Russell Hasan's Blog

This blog post was refined and published in my e-book The Apple of Knowledge, which gives a far broader analysis of science vs. religion. Christians and Muslims, please turn away. It’s about to get ugly. Jews and atheists, keep reading: you don’t believe in Hell, so there’s really no downside to being exposed to my heresy. Let me begin by disclosing that I am an atheist. My theory of religion is that religion is a mixture of mythology and psychological defects arising from “design flaws” in the human brain. I can explain the myth part of religion very simply: ancient humans circa 10,000 BC to 1500 AD did not have science, but they needed theories to explain the natural phenomena they observed, so they dreamed up gods and supernatural forces to explain lightning, fire, death, etc. The mental illness side of religion is the more interesting aspect, which I will discuss here. What is a “mental illness”? Let me begin with two foundational premises. First, humans are animals. S...

This blog post is now a chapter in my book The Apple of Knowledge. Today I would like to introduce two related concepts: experimental philosophy, and external contradictions. Many philosophers claim to want to introduce the "scientific method" into philosophy. Hume said this. So did Kant. But philosophers have been notoriously lazy in terms of actually using science in philosophy. The scientific method begins with a belief, theory, assumption, premise, hypothesis or postulate, and then looks at experience, usually in the form of empirical data from tests and experiments, and science asks: "is our experiences exactly what we would have expected them to be if our theory was correct?" If not, throw out the theory and try a new one. If it is confirmed, always be looking for more verification from other new tests. What would experimental philosophy look like? Well, if Kantian subjectivism is true and the mind creates the experience of space and time, then you could...