Word: skepticism
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Shepard, better known as a playwright than as an actor, successfully portrays Cal's violent transition from skeptic to zealot. Shepard's brooding, understated intensity adds a dash of noir to the film...
...country home of the Tarleton clan seems demolition-proof. John Tarleton (Sandy Webster), self-made head of Tarleton's Underwear, is a man of irrepressible élan vital to whom skeptic thought is the champagne of the mind...
...then pursed his lips." On the first of May Byars will depart for Italy to design a 100-foot pink flag for the Venice Biennial Celebration. Byars says that he also runs the "World Question Center," and he adds that he is the only one left in it. The skeptic will naturally ask "Is this his imaginative, and perhaps vain name for his own inquisitive mind?" Byars will answer no. He insists that there is a real Question Center where he collects questions, and even a skeptic would be rash to doubt that such a man collects questions...
Since the Enlightenment, though, philosophers have not been impressed. The great skeptic was David Hume (1711-76), who scoffed at the design argument because nature is so savage and wasteful that it might have been the work of "some infant deity who afterwards abandoned it, ashamed of his lame performance." Turned inside out, the proof is really a question: Could this intricate universe have evolved by pure trial and error? The last major philosopher to promote the argument, Britain's F.R. Tennant, wrote in 1934: "Presumably the world is comparable with a single throw of the dice. And common...
...century Archbishop of Canterbury who defined God as "a being than which nothing greater can be thought." The Archbishop reasoned that since existence would have to be part of any such perfect and necessary being, this being must actually exist. This is "too good to be true," says one skeptic, and even one of its current defenders admits that it "looks too much like word magic...