What we think about love, and why
This is the first in a short series of posts on the philosophy of love. Using British philosopher Simon May’s book Love: A History, we will explore where we got our current ideas about love and how those ideas both reflect and create meaning in our lives –– both individual and communal. Throughout we ask the question of how our ideas of love support our contradict our worldviews.
Love as a “soft problem” for physicalists
Arguments against atheism and the accompanying physicalist and secular humanist worldviews have varied over the past few decades. The discovery of the Big Bang and a beginning to our universe destroyed the static universe belief held by many leading scientists and philosophers and strongly supported the idea of a beginning. That sounded like creation to many. Then fine tuning, the inexplicable multiplication of coincidences found by scientists that were necessary for life and our existence, served to raise significant questions about a purposeless, random universe. Then came quantum weirdness and uncertainty providing compelling evidence against the dogma of determinism. The measurement problem continues to bedevil physicists leading some to the strange conclusion in the words of Freeman Dyson, that it almost looked like the universe knew we were coming. Physicalism had displaced humans to a pointless if infrequent…
