Of the traditional arguments trying to prove the existence of God (ontological argument, cosmological argument, argument from design, and argument from beauty), the argument from beauty is one of the most popular, persuasive, and easy to understand. For instance, surely the beautiful image below is evidence of a divine artist …
In helping students question the argument from beauty, there is no need to upset them by showing the image below, but a gentler analogous image can be used to show the argument from beauty is specialpleading, picking and choosing images that might support a religious belief and ignoring those that don’t. Eg:
(wiki)
And besides, beauty is not in the world, but in the eye of the beholder: eg one person sees a dilapidated bungalow, while another sees it as a quaint cottage; or, one person see a mansion as magnificent, while a minimalist sees it as gawdy.
Queen’s Gate Junior School. Should people be forced to vote? What makes a vote fair? Is a vote a fair way to make a decision?🗳Questions which are being debated by III Form in their @philosophyfound workshop this afternoon.
This is a recent post by Jeana Jorgensen, who studied folklore under Alan Dundes at the University of California, Berkeley, and went on to earn her PhD in folklore from Indiana University. She addresses the issue of censorship in education.
These have been shared by philosopher Garrett Pendergraft
1 The Bridge Riddle
2 Coming and Going
In 1978 the Chronicle of Higher Education mentioned an old exam question:
Q. How far can a dog run into the woods?
A. Halfway. The rest of the time he is running out.
Harvard’s Richard E. Baym wrote in to take issue with the answer:
The correct answer is ‘All the way’. Certainly we understand that the dog is running ‘in’ only until he reaches the middle of the forest, but this is in fact, all the way in. If the dog ran only half ‘in’, he would not yet be at the middle. Indeed if the dog ran halfway in and then ran halfway out, he would still be in the woods.
The editors noted, “It occurs to us that the dog’s continued presence there would be useful, in case something happens to that tree that we’ve been hearing about since high school physics — the one that falls when no one is in the forest and since there is no eardum to register sound waves, makes no noise. You know what a fine sense of hearing a dog has. Let him run halfway in (or as Mr. Baym argues, all the way), settle there, and keep an ear cocked for that tree.”
(from Robert L. Weber, ed., Science With a Smile, 1992.)
The cosmological argument basically says something like: I have parents, and my parents had parents, and so on in time back to the beginning of the universe, asking how the materials that made up The Big Bang got there in the first place? The theist says we must posit God as creator to start the chain of causes. In fact, this theistic answer is a God of the Gaps fallacy, like the ancient Greeks not knowing why the sun went across the sky so they imagined the God Helios driving the sun across the sky. There is a gap in scientific knowledge regarding a precise scientific consensus about the very beginning of our universe, but as scientific and mathematical knowledge grows we can see we are certainly not at the point where a reasonable answer is that fairies created the universe. Here is an important video explaining why:
Religion: By 2017, about one-fifth of our population will be members of diverse faith communities including Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Judaism, in addition to a growing number of individuals without a religious affiliation (8)
Curriculum and Courses – Revised curriculum policy documents contain a section on antidiscrimination education that encourages teachers to recognize the diversity of students’ backgrounds, interests, and experiences, and to incorporate a variety of viewpoints and perspectives in learning activities. New courses are also being created that focus on gender studies, equity studies, and world cultures. (25)
This is important to emphasize, but what is currently lacking in many public schools are effective cross-curricular units outlining the core elements of the secular point of view that should be incrementally taught at each grade level along with the other pluralism/multicultural points of view. Teachers lack the resources to properly teach the secular worldview.
On this site you will find ideas and resources that are helpful in building multicultural/pluralism lesson plans. These lessons express and engage with the secular point of view, and “philosophy for kids/critical and creative thinking” generally. So, consider some of these strategies for creative and critical student skill building.
