Equivocating theories

The first step I now take when I sit down to debate a subject with someone is to define the terms we will be using.  I cannot count the times in my younger years when I debated with a friend for hours only to finally discover that we actually agreed on everything and our only debate was really over how we should define some word.  I'd like to pass this long learned lesson on to Madison Murphy who recently wrote an article entitled "Evolution: theory not fact."  Murphy here argues with scientists but does not understand what they mean when they say "theory" and thus she ends up using theory in a different sense than they do.  Murphy is equivocating here, she is shifting between different definitions of the word theory.

Meaning of Life

I was reacquainted with the age old question "what is the meaning of life" recently when reading a book called War of the Worldviews by Deepak Chopra and Leonard Mlodinow.  Throughout the book, Deepak brings up the issue of the meaning of life numerous times.  This question, often described as the "ultimate question," the "big question," etc...  is an oft debated question and considered to be vastly important.  However, as anyone who has addressed this question knows there has never been an agreed upon answer and in fact there have been many vastly different answers to this question.

After reading Deepak's book and a recent article by Deepak discussing the meaning of life I felt I had to break down this question.  However, in this post I won't answer what the meaning of life is but I'll explain exactly why it hasn't been answered.  And the answer to that question lies in an understanding of language and rhetoric.  So what is the answer...

Answer:  "What is the meaning of life" is a bad question that can't be answered because it is far too ambiguous to be meaningful.  In fact, under some interpretations the question itself may simply be a meaningless question such as "what shape is an idea?" 

In other words, remember when your teachers told you there was no such thing as a dumb question.  Well, in a sense they were right because you can learn something from trying to answer any question.  But in another sense they were wrong, some questions can't be answered because the words composing the question aren't meaningful when strung together.  "What is the meaning of life?" is one of these meaningless questions (if you'll pardon my pun).

Hoffmann's poor reasoning

Today I stumbled onto a blogpost entitled Atheism's Little Idea by R. Joseph Hoffmann who I will give credit for being a writer with a talent for making an argument entertaining.  Unfortuantely, in this blogpost his arguments used to support his claim are far from clear and fall subject to a number of fallacies.

His blogpost is a rambling, meandering piece full of ad hominems, meaningless statements, and vague and ambiguous terms.  It reads like an angry rant where the author knows he is mad at an opposing viewpoint but can't find any logical grounds on which to attack that viewpoint.  The result is an article that lacks clear focus and never really explains what it means because doing so would require too much introspection about the stability of his own ideas.  So without further ado I will dig into specific examples to support my above claims, something Hoffman fails to do.