Naturalism

From Unbelievable? at Premier Christian Radio: Eminent cosmologists Sean Carroll and Luke Barnes join Justin for an extended edition of the show debating naturalism, Theism, Big Bang cosmology and fine tuning. Sean, an atheist astrophysicist and author of ‘The Big Picture: on the origins of life, meaning and the universe itself’ argues that naturalism best fits with our scientific understanding. Luke, a Christian astrophysicist and co-author of ‘A Fortunate Universe: life in a finely tuned cosmos’ argues that Theism makes better sense of the evidence. More. Audio here. Sean Carroll at A Preposterous Universe Luke Barnes at A Fortunate Universe See also: Peter Woit on Sean Carroll and science as religion and Free live interactive webinar Saturday with fine-tuning astrophysicist Luke Barnes (U Read More ›

From Adam Hadhazy at Space.com: A new cosmic map was unveiled in August, plotting where the mysterious substance called dark matter is clumped across the universe. To immense relief — and frustration — the map is just what scientists had expected. The distribution of dark matter agrees with our current understanding of a universe born with certain properties in a Big Bang, 13.8 billion years ago. So what is the problem here? But for all the map’s confirmatory power, it still tells us little about the true identity of dark matter, which acts as an invisible scaffold for galaxies and cosmic structure. It also does not explain an even bigger factor shaping the cosmos, known as dark energy, an enigmatic Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Life on Earth originated in an intimate partnership between the nucleic acids (genetic instructions for all organisms) and small proteins called peptides, according to two new articles from biochemists and biologists. Their ‘peptide-RNA’ hypothesis contradicts the widely-held ‘RNA-world’ hypothesis, which states that life originated from nucleic acids and only later evolved to include proteins. … Co-author Peter Wills, PhD, professor of physics at the University of Auckland, said, “Compared to the RNA-world hypothesis, what we’ve outlined is simply a much more probable scenario for the origin of life. We hope our data and the theory we’ve outlined in these papers will stimulate discussion and further research on questions relevant to the origins of life.” The two scientists are Read More ›

From Gregory Chaitin at UFRJ: In Chapter 8 of his 1996 Oxford University Press masterpiece The Conscious Mind, David Chalmers speculates on using information theory as the basis for a fundamental theory of consciousness. Building on his work, we attempt to flesh out an updated version of the Chalmers proposal by taking into account more recent developments including algorithmic information theory, quantum information theory, the holographic principle and the Bekenstein bound, and digital philosophy as sketched in two little-known monographs in Italian: Introduzione alla filosofia digitale and Bit Bang: La nascita della filosofia digitale … In the two decades since Chalmers published his panpsychism thesis that any physical system that processes information is conscious, it has become possible to put Read More ›

Where science means: Anything goes (with some targeted exceptions). From Denyse O’Leary at Evolution News & Views: Modern science, beginning in Europe in the 18th century, has been dominated by educated European men. But their dominance was not a principle of science. The principles were the laws and theorems that apply an internationally recognized thought pattern to nature. “Hidden figures” who sought and gained equality applied the same principles to the same effect. But for post-modernists, philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend (1924–1994) provided liberation: “Anything goes.” One outcome is that social justice activists have shifted away from helping marginalized people qualify in science toward questioning its principles, supposedly on behalf of the oppressed. We hear that objectivity is “cultural discrimination” (or sexist), Read More ›

Keep them mad. Maybe serious science is coming up for oxygen… just maybe. From Emma Marris at Nature: On 23 October, a group of current and former volunteers posted an open letter to the central March for Science organization in New York City, alleging that it is secretive, insensitive to the concerns of its volunteers, and unwilling to share power or information with organizers of its many affiliated ‘satellite’ groups around the world. The volunteers also claim that the organization sidelined and stonewalled experienced activists who wanted the movement to focus on how science can be used in ways that perpetuate racism, sexism and other forms of discrimination. In a statement to Nature, the March for Science said that it Read More ›

From David Klinghoffer at Evolution News & Views: In Human Zoos, Dr. West explores the shameful legacy of pseudo-scientific racism that has trailed Darwinian theory from its inception down to today, with the emergence of the so-called alt-right. The film will premiere at the Oregon Documentary Film Festival on Saturday evening, November 11. It will release to the general public next year. More. The pseudo-scientific racism was  predictable from the get-go, once humans were proclaimed to be not special (we became subject to science-based reckonings as if we were animals). And once the Darwinian worldview was adopted by Big Cool Science, the racism became something those who wanted to get ahead just did not talk about. Call Darwinian racism, if you Read More ›

Lizzie Wade shares her worries about the new Museum of the Bible at Science: The grandiose new venture is bankrolled by the Greens, the billionaire family that owns the Hobby Lobby chain of craft stores. Since 2009, the Greens, evangelical Christians known for their successful Supreme Court challenge to the Affordable Care Act’s requirement that health insurance plans pay for birth control, have amassed a private collection of 40,000 artifacts—both ancient and modern—relating to the Bible and the ancient Near East. The $500 million Museum of the Bible is a separate, nonprofit entity, but Steve Green, president of Hobby Lobby, chairs its board, and the family has donated hundreds of artifacts to the museum. Forty thousand artifacts? Wow. Some of the Read More ›

As we noted here. From media analyst Dan Gainor at Newsbusters: The alt-left are some of the major beneficiaries of this insanity. Top liberal sites like Vice, Buzzfeed, Bustle and even Cosmo push the occult on their young readers. Countless internet sites run horoscopes, as newspapers did before them. But some outlets go a lot farther. Cosmo interviews “certified astrologer John Marchesella,” who claims that Aries folks, “don’t hold grudges. When you think about it, it takes a lot of patience to hold on to resentments.” This is how you know it’s garbage. I’m an Aries. (Other famous Aries are Lady Gaga and Kourtney Kardashian. So I got that goin’ for me.) Over at BuzzFeed, which pretends to be a Read More ›

Columbia mathematician Peter Woit notes at his blog Not Even Wrong: An article at FQXI on multiverse research they are funding seemed to finally give me an understanding of what this is all about: These are the two conceptually hardest questions in cosmology, according to Raphael Bousso, a theoretical physicist at the University of California, Berkeley. They go to the core of what it means to exist as a human being making sense of the universe we find ourselves in. And, he adds, unfortunately, there is very little physical knowledge to go on when it comes to working out the answer. Undaunted by the lack of tools to help them, theatrical physicists Eugene Lim of King’s College London, UK, and Read More ›

From Michael Denton, in Wonder of Water: Whether the remarkable instances in which various properties of water work together to serve a vital end—such as the suite of properties involved in eroding rocks, or the suite of thermal properties involved in temperature regulation—are actually the result of design or not, there is no doubt that they convey a compelling impression of design. Every bit as remarkable, and also highly suggestive of design—perhaps even more so—are those instances where one vital property of water or set of properties is only useful because of another property or set of properties. We have seen many such instances in the previous chapters, and I have referred to them variously as a teleological sequence or Read More ›

From Toni Airaksinen at Campus Reform: “On many levels, mathematics itself operates as Whiteness. Who gets credit for doing and developing mathematics, who is capable in mathematics, and who is seen as part of the mathematical community is generally viewed as White,” Gutierrez argued. Gutierrez also worries that algebra and geometry perpetuate privilege, fretting that “curricula emphasizing terms like Pythagorean theorem and pi perpetuate a perception that mathematics was largely developed by Greeks and other Europeans.” Math also helps actively perpetuate white privilege too, since the way our economy places a premium on math skills gives math a form of “unearned privilege” for math professors, who are disproportionately white. … Further, she also worries that evaluations of math skills can Read More ›

From Hossain Derakhshan at Wired: Wikipedia has never been as wealthy or well-organized. American liberals, worried that Trump’s rise threatened the country’s foundational Enlightenment ideals, kicked in a significant flow of funds that has stabilized the nonprofit’s balance sheet. That happy news masks a more concerning problem—a flattening growth rate in the number of contributors to the website. It is another troubling sign of a general trend around the world: The very idea of knowledge itself is in danger. … Now the challenge is to save Wikipedia and its promise of a free and open collection of all human knowledge amid the conquest of new and old television—how to collect and preserve knowledge when nobody cares to know. Television has Read More ›

Whodathunkit? From Yasmin Tayag at Inverse: Those long-held racist assumptions based on skin color have been scientifically proven wrong, according to a groundbreaking new study in the journal Science published on Thursday. With their observations, the team of geneticists led by the University of Pennsylvania’s Sarah Tishkoff, Ph.D., tear down that notion by discrediting the idea that race has any biological roots. (The paper is titled “Loci associated with skin pigmentation identified in African populations.”) The researchers identified the genes linked to the diversity of human skin color and when and where those genes emerged. More. That the light-skin genes originated in Africa is useful to know. But it’s worth keeping in mind that racism only came to seem “scientific” Read More ›

The piece is notable for apparent incoherence on the subject: From philosopher Joseph Laporte at Big Questions Online: As we learn from Augustine’s Confessions, he felt the crushing burden of his vices and of his own helplessness to lift himself without God’s grace. That fits with many people’s experience. Besides, it’s Christian orthodoxy: without grace, there is no action toward spiritual flourishing. Here it’s helpful to invoke freedom-for-excellence. Without God’s help, we lack freedom-for-excellence, freedom to be virtuous. In my insecurity, I go shopping for clothes; later I look in my closet with buyer’s remorse. Or, I’m late again and ask myself what went wrong with my time management. Or, my memory of adolescence is no longer fresh, so I Read More ›