Barry Arrington

As many of our readers know, one of our most valued and prolific contributors lives on Montserrat.  Irma passed over that island early Wednesday morning.  We have not heard from our contributor since Tuesday evening, and we may not hear from him again for several days if, as expected, power has gone out.  Our thoughts and prayers go out to the residents of the Caribbean islands and the coastal regions who have been or soon will be hit by the storm. UPDATE:  We have heard from KF and he is OK.  The main force of the storm passed slightly to the north of Montserrat.  Let us continue to remember the residents of the small island of Barbuda, which was devastated Read More ›

OK, raise your hand if you knew that the in the 1600’s advocates of the heliocentric view appealed to God’s greatness to answer geocentric arguments.  Yep.  In fact, the “size of the star” issue was not fully resolved until the 1800s.  The point is that the debate was not purely religion (geo) vs. science (helio).  The geo advocates had scientific arguments that were not fully answered until the 1800s, and the helio advocates sometimes resorted to religious arguments.  Anyone who has followed the standard history of the so-called war of religion against science would be surprised to learn there was nuance.  John Hartnett writes: The size of stars argument went as follows. Sizes of stars were first measured by eye, Read More ›

Julie Kelly reports If you need proof that the line between science and politics has been irrevocably erased, look no further than the September edition of Scientific American. In a special issue entitled “Sex and Gender,” the magazine purloins the progressive political agenda and attempts to give it a scientific mooring even when none exists. It represents a wholesale retreat from the principle that science should be apolitical, further jeopardizing the integrity of the scientific establishment and potentially inflicting real harm as it chooses to promote identity politics over solid science. more

Some friends and I drove up to Casper, which was in the exact center of the zone of totality of the eclipse.  The experience was indescribably spectacular.  It was even worth enduring the worst traffic jam of my life in which the normal four-hour drive back to Denver was stretched to ten hours. This morning I learned that Neil deGrasse Tyson‏ tweeted The divided United States of America will unite today, sharing a cosmic event predicted by the methods and tools of science. Most commenters have interpreted this as a dig at climate alarmism skeptics.  So, let’s play “Spot the Equivocation”! A.  The “methods and tools of science” used to predict the eclipse have been extremely well understood for hundreds Read More ›

Our atheist friends delight in preening over their rejection of the “irrational” and “magic.”  Not so writes David Bentley Hart: All of which is to say (to return to where I began) that it is absurd to think that one can profess atheism in any meaningful way without thereby assenting to an entire philosophy of being, however inchoate one’s sense of it may be. The philosophical naturalist’s view of reality is not one that merely fails to find some particular object within the world that the theist imagines can be descried there; it is a very particular representation of the nature of things, entailing a vast range of purely metaphysical commitments. Principally, it requires that one believe that the physical order, which Read More ›

Concerning the now infamous diversity memo that led to the ouster of a heretical engineer at Google, Kelly Ellis reports that “some women who still work at the company stayed home Monday because the memo made them “uncomfortable going back to work.” Oh the irony.  Daniel Payne informs us that the heretic, James Damore, explained, in part, why he believed there is a “gender gap” in tech fields—namely because, on average, women are, in a variety of ways, predisposed to avoid the high-stress world of technology.” And women at the company react by — wait for it, wait for it — avoiding a high-stress situation at the company. All of which makes me wonder whether Google should install in its Read More ›

Here: [The New Atheists’ assertion that they do not believe in God, defined as the infinite actuality that grounds all being] is the embrace of an infinite paradox: the universe understood as an “absolute contingency.” It may not amount to a metaphysics in the fullest sense, since strictly speaking it possesses no rational content—it is, after all, a belief that all things rest upon something like an original moment of magic—but it is certainly far more than the mere absence of faith.

Guest post by Evgeny Selensky: An interesting summary of an abiogenetic hypothesis of prebiotic metabolic networks can be found here. The bottom line is, it is interesting but it raises many serious questions. The hypothesis is based on the observed similarity of the core structure of metabolic networks across all organisms. It is then hypothesised that the core must have had an early evolutionary origin. As is expected of a naturalistic hypothesis, it relies on extremely favourable starting conditions (the lucky concentrations of all necessary reagents in an Archean ocean, the right temperature, etc.) and other physico-chemical constraints, which, according to its proponents, helped form a prebiotic metabolic complex. The summary makes a correct distinction between thermodynamically controlled reactions and Read More ›

News recently brought to our attention an article by Tom Rudelius in which he asserts that Occam’s razor does not militate against the existence of the multiverse.  Rudelius writes: The other argument against the multiverse that I find unconvincing is an appeal to Occam’s razor: it is absurd, some would argue, to hypothesize an infinite number of other universes just to explain our own. It is simplest to assume that only one universe exists. Incidentally, atheists will often say the same thing about God, claiming that it is simpler to assume that just the natural universe exists rather than postulate a complicated entity like God to explain fine-tuning. The problem with both of these arguments is that Occam’s razor does Read More ›

In the journal Nature Geoscience:  Abstract Here.    

As far as the practice of science is concerned, is there a practical difference between assuming the probability that a miracle will not occur is 1.00 and assuming the probability that a miracle will not occur is 0.9999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999? Tom Gilson addresses this question in his contribution to Naturalism and Its Alternatives in Scientific Methodologies in a chapter entitled Methodological Naturalism, Methodological Theism, and Regularism. Gilson starts off by quoting J. B. S. Haldane: My practice as a scientist is atheistic. That is to say, when I set up an experiment I assume that no god, angel or devil is going to interfere with its course; and this assumption has been justified by such success as I have achieved in my Read More ›

Over at FT, Michael Egnor, professor of neurological surgery at Stony Brook University School of Medicine, discusses the weaknesses of the materialist paradigm.  Sterile reductionist accounts bandied about in the 21st century are far less robust than the state of the art in the 13th century: We can do better science—and medicine—when we recognize that human beings have abilities that transcend reductionist material explanations. In this century of unprecedented advances in brain research, it’s remarkable that the deepest insights emerge from an ancient paradigm: Thomas Aquinas’s map of the soul.

Over at ENV, David Klinghoffer reports on an article in Live Science about research into why atheists disproportionately score higher on standard tests of intelligence.  The article states: [Researcher Edward] Dutton set out to find [the] answer, thinking that perhaps it was because nonreligious people were more rational than their religious brethren, and thus better able to reason that there was no God, he wrote. But “more recently, I started to wonder if I’d got it wrong, actually,” Dutton told Live Science. “I found evidence that intelligence is positively associated with certain kinds of bias.” For instance, a 2012 study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology showed that college students often get logical answers wrong but don’t realize it. Read More ›

Such as global warming causing glaciers to shrink even though the local temperatures have NOT warmed.  Robert Tracinski explains here. BTW, medieval inquisitors called those who did not accept their views “heretics” or “infidels.”  The religion of environmentalism also has heretics and infidels, but they are called “deniers.”

Yet again a materialist comes into these pages (this time rvb8) and asserts that ID necessarily entails a supernatural designer.  The conversation usually goes something like this: Materialist:  ID is not science, because it studies the supernatural. ID Proponent:  No, that’s wrong.  ID is the study of design in nature.  While the designer may be supernatural, he is not necessarily so. Mat:  No, you are dissembling. ID:  Why do you say that? Mat:  Because the design of living things would require a miracle, and miracles are, by definition, supernatural. ID:  Let me get this straight.  You believe that blind, unguided natural forces are sufficient to account for the staggering complexity and diversity of life. Mat:  That’s right.  That is why Read More ›