https://understandinghumanism.org.uk/

One of the most important goals of teaching is fostering “Metacognition,” making implicit student thinking processes explicit for the students. One approach to this is teaching Inquiry Questions. All student work is going to be an answer to questions, and so getting students to become aware of the questions they are answering helps to create cohesion and meaningfulness to their learning. Here are two examples:

(1) This essay is called “The Justified Lie By The Johannine Jesus In Its Greco-Roman-Jewish Context.” The Inquiry Questions it is answering are: (i) Does the Gospel of John portray Jesus as lying? (ii) If so, why would the writer portray such a thing? See: https://infidels.org/library/modern/john-macdonald-justified-lie/

(2) This essay is called “A Critique of the Penal Substitution Interpretation of the Cross of Christ.” The Inquiry Questions it is answering are: Our oldest faith statement of the cross is from the Corinthian creed/poetry Paul quotes that “Christ Died For Our Sins.” Does this mean Christ died (i) to pay our sin debt, or (ii) to make our hidden sin nature conspicuous to inspire transformation and repentance? See: https://infidels.org/library/modern/a-critique-of-the-penal-substitution-interpretation-of-the-cross-of-christ/

In the above cases, seeing how student writing not only has a specific form (eg recount, report, narrative, etc), but also has an unfolding thesis, theme, etc, and blossoms forth in the context of inquiry questions, students not only find greater purpose in their work, but also become better thinkers as their cognitive strategies and approaches go from implicit to explicit.

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 special pleading, picking and choosing images that might support a religious belief and ignoring those that don’t. Eg:

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.

https://onlysky.media/jjorgensen/censorship-in-education-is-a-social-justice-issue/

Also, consider this, because all religious people don’t look at this issue in the same way:

This Book Will Be Banned

Question:

If questionable content makes a book a target, should the bible be banned for such things genocide, etc? Spoiler: Of course not!

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.)

3 Penniless Pilgrim

4 The River Crossing

5 Fun With Venn Diagrams

Euphony

A charming puzzle from Crux Mathematicorum, December 2004:

If all plinks are plonks and some plunks are plinks, which of these statements must be true?

X: All plinks are plunks.
Y: Some plonks are plunks.
Z: Some plinks are not plunks.

Answer

6 The Troll’s Paradox Puzzle:

7 The Jail Break Riddle

8. Prisoner Hat Riddle

9. Wizard Standoff Riddle

10 The Temple Riddle

11 The Pirate Riddle

12 The Dark Coin Riddle

13 Which Box Has The Gold?

14 The Giant Iron Riddle

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: