lots of stories of theist philosophers of religion who were previously atheists (e.g., Ed Feser, Peter van Inwagen, Phillip Goff), but I can't think of many examples of the opposite direction, apart from James Sterba (see https://philpapers.org/rec/STEIAG-2). Are there any others? If not, why could that be the case?

Recently, philosophers Brian Cutter and Philip Swenson released a paper titled "The Omission Theodicy."

A longstanding response to the problem of moral evil (e.g., murder, genocide) is that it is justified by human free will. One major problem with this response is that it can't account for natural evils (e.g., natural disasters, disease, the cruelty of evolution). Thus, some posit that natural evils might be explained by the free will of demons, who have chosen to cause harm that, for example, allowed animals to kill each other in the past for food. This is also quite a bad response, since it appears to contradict the evolutionary explanation for such facts.

The "omission theodicy" is the idea that natural evils exist not because demons acted to cause such harms, but because angels failed to prevent such harms. It posits that God delegated to angels the authority and power to prevent things such as evolutionary animal suffering, natural disasters, childhood cancer, and so forth, but that these angels merely failed to exercise that authority properly. God is said to permit these violations of duty because it allows these angels to form better relationships with humans in the afterlife.

If you wish to read further, you may see the paper. Or, for a simpler overview, see this blog post.

It's worth noting that I personally find this argument deeply implausible. The blog post points out that this theodicy depends on certain "aggregationist" intuitions; i.e., that greater goods always outweigh lesser evils. The author insists that these intuitions are "just obviously right." I beg to differ.

I seem to recall that it referred to Democrats as "Demonrats", evolution as "evil-lution", and spelled God's name in all caps ("GOD"). The narrator would shout "GOD!" whenever this came up in the text.