The following headline appeared in the New York Times today: Trump May Be Preparing Pardons for Servicemen Accused of War Crimes My family and I have been praying for a headline like this for over ten years. Before I tell this story I will disclose my personal interest. My father met his best friend Darryl […]
Author: Barry Arrington
attorney; specialist in school law and litigation; former member of Colorado House of Representatives
The Multiverse is Anti-Scientific
The UD News Desk’s latest post has me thinking. The multiverse is not only unscientific, it is positively anti-scientific. If there are an incomprehensibly vast (I believe some say even infinite, though that is hard to conceptualize) number of universes, then any being or phenomenon can be explained by “we just happen to live in […]
Increasing Skepticism Among Secular Scientists?
Today at The Federalist: The plain truth from the literature, conferences, expert perception, and a bit of anecdote for color, is that current Neo-Darwinism is far from the untouchable theory it is lauded to be. Not only this, but it has serious and increasing skeptics and challengers from within the secular scientific community.
How Do You Know an Artificial Intelligence Advocate is Shining You On?
When they say they “know” that an AI machine is conscious. How can I be so sure? Easy. As I have discussed before, we cannot in principle “know” that even other humans are conscious; far less can we know that an AI is conscious. By its very nature, consciousness, as evidenced by subjective self-awareness, can […]
For Progressives, the Only “Principle” That Matters is This: We Advance Principles When They Suit Our Interests, and we Abandon Them When They Don’t
Two recent posts have highlighted the moral and intellectual rot that threatens Western Civilization. In the first, materialist Seversky expressed a moral nihilism that is breathtaking in its scope. I asked him if the ancient practice of killing unwanted girl babies was an affirmatively good thing. His answer: “It was an affirmatively good thing for […]
WJM Schools Brother Brian on Why He is an Oppressor Under His Own Definition
It is amusing to watch WJM hoist a materialist with his own petard. All that follows is WJM: Brother Brian, So, if you could, you’d force others to live by your preference – let’s call it the non-oppression of women. Your position is that it is your subjective preference as to how people should behave, […]
Social Justice Warriors to Believers in Truth: Drop Dead
Those of us who believe in truth, virtue and “justice” (unadorned with the modifier “social”) are inimical to the “social justice” movement. So says this UN report: “Present-day believers in an absolute truth identified with virtue and justice are neither willing nor desirable companions for the defenders of social justice.” Social Justice in an Open […]
Severskey is Honest About the Logic of Materialism
You’ve gotta love Sev’s refreshing honesty. In this post I noted that killing little babies was not uncommon in ancient cultures. And then I asked: [Materialists] say that morality is a social construct; which means that “good” means what the people of a society collectively deem to be good. If that is so, was it […]
Was Killing Babies Good?
I have a question for our materialist interlocutors. As Georgi Boorman summarizes in this article, in many ancient cultures killing certain babies was an acceptable, even lauded, practice. Here’s my question: You say that morality is a social construct; which means that “good” means what the people of a society collectively deem to be good. […]
“If’n I Drop, I’m Gonna Be in Motion”
In a recent post I took umbrage with a writer who said : “If determinism is also true, that does not mean that free will is false.” Well, yes, it kinda does, because those two things — determined and free — are mutually exclusive. The whole thing put he in mind of a scene from […]
The Governor of Virginia: Killing Babies is OK by Me
Yesterday two stories out of Virginia went viral. In the first the Democrat sponsor of an “abortion” bill confirmed that she intends to allow the babies to be killed up to the moment of birth. See here. You can read the text of the bill in this article. Under the proposal a baby could be […]
Knock Me Over With a Feather; Jerry Coyne is Being Honest About the Meaninglessness of Subjective Morality
Writing at his blog: With few exceptions, most scientists and philosophers think that morality is at bottom based on human preferences. And though we may agree on many of those preferences (e.g., we should do what maximizes “well being”), you can’t show using data that one set of preferences is objectively better than another. (You […]
Andrew Jones on Free Will
Over at EN he writes: If determinism is also true, that does not mean that free will is false. It could be simply that there is a problem with the philosophical abstraction called “libertarian free will” (which seems to assert indeterminism as a fundamentalist tenet). “If determinism is also true, that does not mean that […]
God Help The Little Babies
Here is a picture of a baby being operated on before birth. With advances in medical technology, this has become a fairly common procedure. Now, imagine the operating room is in New York. In the operating room on the other side of the wall, a doctor could be hacking a practically identical baby to death. […]
Theistic Evolutionists: The Reality Behind the Illusion is Itself an Illusion
. . . and the reality behind that illusion is, well, the initial illusion. Richard Dawkins famously declared that the appearance of design in living things is overwhelming. Theistic evolutionists do not disagree. But, like arch-atheist Dawkins, they assert that the appearance of design is an illusion and Darwinian evolution is the reality behind the […]