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Naturalism

At Mind Matters News: Our Universe Survived a Firing Squad and It’s Just an Accident?

Ola Hössjer: According to the Weak Anthropic Principle, we should not be surprised to live in a universe that harbors life. But I should add that, in our paper, "Cosmological Tuning Fine or Coarse?," we compute or give an upper bound for the probability of a randomly generated universe to have a certain constant of nature, ending up within its life-permitting interval. We take the Weak Anthropic Principle into account — and still we come up with small probabilities for certain constant of natures or certain ratios or constants of nature. Read More ›

At Mind Matters News: Leading astronomer gets it all wrong about free will and destiny

In response to Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb denying free will and all that, neurosurgeon Michael Egnor points out, “Logic and reason aren’t laws of physics and therefore they transcend physical properties.” Read More ›

Was Thomas Henry Huxley the first science journalist?

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. Read More ›

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 Design, and Two Good Ones’. Koperski thinks that one good way to critique ID is to point out that it violates principles like ‘scientific conservatism’. Because there are several potential naturalistic mechanisms on the table, even if orthodox neo-Darwinism fails, ID is an unnecessary proposal. To turn to design explanations would be to adjust our theories too drastically. I argue against this claim, concluding that 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 Read More ›

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. Read More ›

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 series of coin flips. If the distribution is heavily skewed one way or the other after a large number of flips, then we can be pretty certain the coin is not fair. We cannot be absolutely certain, since there is always a small probability for a really long run of heads, but as the run lengthens, the probability of achieving the run with a fair Read More ›

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. Read More ›

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. Read More ›

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… Read More ›