Word: proof
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Unwilling to die, Brown rose yet another time and posted three goals to pull within range at 10-9. During that final half Lechner once again seemed bullet-proof, deflecting most of the shellfire from the Brown offense. Lechner stopped 22 for the game, tying his high posted against Cornell...
James A. Argeros, general manager of the Coop, called the decision "unfortunate," adding, "I don't understand why a Harvard committee would want to take it unto themselves that the charges and allegations are proof of guilt...
...Cosmological Proof. The term applies technically to any argument for God through reflection upon the natural world. But most often "cosmological" refers to sweeping generalizations about ultimate origins and why the cosmos exists at all. Evolutionary schools of thought do not entertain such notions because they fall, by definition, outside what can be observed or tracked. If such questions are never asked, of course, they require no answer. Bertrand Russell once remarked in a BBC debate that the universe is "just there, and that's all." He was convinced that "all the labors of the ages, all the devotion...
...time Adler embraced Aquinas' proof, then for decades he thought it did not work because although everything in the universe is contingent, nothing ceases to exist absolutely (e.g. burning wood only changes form), so no God is needed to explain the existence of contingent things. Last May he suddenly changed his mind again after applying the "possible worlds" approach. Adler speculated that the universe is only one of many possible universes, any of which -including this actual universe-can just as easily not exist as exist. The universe is "radically contingent," the only thing capable of not existing...
Other scholars use what could be called the cumulative argument: they contemplate the comparative plausibility of various arguments and evidences using Adler's favored standard of judgment, the jury's proof "beyond a reasonable doubt." This permits atheists to avoid having to disprove God absolutely, which is as hard to do as prove his existence, and lets theists cite human phenomena that strict empiricism used to rule out. In The Existence of God (Oxford; $37.50), Richard Swinburne of England's Keele University concludes: "The experience of so many men in their moments of religious vision corroborates what...