Barry Arrington

Finally, an honest materialist. In comment 93 to my last post a materialist finally admits the obvious. Why is that so hard for the rest of them? I don’t agree with everything Seversky says, but the general thrust of his comment is spot on from a materialist perspective. @ Materialist premises lead ineluctably to the following conclusions. There is no such thing as “good.” There is no such thing as “evil.” There is only my personal preferences competing with everyone else’s personal preferences, and all of those personal preferences can be reduced to the impulses caused by the electro-chemical processes of each person’s brain. My challenge to materialists was to show how any of the conclusions I’ve reached based on Read More ›

I sometimes despair of even the possibility of rational discourse with the ID opponents who post regularly on these pages. In this post I will try to give you a template for rational, logical discourse using my last post as an example. Before I do that, I will give you a couple of hints about the basics. All arguments rest on premises. Here is the classic: 1. All men are mortal 2. Socrates is a man. 3. Socrates is mortal. In order to refute an argument you must do one of two things: Show that it is invalid or show that is unsound. “Invalid” means the conclusion does not logically flow from the premises. In other words, an invalid argument Read More ›

In my last post I challenged materialists to answer the following challenge: Materialist premises lead ineluctably to the following conclusions. There is no such thing as “good.” There is no such thing as “evil.” There is only my personal preferences competing with everyone else’s personal preferences, and all of those personal preferences can be reduced to the impulses caused by the electro-chemical processes of each person’s brain. My challenge to materialists was to show how any of the conclusions I’ve reached based on materialist premises are not in fact compelled by those premises. RDFish responded with a comment you can read for yourself (comment 23), the gist of which was “normal people agree that evil things are evil.” RDFish’s response Read More ›

Mark Frank apparently no longer wants to play. So I will throw the question I asked him open to any of the other materialists who post here. Imagine the following exchange: Barry: Mr. Materialist, is it possible to imagine a universe in which torturing an infant to death for personal pleasure is actually an affirmatively good thing? Mr. Materialist: The answer to your question is that my metaphysics compel me to say that the phrase “affirmatively good thing” is all but meaningless in the sense you are using it. There is no such thing as “good.” There is no such thing as “evil.” There is only my personal preferences competing with everyone else’s personal preferences, and all of those personal Read More ›

Some people say that Stephen Hawking is the smartest man in the world, and doubtless he is a brilliant physicist. But when it comes to metaphysics he has said some silly things. Consider his famous universe-from-nothing quote: “Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing.” Read that statement again. It is gobsmackingly stupid. First, as we have discussed before, the statement “because there is something the universe can create itself from nothing” is self-referentially incoherent. But more importantly consider this. The statement appears to confer causal agency on “gravity.’ But what is gravity? It is a “law” of nature. What is a law of nature? It is an observed regularity that Read More ›

Closely related to the definition of evidence that we have been debating lately is the notion that evidence does not “speak” for itself. It is always interpreted within a paradigm. This is not wrong for the simple reason that it is unavoidable. That said, a researcher runs off the rails when he becomes so enamored with the paradigm within which he is working that he literally cannot see evidence smacking him in the face. Gould notes one such case concerning stasis: Paleontologists therefore came to view stasis as just another failure to document evolution. Stasis existed in overwhelming abundance, as every paleontologist always knew. But this primary signal of the fossil record, defined as an absence of data for evolution, Read More ›

In several posts last month Dr. Torley and I led a spirited discussion on the nature of “evidence.” See here, here, here and here. Those discussions revealed there is a lot of confusion about this topic. This is especially the case when it comes to the purpose of evidence. Many of our materialist friends seem to believe that unless evidence compels belief it does not count as evidence at all. Worse, they seem to believe that merely by advancing an alternative explanation for some proposition, they have caused all of the evidence for the explanation advanced by their opponents to magically turn into non-evidence.  This is simply not the case. Let’s go back to the dictionary. Evidence is “the available Read More ›

Mark Frank: “Evolution does not select for specific beliefs.” Of course not Mark, if by “evolution” you mean materialist Neo-Darwinian evolution. This is the case for the simple reason that if materialism is true, “beliefs” as they are commonly understood do not exist. They are an illusion, mere “folk psychology” according to Dennett.

In this post the UD News Desk quotes from Nancy Pearcey’s new book concerning evolutionary epistemology: An example of self-referential absurdity is a theory called evolutionary epistemology, a naturalistic approach that applies evolution to the process of knowing. The theory proposes that the human mind is a product of natural selection. The implication is that the ideas in our minds were selected for their survival value, not for their truth-value. Piotr thinks he has a cogent response to this: Does she believe “the ideas in our minds” are innate, or what? At best, it could be argued that the human mind has been shaped by natural selection in such a way that it can produce ideas which help us to Read More ›

See here.  Excerpt: At a UN-sponsored Symposium on the “Space Science and the United Nations” held in Graz, Austria, from 22-24 September 2014, Chandra Wickramasinghe presented a paper entitled “The transition from Earth-centred biology to cosmic life” with co-authors Gensuke Tokoro and Milton Wainwright. The paper, now published in Journal of Cosmology 24, 12080-12096, argues that a paradigm shift with potentially profound implications for humanity has been taking place over the past 3 decades and is on the verge of acceptance.  In an accompanying second paper (JoC, 24, 12097-12101) the same authors show that the recent discovery by radio astronomers of isopropyl cyanide in interstellar clouds adds to earlier discoveries in astronomy that have indicated the widespread occurrence of even more complex Read More ›

Brian Williams has been suspended by NBC for lying about being in a helicopter that was hit by RPG fire.  NBC says they are “rooting” for him and that he deserves a second chance, presumably after the suspension.  One wonders why NBC would even consider putting him back in the anchor chair.  Are they incapable of finding anywhere in the world a news reader capable of doing the job at least as well as a man who has sullied his reputation for veracity beyond any hope of repair? Be that as it may, there has been a lot of “analysis” over a very straightforward matter.  For his part Williams says “I would not have chosen to make this mistake.  I Read More ›

This is a follow up to my Stupid Things Atheists Say post. Evolve is being obstinate in his idiocy. He does not seem to understand the rather simple distinction between “evidence” and “evaluation of evidence.” I will try to help him (whether a fool such as he can be helped remains to be seen; there are none so blind as those who refuse to see). I will try to spell it out in terms adopted to the meanest understanding: What is “evidence”? The dictionary defines the word as follows: “the available body of facts or information indicating whether a belief or proposition is true or valid.” The rules of evidence that I use in court define relevant evidence as anything Read More ›

The Telegraph reports alarmists have been caught “adjusting” temperature readings to create warming that did not actually occur. UPDATE. This site shows the data much better. This leads to a greater question for our subjectivist friends: If the fraud did in fact occur, and the warmist who committed the fraud sincerely subjectively believed that committing scientific fraud is a good thing if it serves the greater good of environmentalism, was the scientific fraud then good?

In the thread to another post, “Evolve” writes: There’s absolutely no evidence that any God exists . . . There you have it folks. All this wrangling back and forth for millennia solved in a flash by Evolve’s super-intellect. Oh Evolve, where have you been all of my life? You have decreed there is “absolutely no evidence” for the existence of God. How much easier my life would have been if I had known about your decree earlier; if I had known that one needn’t actually engage with evidence; if I had known one can simply decree that what is thought to be evidence by one’s opponents “absolutely” does not exist. Evolve has decreed there is “absolutely no evidence” for Read More ›

Nietzsche was wrong and tragic and, in the end, insane. But at least he was brave and honest. Brave enough to stare into the abyss and honest enough to report back what he saw there. He would be disgusted by the puerile, simpering cowardice that characterizes atheism in the 21st century. In Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche writes of those who have cast off the restraints and bonds of the past: “Need I say expressly after all this that they will be free, VERY free spirit . . .” And from their vantage point of freedom these new philosophers will look down with contempt on those who espouse the ideals of Christianity and liberal democracy: What [those espousing love and Read More ›