Elif Shafak: The politics of fiction. I Love Philosophy.com. YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES PRESENTS. THE STONE - Opinionator Blog. This is the second in a series of interviews about religion that I am conducting for The Stone. The interviewee for this installment is Louise Antony, a professor of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and the editor of the essay collection “Philosophers Without Gods: Meditations on Atheism and the Secular Life.” Gary Gutting: You’ve taken a strong stand as an atheist, so you obviously don’t think there are any good reasons to believe in God. But I imagine there are philosophers whose rational abilities you respect who are theists. How do you explain their disagreement with you? Are they just not thinking clearly on this topic? Louise Antony: I’m not sure what you mean by saying that I’ve taken a “strong stand as an atheist.”
I don’t consider myself an agnostic; I claim to know that God doesn’t exist, if that’s what you mean. G.G.: That is what I mean. L.A.: O.K. I say ‘there is no God’ with the same confidence I say ‘there are no ghosts’ or ‘there is no magic.’ RTP - Home Page. The Ragged Trousered Philosopher or 'RTP' as we are affectionately known to our friends, is an exercise in Web authorship which has been going on since 1996 (the core 'book' was started in 1986), the title of which was inspired by Robert Tressell's classic 'The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists'. But that's about as far as the resemblance goes. There is little doubt that life on Earth is headed in the general direction being painted here. Entropy, chaos and quantum mechanics have somehow turned primitive information first into energy, then matter, then self-motivating matter, intelligent matter and, with us, matter that can begin to create even more intelligent matter.
Now, what is somewhat less certain is whether any remnants of the intelligent consciousness of our own species will survive 'coherently' into the future. Or will our dust simply be recycled like the atoms within our bodies - immortal, yet lifeless other than as a bit player on an infinite stage. Or can we think ahead?