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Secondly, there are many philosophical problems that are now considered to be metaphysical problems (or at least partly metaphysical problems) that are in no way related to first causes or unchanging things; the problem of free will, for example, or the problem of the mental and the physical.
Through conscience and its related notion, synderesis, human beings discern what is right and wrong. While there are many medieval views about the nature of conscience, most views regard human beings as capable of knowing in general what ought to be done and applying this knowledge through conscience to particular decisions about action. The ability to act on the determinations of conscience is, moreover, tied to the development of the moral virtues, which in turn refines the functions of conscience.
As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one." There is a tradition in many groups that, once this occurs, that thread is over, and whoever mentioned the Nazis has automatically lost whatever argument was in progress. Godwin's Law thus practically guarantees the existence of an upper bound on thread length in those groups.
Ah, so if I call you a Nazi, I lose, while if you are a Nazi, you win...
Twentieth-century coinages like ‘meta-language’ and ‘metaphilosophy’ encourage the impression that metaphysics is a study that somehow “goes beyond” physics, a study devoted to matters that transcend the mundane concerns of Newton and Einstein and Heisenberg. This impression is mistaken.
When there is no math to explain the phenomena, they simply call it metaphysics. What has happened is that anything labeled "metaphysical" also gets considered "delusional mumbo-jumbo." It's as if someone tried to take the literally meaning of the prefix "meta" to not mean what it does when attached to the word "physical."
When the twentieth century opened, science and religion were locked in a protracted war in which it seemed no compromise was possible. There were two primary reasons for this. The first was epistemological,1 involving different notions about what constitutes truth and how it can be known. While science boasted that scientific truths could be tested and verified through empirical experiments, religion apparently demanded that spiritual truths be accepted on blind faith.
The second reason was ontological.2 That is, science and religion were founded on diametrically opposed views concerning the fundamental nature of reality. Religious believers insisted that, ultimately, the nature of reality was spiritual, and that, apart from this All-Encompassing Spiritual Reality, nothing would or could exist. Advocates for science, on the other hand, adopted a strictly materialist position, arguing that everything could be reduced to, and explained by, the interactions of independently existing atoms and the physical forces which acted on them.