Barry Arrington

There has been a lot of talk lately about the impending demise of liberal democracy and if anything can be done to save it.  Yes, things look bleak, and men of good will everywhere must act before it is too late.  But what should we do?  To answer that question we must first know what we are up against; for we can fight effectively only if we know what we are fighting against.  Michael Anton provides the answer.  He writes in the latest edition of the Claremont Review of Books that absent cataclysm or conquest, all regimes: are felled by the inevitable radicalization of their core principle.  Democracy, then, falls when its core principles of liberty and equality are perverted Read More ›

“At the heart of quantum mechanics is a rule that sometimes governs politicians or CEOs – as long as no one is watching, anything goes.” Lawrence Kraus Given recent allegations against Kraus, this statement is deliciously ironic.

Focusing on stopping progress, barring new power plants, dismantling chemical facilities, mobilizing against Israel, and other reactionary pursuits, Ivy institutions are pursuing the fancies of a declining intellectual and business elite, full of chemophobic nags and luddite lame-ducks quacking away on their miasmic pools of old money as the world whirls past them. George Gilder, Life After Google:  The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy Would that it were so.

Headline in azcentral:  Renowned ASU professor Lawrence Krauss ousted from post after sex misconduct claims  

Much has been written about the so-called “warfare thesis” first popularized in the 1870’s by Andrew Dickson White.  This thesis posits that there is an inherent conflict between Christianity and science.  Never mind that many of the most famous scientists in history, including practically all of the progenitors of the scientific revolution, were Christians (Galileo, Newton, Maxwell, etc.).  The obvious historical weakness and intellectual tendentiousness of the warfare thesis has led to its reevaluation and often its rejection by contemporary researchers.  (See here for example). The idea that there is an inherent conflict between science (in the sense of an investigation of nature) and Christianity is risible.  This is not to say, however, that there is no conflict at all.  Read More ›

Francis Crick and Leslie Orgel co-authored an article entitled “Directed Pansmermia” in which they advocated consideration of infective* theories for the origin of life on earth in addition to the moribund (then and now) search for a materialist terrestrial origin.  In that article the following sentence stands out: It has also been argued that ‘infective’ theories of the origins of terrestrial life should be rejected because they do no more than transfer the problem of origins to another planet. ID proponents frequently get similar push back.  Indeed, Crick and Orgel’s sentence could be modified only slightly to reflect that materialist objection: It has also been argued that ID theories of the origins of terrestrial life should be rejected because they Read More ›

Fideism is the idea that sometimes you just have to grit your teeth and believe, because faith is independent of, or even in opposition to, reason.  Theists are often accused of fideism.  Every time you hear someone say, “your belief in God is based on nothing but blind, unreasoning faith” the speaker is accusing his target of fideism.  Theists respond to the “blind faith” attack by pointing out that their beliefs are evidence-based, reasoned, and reasonable.  See here for an example. But this post is not about responding to materialist accusations of fideism against theists.  It is about the irony of such attacks coming from any materialist who has ever cited Orgel’s Second Rule of Evolution.  Orgel’s Second Rule, named Read More ›

In Fallacies physicists fall for Ed Feser demonstrates how scientism such as that frequently espoused by “Why Evolution is True” Jerry Coyne can be refuted by a bright child: Scientism is simply not a coherent position.  You cannot avoid having distinctively philosophical and extra-scientific theoretical commitments, because the very attempt to do so entails having distinctively philosophical and extra-scientific theoretical commitments.  And if you think that these commitments arerationally justifiable ones – and of course, anyone beholden to scientism thinks his view is paradigmatically rational – then you are implicitly admitting that there can be such a thing as a rationally justifiable thesis which is not a scientific thesis.  Which is, of course, what scientism denies.  Thus scientism is unavoidably self-defeating. Of course, this has been done Read More ›

All that follows is WJM’s: Modern physics has long ago disproved the idea that “matter” exists at all. Timothy’s position might as well be that because we all perceive the sun moving through the sky from east to west, it is a fact that it is the sun that is doing the moving. Just because we perceive a world of what we call “matter” doesn’t change the fact that we know no such world actually exists regardless of what our perception tells us. What we call “matter” is a perceptual interpretation of something that is not, in any meaningful sense, “matter”. We know now (current science) that matter is, at its root, entirely “immaterial”, despite what our macro sensory perceptions Read More ›

In response to my last post A-Mat timothya writes: “If You are Going to Reject Something, At Least Take the Time to Understand What You Are Rejecting” Absolutely agree. Evolutionary biology would be a good place to start. Timothy, it is easy to be a smartass.  Making cogent arguments, not so much.  You appear to be suggesting that those who disagree with evolutionary biology do not understand it.  That is a mere assertion (an unspoken one at that).  If you are going to make an argument, as opposed to a splenetic grunt, you will need to demonstrate where an ID proponent failed to understand an evolutionary concept he rejected.    

The post by News here about how an atheist believed that miracles are impossible because “science,” reminded me of the atheist who responded to one of my posts a few weeks ago.  He said he cannot believe in an immaterial mind because in his view the interaction problem is hopeless for dualists.  The problem of course is that the atheist was attacking a strawman caricature of what most dualists believe, not actual dualism.   It is as if our A-Mat thinks all dualists hold to a sort of hyper-Cartesian  substance dualism in which an immaterial homunculus  sits in a material seat in the brain (perhaps in the pineal gland) and pulls levers to operate the body, and his knock-down objection to that theory Read More ›

Canada’s Globe and Mail recently published a horrifying exposé of China’s persecution of religious minorities. Large numbers – researchers estimate the total in the hundreds of thousands – of people have been placed in Chinese facilities known as re-education centres, where they are forcibly indoctrinated. The Globe described the “re-education” experience of one woman: The woman, whose name is not being used by The Globe and Mail for her protection, was put through regular self-criticism sessions.  Part of the content was cultural.  ‘My soul is infected with serious diseases,’ she would repeat.  ‘There is no God.  I don’t believe in God.  I believe in the Communist Party.’ Other content was more explicitly political.  Day after day she would say out Read More ›

Let’s review my recent exchange with MatSpirit: MatSpirit quotes Dawkins: Richard Dawkins is not just flapping his gums when he says, “The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction . . . I point out that is the same Dawkins who wrote: The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference. MatSpirit ignores the incoherence of his position and says: but the most important [question to Barry] was, “What in the world makes you think God has good morals? No, Mat. There is an even more basic and important question that absolutely must Read More ›

The recent spate of celebrity suicides has me thinking about why people, even very rich and famous people, sometimes despair and give up.  Of course Nietzsche predicted that despair and nihilism would follow in the wake of the death of God, and he worked frenetically to find a solution.  Does his solution work?  We shall see. Nietzsche believed that Enlightenment rationalism and the philosophical materialism that followed in its wake had made belief in God untenable.  God is dead and we have murdered him he famously announced in The Madman: The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes.  “Whither is God?”  he cried; “I will tell you.  We have killed him — you and I.  All Read More ›

The next time you hear a progressive hurl the epithet “war on science” against an ID proponent, I  hope you will think of this article.  When did we fall through the rabbit hole and land in a world where the first and second place finishers in the girls’ race are boys?  God help us.