vjtorley

After critiquing Libby Anne’s atheism and faulty epistemology in my previous post, I propose to complete my examination of her philosophy by critiquing her views on ethics, and in particular on human persons and the morality of abortion. Readers will recall that a few days ago, Libby Anne put up a post that subsequently went viral, describing how she had lost faith in the pro-life movement. What I aim to show in this post is that her views on ethics (and in particular, on abortion) are riddled with contradictions, and that her philosophical understanding of the pro-life ethic is very poor. I shall also address the question of how a non-religious person might go about trying to determine what is Read More ›

Who is Libby Anne? That’s what you’re wondering, isn’t it? I’ll let her introduce herself: As a brief introduction, I was raised in a large homeschooling family influenced by the Christian Patriarchy and Quiverfull movements. I grew up an evangelical Christian, though with some fundamentalist aspects. I found my beliefs challenged in college and am today an atheist and a feminist. I am in my mid-twenties, married to a wonderful man… and busily raising young children… I am also in graduate school getting my Ph.D. in a humanities field. (I’ve omitted the names of family members, out of respect for their privacy.) Libby Anne has a Web site called Love, Joy, Feminism. I would recommend that readers take the time Read More ›

Human prehistory has descended into a state of chaos which can only be described as farcical. New research, summarized in an October 2012 review by Aylwyn Scally and Richard Durbin (“Revising the human mutation rate: implications for the understanding human evolution” in Nature Reviews Genetics 13:745-753, doi:10.1038/nrg3295) suggests that the molecular clock used to date events in hominid prehistory may run more slowly than previously thought, and at variable speeds, throwing the timetable of evolutionary events into confusion. The new research has staggering implications for the date of the split between the lineage leading to orangutans in Asia and the line leading to humans, chimps and gorillas in Africa: it’s been revised from 13-14 million years ago to anywhere from Read More ›

I have just been listening to a talk on the subject of free will, by the British philosopher Jonathan M. S. Pearce, who contributes to the blog, Debunking Christianity. The talk was given to a meeting of Portsmouth Skeptics in a Pub on 14th June 2012, which was attended by about 50 people. A podcast of the talk is available online here. In this post, I’d like to focus on what I take to be Jonathan’s key argument against free will. After making this argument, he then goes on to critique dualism and put forward scientific arguments against free will. I have already addressed these criticisms in previous posts, so I won’t be rehashing them here. Instead, I’ll just list Read More ›

Yesterday, I came across a fascinating article on hearing in whales and dolphins that blew my mind away, entitled, A New Acoustic Portal into the Odontocete Ear and Vibrational Analysis of the Tympanoperiotic Complex by T.W. Cranford, P. Krysl and M. Amundin (PLoS ONE 5(8): e11927, 2010, doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0011927). Odontocetes, for those who may be wondering, are commonly known as toothed whales – a category that includes porpoises and dolphins. And the tympanoperiotic complex is the so-called “ear-bone” of whales, porpoises and dolphins (see here for a more technical definition). The article revealed that hearing in whales and dolphins is a staggeringly complex process, which scientists are still struggling to understand. There is an old Chinese proverb that a picture is Read More ›

There has been much discussion in the blogosphere about a recent study entitled, “New Caledonian crows reason about hidden causal agents,” in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (doi: 10.1073/pnas.1208724109, PNAS September 17, 2012) by Alex Taylor, Rachael Miller, and Russell Gray, demonstrating that crows have a tendency to attribute the movements of an inanimate object (e.g. a stick) to a causal agent whom they know to be in the vicinity, even when that agent is hidden from view, and that crows react with fear when they witness the movements of an inanimate object in the absence of any nearby causal agent. The authors of the study conclude that crows are capable of reasoning about a hidden causal Read More ›

Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction. You wouldn’t expect a biology professor, of all people, to get the facts of life wrong. You wouldn’t expect a man whose specialty is genetics to overlook the most basic facts about how evolution works. And you certainly wouldn’t expect a scientist who declares that “it is necessary for schools to teach biological evolution” to be ignorant of the key events in human evolution. “Surely,” you might say, “that could never happen.” And yet it did. When? Just last week. (Lydia McGew has an excellent article about the whole episode here.) The man I’m talking about is Greg Hampikian, a professor of biology and criminal justice at Boise State University, who received his Ph.D. Read More ›

Over at his Website, Why Evolution is True, Professor Jerry Coyne is a vigorous defender of science against what he sees as the encroachments of religion. Professor Coyne has made many forceful criticisms of religion over the past few years, so I thought I would respond by writing him an open letter, in which I ask him questions under ten broad categories, regarding what I regard as key weaknesses in his own philosophical position. I look forward to Coyne’s response. Question 1 – Is science the only road to knowledge? Professor Coyne, you have repeatedly affirmed that science is the only road to knowledge, and you’ve argued (cogently, in my view) that faith cannot be equated with knowledge. So here’s Read More ›

It is not often that I find myself in agreement with Professor Jerry Coyne, but this is one of those occasions. Over at his Website, Why Evolution is True, Professor Coyne has written a lengthy post entitled, Catholics proclaim complete harmony between science and their faith, trot out Aquinas again, in which he cites (without naming me) a post of mine from 2010 on Why Aquinas’ views on Scripture would have prevented him from becoming a Darwinist. I stand by the conclusions I reached in that post, regarding Aquinas’ views on God, creation and Scripture, and I share Coyne’s sense of indignation with the following statement, made by a prominent Catholic theologian from the University of Oxford and a scientist Read More ›

Recently, Uncommon Descent featured a post by News, inquiring of readers what they would like to ask Richard Dawkins, if they could interview him. I wrote a response. I have been told that News has gone on holiday and would welcome posts on UD, so I’ve decided to put up my question as a separate post. So here’s what I’d really like to ask Professor Richard Dawkins. “Professor, I understand you’re a great fan of Rev. William Paley’s work, Natural Theology, which Darwin continued to speak highly of, even after he believed he had refuted it. Indeed, you even described yourself as a ‘neo-Paleyan’ in The Blind Watchmaker. Paley, as you’re well aware, contended that unguided natural processes were incapable Read More ›

Now and again, over at Why Evolution Is True, Professor Jerry Coyne issues challenges that are too easy to resist. In a recent post entitled, “Zeuglodon” on free will at the RDF site, Professor Coyne issued one such challenge relating to the notion of responsibility, when he wrote: I’m not aware of any incompatibilist—those who claim that determinism and free will are incompatible (I’d add that the indeterminism of quantum mechanics may not do much to give us free will)—who claims that determinism absolves us of responsibility. Though it absolves us, I think, of moral responsibility, we still must hold people responsible for their actions for the good of society. For holding people responsible can deter others from actions we Read More ›

Remember the amazing story on Uncommon Descent a few days ago, about the private school science textbook which teaches that the Loch Ness Monster is real? Believe it or not, the story is true. It’s also three years old: way back in 2009, an article exposing the school program that publishes the textbook, Accelerated Christian Education (A.C.E.) (a publisher of home schooling texts, founded in Texas in 1970), appeared in an article by Michael Shaw (31 July 2009) in the Times Educational Supplement (TES), a British publication for teachers. Shaw was alerted to the deficiencies in the A.C.E. curriculum by one Jonny Scaramanga (more about him below). In fact, it turns out that the Accelerated Christian Education curriculum has been Read More ›

Over at Why Evolution is True, Professor Jerry Coyne has been busily promoting the writings of a man he describes as “The First New Atheist”: the acclaimed writer, H. L. Mencken (1880-1956). Professor Coyne promised his readers one week of daily posts featuring quotes from the great essayist, on the follies of religion, and he’s kept his word: he’s just completed Day Seven of his postings. When I first read of Professor Coyne’s choice of patron for the New Atheist movement, I quietly marveled. Professor Coyne is a very well-read man, and when he makes a choice, you can be sure that he has given it a lot of thought. It was he who officially declared Aratina Cage’s logo of Read More ›

Physicist Sean Carroll, an outspoken but ever-courteous defender of the New Atheism, has recently written a post entitled, The Case for Naturalism, at the end of which he kindly encloses a 10-minute video summary of the reasons which have led most scientists to reject the supernatural and accept that the natural world is all there is. The video, which is well worth watching, is excerpted from a two-hour debate held at Caltech on 27 March 2012, on the topic, Has Science Refuted Religion?. Sean Carroll and Michael Shermer argued for the affirmative, while Dinesh D’Souza and Ian Hutchinson argued for the negative. In the course of his video presentation, Professor Carroll makes reference to a most remarkable woman from the Read More ›

By now, I imagine most of my readers will have watched the infamous video clip featuring activist Dan Savage’s comments on “the bull—t in the Bible,” during a talk he recently gave to the National High School Journalist Conference in Seattle. The text of Savage’s remarks can be found in a post by a contributor named Sigmund, over at the Website Why Evolution Is True. (The font color is easier on the eye than the original transcript at Towleroad.) P. Z. Myers weighs in here, and The Huffington Post has a piece about Savage’s comments here. I’m currently working on a post on Methodological Naturalism, which has direct relevance to the issue of Intelligent Design. Morality is a topic which Read More ›