Steven E. Landsburg wrote The Big Questions and in it he uses physics, mathematics and economics to answer the eternal questions of philosophy.
The main philosophy of The Big Questions: If you're objecting to a logical argument, try asking yourself exactly which line in that argument you're objecting to. If you can't identify the locus of your disagreement, you're probably just blathering.
More insights:
1. I have never, ever, heard a parent say to a child that it's okay to forcibly take toys away from other children who have more toys than you do. Nor have I ever heard a parent tell a child that if one kid has more toys than the others, then it's okay for those others to form a 'government' and vote to take those toys away."
2. Most people have instinctive sympathy for the man who says "I tried for months to get a job and nobody would hire me. Only in desperation did I turn to theft." The same people have only scorn for the man who says "I tried for months to get a date and nobody would go out with me. Only in desperation did I turn to rape."
3. You're just idly wondering where the electron is. In most circumstances, quantum mechanics says that it's quite impossible for you to know the answer to that question.
4. Aha! A fundamental limitation on human knowledge, no? No. Here's why: Most of the time, the electron is nowhere. Asking "Where is the electron?" is akin to asking "What is the electron's favorite movie?". It's a nonsense question. The inability to answer nonsense questions is not a fundamental limitation on knowledge.
5. How can the electron be nowhere? Because electrons behave nothing at all like anything you're familiar with. Instead of a location, the electron has a quantum state.
6. Just as "weather" is shorthand for the aggregate of the interactions of trillions of water molecules, "free will" is the same kind of shorthand:
7. What caused your decision to get drunk and watch Mystery Science Theater the night before your philosophy final? Free will. An insane person might object that free will can't be it at all, because free will is just a shorthand term for an indescribably complex process involving trillions of neurons, which in turn can be described in terms of quadrillions of atoms and quintillions of subatomic particles. So what? You still have free will, and you know it.
8. The evidence for evolution is overwhelming. We see it in the fossil record. We see it in the laboratory. We see it in the closely related DNA of various different species. There's a vast amount of evidence for evolution, which I think will lead anybody who thinks hard about the question to believe that the theory of evolution is very likely to be true.
9. Religions contradict each other, and two contradictory things cannot be true. If Christianity is true, then Islam is false. If Islam is true, then Judaism is false. Anybody who tries to pretend that conflicting things can be true - what greater evidence could there be that these people don't really mean the things that they're saying? I find it extremely telling that people will say yes, there are true things in religions other than my own, and yet my religion is completely true. Those things cannot both be correct.
10. One of the best things that can happen to you is to lose an argument, because when you lose an argument, that's when you've learned something.
11. The fact that you're coming to an agreement 25 percent of the time, I think you're doing a whole lot better than most folks, and I think that's great, but I also think it's very interesting that you say that the topics where you don't come to agreements are religion and politics, and I want to suggest that the reason that you're not coming to agreements on those subjects is that those are precisely the subjects where people don't really care whether they're right or wrong. It's not going to affect their lives.
12. If I go into the voting booth and vote for the wrong guy, I'm probably not going to elect him with that one vote. I can afford to be wrong about that. We can afford to be wrong about religion. We can afford to be wrong about politics. And because we can afford to be wrong, we can - that's exactly why we can afford to stick to our opinions and ignore what the other guy has to say.
13. There's a lot of evidence for that just in the fact that most people, most of the time, do not let their daily behavior be guided by these views. The people who say that they believe that bad behavior will lead you to eternal damnation seem to be just about as willing to rob liquor stores as anybody else is. Which is - suggests to me that at some deep level, they're aware that the beliefs they state are not really the beliefs that they hold.
14. Here’s an odd fact, throughout the industrialized world, unemployment and home ownership go hand in hand.” Unemployment is low in Switzerland, where renting is the norm, and high in Spain, where most people own their homes. The pattern also holds within different regions of individual countries, and it persists over time. As home ownership rises, so does joblessness. For instance, people who own their homes may be less willing than renters to move after they lose a job, making it more difficult to find new work. Another possibility is that countries or states with a lot of regulations, like rent control and strict labor laws, may be simultaneously encouraging home buying and discouraging hiring. “It’s not easy to sort out causes from effects,” he says. But “it’s not always impossible either.
15. You should give all your charitable donations to the single cause you deem most worthy. If you think the most important thing you can do is help a starving child by giving $100 to CARE, you should give all your donations to CARE. Your first $100 is not going to cure hunger, and the next $100 you could give — money that might now be going to another cause — will help just as many children. When I started reading the chapter, I was rolling my eyes. When I finished it, I couldn’t decide how I felt.
16. Commissioners of the Food and Drug Administration should be paid with the stock of pharmaceutical companies (to prevent them from being “overly cautious” about approving new drugs). Furthermore, he says the president of the United States should be paid with a “diversified land portfolio,” since the price of land is the best measure of how many people “want to live here and plan their futures here.” He also suggests that the postwar looting of museums isn’t really a problem and, of course, that more sex equals safer sex. Perhaps the better conclusion is that fewer ideas would make for better ideas.
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