Barry Arrington

In the We Won thread someone who calls themselves rvb8 wrote:  “We do not accept the supernatural because we can’t test for that.” Well.  Consider the following two statements: Supernatural phenomena exist. Natural phenomena are all that exist. The two statements are mirror images are of one another.  If one is true the other is necessarily false.  They are mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive. And neither can be confirmed by test. Notice the double standard here.  rvb8 rejects statement 1 on the sole ground that it cannot be tested.  But he affirms statement 2 (it is necessarily entailed by his statement) even though it cannot be tested either.  The incoherence of scientism is obvious.  Yet many cling to it in Read More ›

Jason Rosenhouse writes: We certainly do not know a priori that piles of bricks do not form images of imaginary unicorns, and it is not logically impossible that they do. UPDATE: I decided I could not resist adding Example 8,265 from the some post: I do not know how the chemical reactions and electrical firings inside my head lead to mental images, but there is copious evidence that they do and zero evidence that anything non-physical is involved Wow.  How does Rosenhouse deal with all of the evidence contrary to his position?  Easy peasy.  Fiat.  Just declare that it does not exist. Turns out the hard problem of consciousness is not so hard after all.  All David Chalmers needed to Read More ›

“No argument can pry doubt from the minds of those wishing not to believe.”  WJM Exactly.  Dozens of idiots commenting on these pages have engaged in what we call “insane denial.”  WJM’s particular comment was directed to daveS, and if Dave wants to join their ranks, there really is nothing anyone can do to stop him.  All thinking people must respond to Arthur Leff’s Grand Sez Who, and when they respond they have two and only two choices: Choice 1:  Insist on radical personal autonomy and deny the objective nature of morality. Choice 2: Bow humbly before the obvious existence of self-evident moral truth. There is a price for either choice. The price of Choice 1 is rationality itself. The Read More ›

Eon Musk assures us that it is highly probable that a techno-version of him does in fact exist: The strongest argument for us being in a simulation probably is the following: 40 years ago we had pong. Like, two rectangles and a dot. That was what games were. Now, 40 years later, we have photorealistic, 3D simulations with millions of people playing simultaneously, and it’s getting better every year. Soon we’ll have virtual reality, augmented reality. If you assume any rate of improvement at all, then the games will become indistinguishable from reality, even if that rate of advancement drops by a thousand from what it is now. Then you just say, okay, let’s imagine it’s 10,000 years in the Read More ›

WJM challenges the moral subjectivists: I challenge CF and zeroseven to explain, from logically consistent moral subjectivism, how any of their moral views do not depend entirely upon personal preference, and how that principle cannot be used to make anything moral – even cruelty. Clown Fish rises to the challenge: Morals, regardless of their origin, span the gamut from deeply entrenched to weakly held. I assume that you would agree with this. It was “beat” into me from an early age by my parents that I must hold the door open for women and the elderly. I think that you would agree that this is not an objective moral value, yet I feel very uncomfortable if I don’t get to a Read More ›

Zeroseven said:  “Hi Vivid, I’m not much of a logician. Just give your practical example and we can explore it.” If you are not going to explore a practical example logically, what use is exploring it at all? To share your personal feelings? Here’s the problem in for those that wish to interact with Aleta, Zeroseven and Clown Fish: it is utterly unimportant to them that their worldview, statements and behavior be logically consistent. This is why it simply doesn’t bother them to admit that they are hypocrites – insisting on one thing (that morality is subjective) while behaving the opposite way (like morality is objective), and why they keep raising objections that have already been thoroughly refuted (like morality Read More ›

Robert Tracinski tells us why the greenies will never admit that they were dead wrong (pun intended) about DDT, even though their mistakes have led to the death of millions: So why not just admit that the hysteria whipped up over DDT was wrong? Because this was the founding issue of the environmentalist movement. Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” was the first book to convince the common man that “chemicals” are scary and that modern industry and technology were going to destroy us. Banning DDT was the first triumph of the environmentalist movement in using political pressure to override scientific skepticism and impose its agenda by force. http://thefederalist.com/2016/05/27/yes-you-can-blame-the-ddt-ban-for-zika/  

This time they are burning books in Portland. Read the last paragraph of this resolution adopted by the Portland School Board. Because the suppression of doubt or skepticism is the foundation of any good science education.  Right? As Robert Tracinski reports: Actually, the story is even worse than what conservative news sites have reported. It’s not just that Portland banished from its schools any active denial of catastrophic, man-made global warming; it’s that they banished any language that implies the smallest amount of doubt. Bill Bigelow, a former teacher now working for the activist group that pushed this resolution, explained its rationale in testimony to the school board: “Bigelow said PPS’ science textbooks are littered with words like ‘might,’ ‘may,’ and ‘could’ Read More ›

In my law practice I often represent charter school applicants appealing local districts’ denial of their charter applications to the Colorado State Board of Education.  Some years ago in one of these appeals a local district decided to support their case for denial by hiring an infamous advocacy firm masquerading as experts in education economics to produce a report demonstrating the terrible economic threat charter schools represent to school districts.  The firm produced the report and I proceeded to explode it by pointing out the tendentious assumptions upon which it was based. The district’s decision to use the firm backfired, because their obvious bad faith probably helped me win that appeal.  I was particularly pleased with one line from my Read More ›

See here. Bill Nye fashions himself a voice of rational thought and scientific inquiry. His shtick has gotten him into classrooms and on an endless loop of evangelizing TV appearances. Yet nearly every time he speaks these days, Nye diminishes genuine science by resorting to scaremonger-y nuggets of easily dismissible ideologically-motivated nonsense.

UDEditors:  WJM’s devastating rebuttal to Aleta’s materialism deserves its own post.  Everything that follows is WJM’s: Aleta said: William, I know that your view is that unless morality is somehow grounded (purportedly) in some objective reality to which we have access, then it is merely subjective, and that then people have no reason not to to do anything they want: it’s not just a slippery slope, but rather a black-and-white precipice to nihilism.So actually discussing this with you, which we did at length one other time, is not worth my time. It’s odd that you say that it is not worth your time apparently because you already know my position. If the only thing that makes a discussion “worth your Read More ›

We all learned pi in school in the context of circles.  Pi is the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter.  It is an irrational number approximated by 3.14. It turns out that pi shows up all over the place, not just in circles.  Here is just one instance.  Take a piece of paper and a stick.  Draw several lines along the paper so that the lines are the length of the stick from each other.  Then randomly drop the stick on the paper.  The probability that the stick will land so that it cuts a line is exactly 2/pi, or about 64%.  If one were to perform millions of trials, one could use the results to perform a Read More ›

Richard Lindzen, an MIT atmospheric physicist and one of the world’s leading climatologists, summarizes the science behind climate change. Here.  

Barbara Drossell is a professor of theoretical physics at the University of Darmstadt in Germany.  In this article she talks about the origin of the universe, the fine tuning argument and the implausibility of the multiverse theory. The fine-tuning argument is not proof. It is not science to conclude that God exists because the Universe appears to be finely tuned. But it’s a very convincing philosophical interpretation of the observation of fine-tuning. . . . If you start with the assumption that there is no God, then matter and natural laws are the ultimate reality. Therefore, it is not unnatural to conclude that there is a multiverse. It is always dangerous to attribute motives to other people, but I think Read More ›

Raising Arizona is one of my favorite movies.  It is chock-a-block with hilarious throw away lines like this one: Which brings me to Costa Rica.  Apparently, there are several hundred round stones that archaeologists are certain were designed.  This is from the Wiki entry. The stone spheres (or stone balls) of Costa Rica are an assortment of over three hundred petrospheres in Costa Rica, located on the Diquís Delta and on Isla del Caño. Locally, they are known as Las Bolas(literally The Balls). The spheres are commonly attributed to the extinct Diquís culture and are sometimes referred to as the Diquís Spheres. They are the best-known stone sculptures of the Isthmo-Colombian area. They are thought to have been placed in Read More ›