Some Post-Holiday Blog Discussions

The Consciousness and Culture blog has a series of posts on a subject near and dear to me: the problem of first-person conscious experience. Ellis tries to deflate the issue a bit in his examination. I resist this in the comments.

Parableman had a good discussion (in two parts) of the cosmological argument. It is difficult to use this argument to conclude there is a necessary first cause, without also concluding everything which exists is necessary. Jeremy tries out a strategy which goes about the argument in a different way to try to avoid this. I don't think it succeeds without additional controversial premises, but it's interesting.

In the comment thread to this post on Philosophy, et cetera, a good point emerges: when arguing about the plausibility of theism, we can't avoid being specific about the details of God's attributes and features. So much discussion seems wasted to me by assuming a false dichotomy between classical Christian theism and materialist atheism.