Naturalism

From The Little Book of God, Mind, Cosmos and Truth: In an interview in the Irish Times newspaper, Dr Kevin Mitchell from Trinity College Dublin, spoke about this some years ago. He pointed out the idea “that we are effectively androids, though made out of carbon”. He says that the “mind emerges from the workings of my brain and nothing else”. If God does not exist and Naturalism is all there is, then Dr Mitchell’s views would be correct. But on theism, how can the reliability of his statement be true if it’s coming from an android made out of carbon? Surely carbon androids are primarily evolved for survival-of-the-fittest values, with truthful statements being less significant? Furthermore, an android does Read More ›

From Fern Elsdon-Baker at New Scientist, reporting on that recent study of people who question evolution, It sounds startling. Nearly 30 per cent of adults in the UK say evolution can’t explain the origin of humans. That rises to nearly 50 per cent for human consciousness. Does that mean we’re increasingly following a vocal minority in the US who deny the science on fringe religious grounds? … Unexpectedly, 44 per cent felt that evolutionary processes cannot explain the existence of human consciousness. It might be tempting to assume that this is just a reflection of the number of religious believers. However, while faith does appear to amplify individual doubts about evolutionary explanations, it is not the only factor at work. Read More ›

From Matt Williams at Universe Today: Recent studies have indicated that UV radiation may be necessary for the formation of ribonucleic acid (RNA), which is necessary for all forms of life as we know it. And given the rate at which rocky planets have been discovered around red dwarf stars of late (exampled include Proxima b, LHS 1140b, and the seven planets of the TRAPPIST-1 system), how much UV radiation red dwarfs give off could be central to determining exoplanet habitability. … As always, scientists are forced to work with a limited frame of reference when it comes to assessing the habitability of other planets. To our knowledge, life exists on only on planet (i.e. Earth), which naturally influences our Read More ›

What? In the world of “social justice,” someone actually noticed biology prof Bret Weinstein? Someone took time out from hearing the angst and hoo-haw of “[fill in the blank] studies” students to look at the science education issues? From Michael Shermer at Scientific American: One underlying cause of this troubling situation may be found in what happened at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., in May, when biologist and self-identified “deeply progressive” professor Bret Weinstein refused to participate in a “Day of Absence” in which “white students, staff and faculty will be invited to leave the campus for the day’s activities.” Weinstein objected, writing in an e-mail: “on a college campus, one’s right to speak—or to be—must never be based Read More ›

From Conor Friedersdorf at the Atlantic: As the fall semester begins, 15 professors from Yale, Princeton, and Harvard have published a letter of advice for the class of 2021. Think for yourself. The “vice of conformism” is a temptation for all faculty and students, they argue, due to a climate rife with group think, where it is “all-too-easy to allow your views and outlook to be shaped by dominant opinion” on a campus or in academia generally. Mmmm, yes. Especially if one who opposes the group think could get expelled, fired, burned out, or end up in the hospital, … They warn that on many campuses, what John Stuart Mill called “the tyranny of public opinion” doesn’t merely discourage students Read More ›

From Politics in science—High modulation of engagement in intelligent design discourse at Journal of Language and Politics: Intelligent design is a pseudoscientific concept conceived in an attempt to bring religion-based teaching into the classroom. As such, it is involved in a constant struggle for dialogic space with the dominant scientific discourse of the theory of evolution. Here, we use a corpus linguistic approach to study how intelligent design discourse uses engagement to forward its creationistic propositions and at the same time limit the propositions of the theory of evolution. The results suggest that intelligent design discourse employs engagement far more frequently than evolutionary biology discourse, mainly to counter opposing propositions and to entertain its own proposition in their stead. The Read More ›

From Mic, via AP: Bill Nye, the Science Guy, has been in the news a lot. From Bruce Haring and Erik Pedersen at Deadline: Bill Nye Hits Disney With $37 Million Fraud Suit Over ‘Science Guy’ Profits Bill Nye the Science Guy ran on PBS from 1994 to 1999 and also was syndicated to local stations. The show aired for 100 half-hour episodes spanning five seasons and was nominated for 23 Emmy Awards, winning 19 The suit that Nye and his lawyers put before the court contends that “the disturbing size of the supposed ‘accounting error,’ coupled with the seeming indifference of both BVT and WDC, left Nye suspicious of the veracity of the accounting.” More. See also: Bill Nye Read More ›

Says neuroscientist Anil K. Seth at Aeon: Let’s begin with David Chalmers’s influential distinction, inherited from Descartes, between the ‘easy problem’ and the ‘hard problem’. The ‘easy problem’ is to understand how the brain (and body) gives rise to perception, cognition, learning and behaviour. The ‘hard’ problem is to understand why and how any of this should be associated with consciousness at all: why aren’t we just robots, or philosophical zombies, without any inner universe? It’s tempting to think that solving the easy problem (whatever this might mean) would get us nowhere in solving the hard problem, leaving the brain basis of consciousness a total mystery. But there is an alternative, which I like to call the real problem: how Read More ›

Lauren Frayer and Gokce Saracoglu report: At a news conference last month, Turkey’s education minister announced that new textbooks will be introduced in all primary and secondary schools, starting with grades 1, 5 and 9 this fall, and the rest next year. They will stop teaching evolution in grade 9, when it’s usually taught. “Evolutionary biology is best left to be taught at the university level,” Education Minister Ismet Yilmaz told reporters. “It’s a theory that requires a higher philosophical understanding than schoolchildren have.” That means students who don’t go on to university may never learn who Charles Darwin was. More. Huh? When Darwin’s publicists speak without thinking, they reveal their true concerns. The big problem, put starkly in the Read More ›

From Phys.org: A commonly proposed solution to help diffuse the political and religious polarization surrounding controversial scientific issues like evolution or climate change is education. However, Carnegie Mellon University researchers found that the opposite is true: people’s beliefs about scientific topics that are associated with their political or religious identities actually become increasingly polarized with education, as measured by years in school, science classes, and science literacy. “A lot of science is generally accepted and trusted, but certain topics have become deeply polarizing. We wanted to find out what factors are related to this polarization, and it turns out the ‘deficit model’—which says the divisions are due to a lack of education or understanding—does not tell the whole story,” said Read More ›

From Denyse O’Leary at Evolution News & Views: For many people today, post-modern science is more of a quest to express an identity as believer in science, irrespective of evidence. Cosmologist Paul Steinhardt got a sense of this in 2014, when he reported that some proponents of early rapid cosmic inflation “already insist that the theory is equally valid whether or not gravitational waves are detected.” It fulfilled their needs. In 2017, cosmologist George Ellis, long a foe of post-modern cosmology, summed it up: “Scientific theories have since the seventeenth century been held tight by an experimental leash. In the last twenty years or so, both string theory and theories of the multiverse have slipped the leash.” We have so Read More ›

Notes. See also: An evolutionary challenge: explaining away compassion, philanthropy, and self-sacrifice

A friend sends us some thoughts from well-known persons for our reflection: Physicist George Ellis on the importance of philosophy and free will, in an interview with science writer John Horgan (July 27, 2014): Horgan: Einstein, in the following quote, seemed to doubt free will: “If the moon, in the act of completing its eternal way around the Earth, were gifted with self-consciousness, it would feel thoroughly convinced that it was traveling its way of its own accord…. So would a Being, endowed with higher insight and more perfect intelligence, watching man and his doings, smile about man’s illusion that he was acting according to his own free will.” Do you believe in free will? Ellis: Yes. Einstein is perpetuating Read More ›

From Evan Allgood at New York Mag: A few years ago, psychological scientist Kurt Gray came across the final statements of 500 Texas inmates executed between 1982 and 2013. (The state’s Department of Criminal Justice posts them online.) As he read these inmates’ surprisingly sanguine last words, Gray wondered if their positivity was a fluke or part of a broader psychological trend. So he conducted a study at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, which compared the words of death row inmates and terminally ill patients to those simply imagining they were close to death. This research —published this summer in Psychological Science — suggests that while it’s natural to fear death in the abstract, the closer one actually Read More ›

In an interview with John Horgan at Scientific American: Horgan: Is consciousness a scientifically tractable problem? Do you favor any current approaches and theories? Dawkins: It certainly isn’t tractable by me. At times I find myself inspired by the confidence of my friend Daniel Dennett. At other times I lean towards his fellow philosopher Colin McGinn’s pessimism: the view that the human mind is flatly incapable of understanding its own consciousness. Our brains evolved to understand how to survive in a hunter–gatherer way of life on the African savanna—understand the behavior of an extremely narrow range of medium-sized objects travelling at medium velocities. It is therefore a wonder, as [cognitive scientist] Steven Pinker has pointed out, that our brains have Read More ›