Author: Barry Arrington

As our News Desk has noted, over at Mind Matters Michael Egnor engages with Jerry Coyne on whether, as a matter of logic, the cosmos can be self-existent. Egnor says no, and one reason he gives is the logical principle that any causal chain points to a first cause. He writes: Imagine a chain hanging Read More…

In the wake of another senseless shooting yesterday we can expect progressive attacks on our Second Amendment freedom to become even more shrill and frenetic.  That is why now is a good time to go back to basics.  In this essay I will explain the history and theoretical underpinnings of the Second Amendment and discuss Read More…

Yes, yes, I grant that he was brilliant in his field of expertise, theoretical physics.  But as was recently noted in these pages, when he ventured outside of his bailiwick, he said some really boned-headed things.  Consider just one example from his book The Grand Design:  “Because there is a law such as gravity, the Read More…

Vasily Grossman was a war correspondent in the Soviet Union during World War II.  After the war he became a novelist, and Life and Fate, about life in the Soviet Union during the Battle of Stalingrad, is considered his masterpiece.  Written in 1960, the novel was suppressed by the KBG and not published until after Read More…

Explaining how as science has advanced, the existence of God has become more probable, not less.

Thank you to the UD News desk for putting up From Closer To Truth: Is Mathematics Invented Or Discovered?  In this video public intellectual Robert Lawrence Kuhn interviews mathematicians and philosophers regarding the titular question. The most profound statement in the video does not address the question.  It addresses the current cultural constraints on the Read More…

Here’s a scenario for your consideration: Suppose there were a group of people who insisted there is absolutely no objective standard for morality and that all moral norms are based on subjective preferences that are foisted on us by material evolutionary forces. And suppose there were a group of people who are so serenely confident Read More…

If only Captain Picard had frequented this site, he would have known that he has nothing to worry about because the probability of a random toss of letters spelling out “disaster” is practically nil. We wish all of our readers a joyful and merry Christmas. And so that we can keep this site up to, Read More…

To all of the materialist OOL researchers who continue to blither about how we are tantalizingly close to discovering how blind unguided natural forces produced the staggeringly complex nano-technology in even the simplest cell, we challenge you to a 100 yard dash. And there is good news.  We will spot you 99 yards and 35 Read More…

“There is no such thing as truth. Science is a social phenomenon and like every other social phenomenon is limited by the benefit or injury it confers on the community” Adolph Hitler* (or your average woke postmodern academic) When you hear a progressive talk about “white science” or “patriarchal science” or “Western science” you should Read More…

The other day I had an exchange with a progressive about Amy Coney Barrett.  The exchange was touched off by Ms. Progressive’s comment about Barrett’s faith:  “I don’t think her religion is a problem as much as her religious convictions driving her decision making is.” I encounter this sort of muddled thinking from progressives all Read More…

The issue of whether the Nazis were on the left or the right comes up most often in discussions of economics.  Some argue the Nazis called themselves socialists, and therefore they should be classified on the left.  The problem with that argument is that in spite of the fact that the formal name of the Read More…

The following is President Trump’s statement: Today, our Nation mourns the loss of a titan of the law. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg served more than 27 years as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States—notably just the second woman to be appointed to the Court. She was a loving wife to Read More…

Weigel takes to the pages of First Things and informs us that the United States has arrived at its sorry state because we have paid insufficient heed to Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde: For Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde diagnosed a primary cause of our current distress over half a century ago.  Böckenförde was a German constitutional law scholar whose “dictum” Read More…

Indeed, it is more than merely true; it is an inexorable logical certainty if the premises of the theorists are true.  That is the question I will address in this post. Before we go on, we need to understand what ‘critical theory’ is.  Wikipedia has a good summary:  In sociology and political philosophy, the term Read More…