Problems come and go over time, and to understand why is a difficult historical task. If one wanted to find the origin of a problem, historical research and close attention to texts is what is needed, not unconstrained speculation about the 'pictures' that philosophers must be in the grip of.
Tim CraneI have a general moral: great philosophers may be great, but that is not a reason to follow them. Don't be a follower. Work it out for yourself.
Tim CraneI'm not a militant atheist, just an atheist. In fact, in a largely atheist country like the UK I think it's a bit silly to be a militant atheist.
Tim CraneUnlike art which contains a message, wine conveys nothing, it has no intellectual or cognitive content
Tim CraneA lot of humanists treat religion as if it were simply a kind of rival cosmological hypothesis, and that this is all it is. My view is that to the extent that religions are cosmological hypotheses, this is not the only important thing about them, and we - atheists- will never get a proper understanding of what religion is if we focus too much on the cosmology.
Tim CraneI do think that philosophy and science are very different intellectual enterprises, but that does not mean that when we get knowledge from philosophy it is a different kind of knowledge.
Tim CraneOne odd thing about the current debate between religious people and atheists is that the participants don't seem to care that they entirely fail to communicate with the other side. They therefore have no account of why the religious or the atheists believe what they do, except that they are stupid or deluded. I think philosophers should try and make sense of their disputes with their opponents as far as possible without treating them as idiots. This applies to the religious participants in the debate as much as to the atheists.
Tim Crane