Barry Arrington

Yesterday I had an exchange with Seversky that illustrates something I have observed countless times over the years.  Materialists have a blind spot regarding how their own arguments undermine, well, their own arguments.  Here is the exchange: Johnnyb wrote: The reason for this is the precise theorem that Hoffman states – in evolutionary competition, fitness beats truth. To which Sev responded: Unless fitness is truth in which case there is no competition. How does Hoffman – or Plantinga – distinguish between “fitness” and “truth”? Are they comparing like with like? I wrote: But Sev, you know for a certain fact that according to your own premises fitness and truth are not the same.  For 99% of human existence, 99% of Read More ›

All that follows is from johnnyb’s comment to New Books On Consciousness Underscore Naturalism’s Fatal Problem posted by the UD News Desk yesterday. This plays very nicely into Plantinga’s “Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism”. The evolutionary argument against naturalism basically states, “if evolution is true and theism is false, we cannot know that evolution is true. The only way to be able to know if evolution is true is for theism (or some other non-naturalistic alternative) to also be true.” The reason for this is the precise theorem that Hoffman states – in evolutionary competition, fitness beats truth. Therefore, if the orientation of our minds is from evolution, then we have no reason to trust it, which would include its thoughts Read More ›

Consequentialism always winds up devouring itself, and this is why: STEP 1:  Define the “Good” That act is good which causes the most net [here insert synonym that allows one to pretend the statement is not a tautology, e.g. human flourishing, increased wellbeing, etc.].  What causes the most [net increase in flourishing]?  Since there is no standard for determining it, it amounts to a subjective call based on the person’s preferences in every instance. Thus, the good is ultimately defined as the “desirable” and the “desirable” is that which one actually, at any given moment, desires. STEP 2:  Free Oneself From Limits If result X is the good result (see above definition of “good”), what means may one employ to Read More ›

A few weeks ago I posted How Materialist Fundamentalists Are Like Christian Fundamentalists in which I argued that Christian and Materialist fundamentalists are alike in this respect:  Their religious/metaphysical commitments come first and the evidence comes second.  If the evidence seems to contradict conclusions compelled by their faith commitments, they will either reject the evidence or try to explain it away.  A few weeks after I posted my article, O’Leary for the UD News Desk posted an article about a philosopher who had dumped Darwinism because of its proponents’ open advocacy of using deception to push the Darwinian line.  She linked to “I’m with stupid” by J. Budziszewski in which he wrote: Philip Kitcher, a philosopher of biology and a Read More ›

Essential building blocks of DNA — compounds called nucleobases — have been detected for the first time in a simulated environment . . . See the story here. Presumably, one can create a simulation in which one may “detect” anything one wishes. Meanwhile, tucking the origins of life inside simulations of environments several light years away certainly serves a purpose (a baleful or sanguine purpose, depending on one’s point of view) if one wishes to insulate one’s conclusions from empirical testing and possible falsification.

The UD News Desk recently reported on obviously desperate origin of life researchers’ attempts to give themselves a leg up on the whole “how did life begin” issue.  I had to chuckle when I read the article, because it reminded me of my second favorite* Steve Martin routine, “You can be millionaire and never pay taxes!”  The routine starts with this: You can be a millionaire and never pay taxes!  You can have one million dollars and never pay taxes! You say  “Steve how can I be a millionaire and never pay taxes?”  First, get a million dollars.  Now you say, “Steve what do I say to the tax man when he comes to my door and says, ‘You have Read More ›

We often get some variation of “Until ID proposes a ‘mechanism’ for how the design is accomplished, it cannot be taken seriously as an explanation for origins.” Here is an example from frequent commenter Bob O’H (who, after years of participation on this site should know better): If ID is correct, then the design has to have happened somehow, so a “how” theory has to exist. OK, Bob, once more from the top: Suppose someone printed your post on a piece of paper and handed it to an investigator.  We’ll call him Johnny.  The object of the investigation is to determine whether the text on the paper was produced by an intelligent agent or a random letter generator.  Johnny, using Read More ›

In a comment to PaV’s recent post about the insurmountable problem the Cambrian Explosion presents for Darwinism, materialist fundamentalist Seversky writes: the Cambrian Explosion is no longer such a problem for Darwin’s theory Of course this is nonsense of a high order, which has been refuted 10,000 times including in the very post Sev was commenting on.  My point in this post is not to add a 10,001st refutation.  Rather, I will discuss how fundamentalists of whatever stripe are able to insulate themselves from what non-fundamentalists would consider glaringly obvious conclusions from the observed data. Consider two examples: 1. Seversky’s assertion above 2. A Christian fundamentalist who asserts the universe is just a few thousand years old Neither Sev nor Read More ›

[Spoilers below] Animal Kingdom is a TNT television drama based on a 2010 Australian movie of the same name.  The series follows the Codys, an Oceanside, California crime family.  The Codys plan and execute their crimes with meticulous attention to detail, and their crimes pay very well indeed.  The fruits of their criminal labors include homes by the ocean, luxury cars, world travel, lavish parties, and unlimited lines of cocaine.  The family consists of matriarch Janine “Smurf” Cody, her sons Pope, Baz, Daren and Craig and her grandson Josh.  The Codys are beautiful and (except for Pope) charismatic, and the writers use these traits to beguile us into cheering for them as they pull off their latest “Mission Impossible” criminal Read More ›

On this date in 1944 one of the first computers, the IBM Mark I, became operational.  See the Wiki article here.  From the article: [The Mark I] could do 3 additions or subtractions in a second.  A multiplication took 6 seconds, a division took 15.3 seconds, and a logarithm or a trigonometric function took over one minute. Now, here is the question for the class.  What is the difference, in principle, between the Mark I and the IBM Summit, which, as of late 2018, became the fastest supercomputer in the world, capable of performing calculations at the rate of 148.6 petaflops (one petaflop is one thousand million million floating-point operations per second)? The answer, of course, is “absolutely nothing.”  Both Read More ›

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 Hatley over seventy years ago. These two men raised their families in Boyd, Texas (population 700) where I grew up. “Uncle Darryl” and his family were more than our friends. They were family. In 1968 Darryl’s son John was born within a week of my little sister, so I have known John literally all of his life. While our paths separated years ago as he Read More ›

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 the universe in which, by sheer dumb luck, that being or phenomenon was instantiated.” This boils down to: “Anything and everything can be explained as the result of sheer dumb luck.” I take it that science is the search for causes upon which predictions can be based. For example, in the movie Apollo 13, NASA scientists calculated the exact number of seconds the astronauts needed Read More ›

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.

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 be known for certain only by subjective experience.  It is self-evident to a person who is subjectively self-aware that he is conscious.  Indeed, this has been called the “primordial datum” – “me” and “not me” exist – from which all other knowledge proceeds.  By definition, I can have subjective experience only of my own self.  I cannot be subjectively self-aware of any other self.  It Read More ›

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 them.”  He hastened to add that he personally does not approve of the practice.  But he added that there is no standard against which to measure whether his preference in the matter is superior to those who would kill the little babies.  I asked Sev if the same reasoning applied to slavery, human sacrifice and genocide.  His answer:  “Yes, it does.”  So, infanticide, slavery, human Read More ›