Books of interest

A late 2010 cosmology book features cosmologist Paul Davies as editor. Davies is known for a number of reflections on extraterrestrials.

Information and the Nature of Reality: From Physics to Metaphysics

“This is the anthology we have been waiting for … seminal papers deal with matter through the history of Greek thought, seventeenth-century materialism and twentieth-century dematerialism, the need for a new scientific world view in the light of the quantum nature of the universe, and the storage and transmission of information in biological systems with the new knowledge of their genomes and development … Philosophers, theologians and scientists all have their say, wrestling with the theme of God as the ultimate informational and structuring principle in the universe.”

Professor Sir Brian Heap, St Edmund’s College, President, European Academies Science Advisory Board, German Academy of Sciences Read More ›

Brendan O’Neill invites readers to avoid the latest “anti-Bibles”, asking, Why, given their obtuse and ostentatious hostility towards organised religion and spiritual hoo-ha, are the so-called New Atheists so keen to refashion the Bible? What’s with all these secularist versions of ‘the good book’, minus the original’s miracles and resurrections and instead offering us guides to life firmly rooted in scientific fact and what poses as rationalism? This bible bonanza tells us a lot about the New Atheists. About their arrogance, their ignorance about where moral meaning comes from, and, most fundamentally, their allergy to, their utter estrangement from, the idea of transcendence.The first question that any remotely inquisitive person will surely ask about these ‘new bibles’ is this: how massive Read More ›

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Apologies, Reb.)

In “The Language of Science and Faith,” Giberson (soon to be in an online dialogue with Bill Dembski) and Collins argue that God has given nature “freedom”: This is their proposed solution to the problem of evil in nature:

When God, as a loving Creator, withdraws from complete sovereign control over his creatures and grants them freedom, this means – in ways often difficult to understand – that those creatures can now act independently of God. They are free to not be robotic automatons, puppets or trained attack dogs. In the case of the Holocaust – the classic example of human evil – we always do exactly what Dembski says we never do: we shift the responsibility for that evil from God to the Nazis. Such reflections have long characterized Christian thinking about the problem of evi. All we need to do now is enlarge this general concept to include the sorts of things that nature is doing on its own.Not all Christians are comfortable with the idea that nature has freedom, of course. …

Actually, not all Christians can even make rational sense of the these assertions. Read More ›

(Contest is now judged. Results are here.) First, here’s Nobel Prize winner Steven Weinberg: … There is also a less creditable reason for hostility to the idea of a multiverse, based on the fact that we will never be able to observe any subuniverses except our own. Livio and Rees, and Tegmark have given thorough discussions of various other ingredients of accepted theories that we will never be able to observe, without our being led to reject these theories. The test of a physical theory is not that everything in it should be observable and every prediction it makes should be testable, but rather that enough is observable and enough predictions are testable to give us confidence that the theory Read More ›

Nicholas Dames asks “Why bother?” (N+1, April 13, 2001) with the humanities these days, offering, Last February, a professor of biology and Harvard PhD named Amy Bishop, having recently been denied tenure by the University of Alabama in Hunstville, released the contents of a nine-millimeter pistol on her colleagues during a departmental faculty meeting. She killed the department’s chair and two others. Three more were wounded. Startling as the homicides were, and though they ratcheted up the common, unglamorous tensions of the tenure process to something fit for a media spectacle, they were hard to read as an allegory for the Problems of Higher Education. Unless, that is, you were unfortunate enough to peruse the reader comments on the New York Read More ›

ISI Books, the publisher of The Nature of Nature , is kindly giving Uncommon Descent ten copies for our contests. Buy yours now, by all means, but win one for your dad or your cash-strapped library. First contest is next Saturday, April 16, judged weekly. Here are the multilateral contributing authors to Nature of Nature.

Richard Weikart, history professor at the University of California Stanislaus, has just published Hitler’s Ethic: The Nazi Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress (Palgrave Macmillan April 2011) In this book, Weikart helps unlock the mystery of Hitler’s evil by vividly demonstrating the surprising conclusion that Hitler’s immorality flowed from a coherent ethic. Hitler was inspired by evolutionary ethics to pursue the utopian project of biologically improving the human race. This ethic underlay or influenced almost every major feature of Nazi policy: eugenics (i.e., measures to improve human heredity, including compulsory sterilization), euthanasia, racism, population expansion, offensive warfare, and racial extermination. For your enjoyment: You can look inside Hitler’s Ethic. Podcast with Weikart on this book here. Here’s Larry Arnhart’s review and here’s Read More ›

A fine tuning and multiverse advocate, Martin J. Rees, today won the 2011 Templeton Prize. The astrophysicist with no religion won the Prize originally “for Progress in Religion.”
The 2011 Templeton Prize was announced today.

LONDON, APRIL 6 – Martin J. Rees, a theoretical astrophysicist whose profound insights on the cosmos have provoked vital questions that speak to humanity’s highest hopes and worst fears, has won the 2011 Templeton Prize.
Rees, Master of Trinity College, one of Cambridge University’s top academic posts, and former president of the Royal Society, the highest leadership position within British science, has spent decades investigating the implications of the big bang, the nature of black holes, events during the so-called ‘dark age’ of the early universe, and the mysterious explosions from galaxy centers known as gamma ray bursters. Read More ›

A friend points to this review of an interesting new book:

In Unsimple Truths: Science, Complexity, and Policy, Sandra D. Mitchell accomplishes an enormous amount in very short compass. Starting from the actual practice of (mainly) biological and (some) social sciences, she presents a workable and effective philosophy of science focused particularly on sciences dealing with complex subject matters. Drawing on nicely handled examples from psychiatry (e.g., major depressive disorder), biology (e.g., recent genetics and genomics, drug discovery, the study of insect societies), and the policy world (e.g., climate change and economic problems), Mitchell develops and illustrates a philosophy of science suited to the complexities scientists face. The result is a compact and elegant presentation of a philosophy she calls “integrative pluralism,” challenging many orthodox positions in the philosophy of science. While keeping her examples in the foreground, Mitchell provides a philosophical basis for rethinking the methods for analyzing complex systems in situations involving considerable uncertainty. She also demonstrates by example the value and reach of her philosophical approach in contrast with more conventional philosophies of science, from Popperian falsification and standard forms of inductive reasoning to sophisticated forms of theory and model testing.

Long overdue, if you ask me.

“Considerable uncertainty”? Um, yes. Most human systems are unthinkably complex.

That does not mean we can’t act or make decisions, but it does mean that we must work with fuzzy boundaries: Causes of Alzheimer? Dangers of radiation? Sin/salvation foods? Alternative medical treatments? Last ditch cancer fight? Simple answers, begone!

For example, Read More ›

A friend writes to say that Nature of Nature can be had at Amazon for just shy of $18, commenting “Given the tiny price for the huge interesting proceedings of the Baylor conference, I hope that tons of us will buy the book.”

Yes, indeed, It is indispensable for whistling bores and broomsticks out of one’s life. In Nature of Nature, both sides on the ID controversy give it their best shot. Including Nobel Prize winners.

No bores, no broomsticks, no trolls, no truthing.

Just think! For a mere $18 plus shipping, and a few hours time, you can Read More ›

Someone has noticed “a slew of anti-Darwin books published last fall”. Now, there are two ways of looking at that: 1. Sociologically, it is a quite predictable reaction to the two-year orgy of worshipping the beard. 2. Or, it’s a …conspiracy. Ring up Barbara Forrest, the world-renowned expert on ID and get the … trooth.

Here, der Spiegel gives Richard Dawkins the floor (03/02/2011), as his book, The Greatest Show on Earth is published in German:

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Has religion not been very successful in an evolutionary sense?Dawkins: The thought that human societies gained strength from religious memes in their competition with others is true to a certain extent. But it is more like an ecological struggle: It reminds me of the replacement of the red by the gray squirrel in Britain. That is not a natural selection process at all, it is an ecological succession. So when a tribe has a war-like god, when the young men are brought up with the thought that their destiny is to go out and fight as warriors and that a martyr’s death brings you straight to heaven, you see a set of powerful, mutually reinforcing memes at work. If the rival tribe has a peaceful god who believes in turning the other cheek, that might not prevail.

– “Interview with Scientist Richard Dawkins: ‘Religion? Reality Has a Grander Magic of its Own'”

It’s hard to tell exactly what Dawkins is trying to say here, but curiously, “a peaceful god who believes in turning the other cheek” was exactly what the early Christians preached and they went from being a persecuted people in the Roman empire to running the show in the course of about two and a half centuries. But your mileage may vary.

We also learn, Read More ›

In this review of Nancy Pearcey’s Saving Leonardo, Christian historian Pearcey revisits the broader question of how science broke loose from reason. (I am thinking of all the “our brains are shaped for fitness, not for truth” rubbish from people who honestly believe that they are on the right side of science, and that that idea somehow helps science.)

Many thinkers were so impressed by the scientific revolution that they began to regard science as the sole source of truth. Whatever could not be known by the scientific method was not real. Science was no longer merely one means for investigation the world. It was elevated into an exclusivist worldview — scientism or positivism. (91)

– Evolution News & Views (March 22, 2011)

Yes. I couldn’t know that I liked sushi until a brain scan told me. My behaviour at the buffet wouldn’t be accepted as evidence. More significant was how it affected the world of the artsie:

Pearcey describes naturalism as an outgrowth of realism, only “…grittier, harsher, more pessimistic. It portrays humans as nothing but biological organisms, products of evolutionary forces.” (145) The Darwinian influence was most noticeable in literature. This literature was rugged, harsh, and at times blurred the lines between man and animal. Jack London was profoundly influenced by the writings of Darwin and Herbert Spencer, and we see in his writings a harsh, unforgiving world where survival of the fittest reigns supreme. (144, 150)

To see what this means, consider, artsies did not used to be considered flakes. Was Leonardo a flake? Michelangelo? Jane Austen? No, the flake who thinks that chimps trampling paint on a canvas is art was a product of these new ideas, not the old ones. There ceased to be any way of making a distinction. If it is in a frame, as Catbert said, it will look like art to you.

But one thing she said really set me thinking. Read More ›

Jonathan Wells’ book, The Myth of Junk DNA (Discovery, 2011), is now being advertised at Amazon:

According to the modern version of Darwin’s theory, DNA contains a program for embryo development that is passed down from generation to generation; the program is implemented by proteins encoded by the DNA, and accidental DNA mutations introduce changes in those proteins that natural selection then shapes into new species, organs and body plans. When scientists discovered forty years ago that about 98% of our DNA does not encode proteins, the non-protein-coding portion was labeled “junk” and attributed to molecular accidents that have accumulated in the course of evolution.

Recent books by Richard Dawkins, Francis Collins and others have used this “junk DNA” as evidence for Darwinian evolution and evidence against intelligent design (since an intelligent designer would presumably not have filled our genome with so much garbage). But recent genome evidence shows that much of our non-protein-coding DNA performs essential biological functions.

The Myth of Junk DNA is written for a general audience by biologist Jonathan Wells, author of Icons of Evolution. Citing some of the abundant evidence from recent genome projects, the book shows that “junk DNA” is not science, but myth.

Junk DNA was one of those ideas that just had to be true. Genome mapper and NIH head Francis Collins saw it as a slam dunk for his beloved Darwinism in his first book, The Language of God, (“Darwin’s theory predicts … That is exactly what is observed”) but seems to have changed his tune in his second, The Language of Life.

I’ll be interviewing Wells on the book next week, but in the meantime, two questions occur to me: To what extent did Darwinism cause the myth to be retained longer than it otherwise would be? Given that Darwinists must now be in search of another guiding myth, any idea out there which one it will be?

Now, one prediction: Read More ›

Escapes trampling by troll competitors – Tells reporters: “Real thinkers don’t read books” Here, at Amazon, the indispensable Nature of Nature (a compendium of the pro- and anti-ID writings of many of the world’s best champions on either side), has attracted a “review” by one, Colonel Zen, who allows us to know that he actually has not read the book. Well, I haven’t read this … and at their vanity press price am unlikely to, but I’d take bets. I say “review”, not review because if the Colonel has not read the book, it is not a review, by definition. If you would like to go to the linked site and join the commenters by pointing out that fact, please Read More ›