What Huxley was marketing was not a correct analysis of the cause of the plague but one that promoted materialism. Today, for example, we constantly hear similar stuff like – just for example – “science is closing in on the human mind” or “apes think like people.” They can’t help it, of course, but Huxley’s career might help us understand better how it got started.
Naturalism
At Mind Matters News: The final materialist quest: A war on the reality of the mind
When George Orwell wrote 1984, he addressed destroying minds, not denying their possibility and changing the language associated with them.
New Video Presentation on YouTube: Intelligent Design & Scientific Conservatism
I have recently posted a new video on my Intelligent Design YouTube channel. In this video I discuss several areas in the philosophy of science and modern evolutionary biology, and their relationship to ID. These thoughts were prompted initially by an interesting paper by philosopher of science Jeffrey Koperski ‘Two Bad Ways to Attack Intelligent Read More…
How to explain why you don’t believe in “evolution”
Math prof Granville Sewell suggests how to respond when you don’t have time to offer a 30-minute answer on all the meanings of the term and, chance are, the yob who is asking is just trying to get you anyway
Are pandas no longer endangered?
National Geographic: In 2016, the International Union for Conservation of Nature had already downlisted the giant panda from endangered to vulnerable, citing a steadily increasing population and expanded habitat. But some Chinese scientists and officials rejected that assessment, saying it was premature and could undermine panda protection efforts.
Eric Holloway: Why is randomness a good model, but not a good explanation?
After all, he argues, random processes are used all the time to model things in science: When we test a sequence of numbers for randomness, we are essentially testing how easy it is to predict the sequence of numbers. One of the simplest tests is to measure how frequently heads and tails occur during a Read More…
Spare a thought for Afghanistan’s terrified scientists
They had hoped for a world that was ultimately denied them.
At Mind Matters News: Is brain science helping us understand our belief in God?
“Ferguson is careful to emphasize that he is not trying to disprove the reality of religious experience:” Oh no. For sure, why would anyone think that? 😉 Egnor: The best way to understand religious experience is to have one. Researchers who are looking for a way around that problem don’t produce useful research.
At Mind Matters News: Non-materialist science is wanted — dead or alive
Michael Egnor: I’ve gotten calls to my department in my university demanding that I be fired. That’s a fairly frequent thing. I was called a couple of years ago by the campus police that there was a death threat against me and they wanted to protect me. So this kind of stuff goes on. And some of these people are vicious.
At Mind Matters News: Epilepsy: If you follow the science, materialism is dead
Egnor: on the issue of intellectual seizures, the fact that there has not been a single seizure in recorded medical history out of 250 million seizures, a quarter of a billion seizures, that has evoked abstract intellectual content, Maybe the next one will, but I’m not going to bet on it…
At Mind Matters News: Is a science writer John Horgan’s “agnosticism” a futile pursuit?
The agnosticism Horgan espouses sounds like hoping indefinitely for answers that conform to a materialist view of the world.
Proof of the power of sheer randomness
Look how the sea just deposited these pebbles here…
At Mind Matters News: How philosopher John Locke turned reality into theatre
Aristotle and Aquinas’s traditional philosophical approach, Michael Egnor argues, offers more assurance than Locke that we can truly perceive reality.
At Mind Matters News: How did Descartes come to make such a mess of dualism?
After Descartes started the idea that only minds have experiences, materialist philosophers dispensed with mind, then puzzled over how matter has experiences.
At Evolution News: Is the universe “causally closed”?
Egnor explains why not and goes on to cite the Big Bang, singularities in black holes, and the field equations of curved space-time, quantum entanglement, and — of course — the immaterial mind.