Naturalism

From Thomas E. Elliott at Acta Cogitate (Eastern Michigan University): Abstract: The cultural debate about Creationism contra evolution by natural selection may be far from over, but the logic underlying it is settled. Creationism is ill-suited to take the place of methodological naturalism for the investigation of biology. In this paper, I survey how philosopher Elliott Sober uses some well-formed concepts from statistics and epistemology, including the nature of evidence, data, as well as the contemporary theory of evolution by natural selection to destroy Creationism as a viable theory once and for all. Creationism is a demonstrable logical fallacy, one that has no support biblically, or in science, but is a thoroughly political conception. I also challenge the idea that disproving Read More ›

From Geraint Lewis at New Scientist: A fundamental concept is coming back to the fore – that the universe may be fine-tuned for life. The idea is that physical laws and constants are inexplicably just right to support it; any different and we wouldn’t be around to ponder this. The notion that this might be so has been around for decades, but has sat on the sidelines, considered idle speculation or even outside the bounds of science. This article is carefully written, so as to undermine the facts and promote multiverse blather. Otherwise, it would not be in New Scientist at all. Underlying all of these potential explanations are serious philosophical questions. Is adopting the multiverse as a solution to Read More ›

From neuroscientist Raymond Tallis at New Atlantis: The project of understanding time is to try to get a clear and just idea of the nature of the relationship between the universe and the observer in respect of time. By rethinking time in this way, we may elude a form of naturalism that sees us as being at bottom material objects whose nature will ultimately be described by physics. We are more than cogs in the universal clock, forced to collaborate with the very progress that pushes us towards our own midnight. By placing human consciousness at the heart of time, it is possible to crack ajar a door through which a sense of possibility can stream. More. See also: Prof. Read More ›

ID is not absurd, unless, of course, thinking is absurd From Raymond Bergner at Academia: Let me say from the outset that this is not an essay arguing for intelligent design. Rather, it is a protest against a certain attitude. Everywhere I turn today, I hear voices, with varying degrees of smugness and contempt, telling me that intelligent design — the position that there is some ordering intelligence behind the whole cosmic shooting match — is straightforwardly ridiculous. “No intelligent person believes such a thing.” ” How unscientific!c ” “It’s always a cover for a religiously based, evolution-denying creationism, trying to sneak in the back door in the guise of science.” Highly visible, scientifically informed public intellectuals such as Richard Read More ›

Summer vacation pricing for a leading book: US$7.56 From Amazon: Many volumes have addressed the question of whether or not naturalism is a required part of scientific methodology. However, few, if any, go any further into the many concerns that arise from a rejection of naturalism. If methodological naturalism is rejected, what replaces it? If science is not naturalistic, what defines science? If naturalism is rejected, what is gained and what is lost? How does the practice of science change? What new avenues would be available, and how would they be investigated? This volume is divided into three parts. The first part considers the question of methodological naturalism and its role in the demarcation problem – deciding what is science Read More ›

From neurologist Robert J. Burton at Nautilus: As a fledgling neurologist, I’d already seen a wide variety of strange mental states arising out of physical diseases. But on this particular day, I couldn’t wrap my mind around a gene mutation generating an isolated feeling of being spied on by the FBI. How could a localized excess of amino acids in a segment of DNA be transformed into paranoia? Though I didn’t know it at the time, I had run headlong into the “hard problem of consciousness,” the enigma of how physical brain mechanisms create purely subjective mental states. In the subsequent 50 years, what was once fodder for neurologists’ late night speculations has mushroomed into the pre-eminent question in the Read More ›

Denyse recently linked to a presentation by Scott Minnich regarding the bacterial flagellum.  Minnich is probably among the dozen or so leading experts in the world on the bacterial flagellum.  Much of the information in his presentation will be familiar to followers of the issues, but a few points bear further examination. First a couple of bench-science items that jumped out at me: Minnich and his team discovered that DNA has a regulatory function in the form of a temperature switch.  Let me be clear, it is not that DNA codes for some molecular machine that is a temperature switch.  The DNA itself is the switch.  In simple terms, the coding portion that codes for a particular protein is bounded Read More ›

The book Naturalism and Its Alternatives in Scientific Methodologies describes how science can be done apart from the assumptions of Naturalism, which are usually assumed by materialists to be part and parcel of science. The book is based on a conference attended by many people in the Intelligent Design community, including several who are regulars on this site.
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From Peter Woit at Not Even Wrong: The political campaign for the multiverse continues today with a piece by Amanda Gefter at Nautilus. It’s a full-throated salvo from the Linde-Guth side of the multiverse propaganda war they are now waging, with Linde dismissing Steinhardt’s criticism as based on “a total ignorance of what is going on”. All of the quotes for the article are on the pro-multiverse side. There is a new argument from them I’d never heard before: Guth comes up with this one: You can create a universe from nothing—you can create infinite universes from nothing—as long as they all add up to nothing. … The article is subtitled “Why the majority of physicists are on one side Read More ›

From Sarah Chaffee at ENV: Two Days After Warning Against “Anti-Science” Label, Nature Calls Academic Freedom “Anti-Science” From the headline of the piece you might think you were reading some online tabloid. But guess again. Published in Nature on May 12 and republished by Scientific American, Erin Ross’s article declares, “Revamped ‘anti-science’ education bills in United States find success.” The headline is describing legislation in Florida and academic freedom resolutions in Alabama and Indiana. The term “anti-science” is ironic. As we noted at Evolution News the other day, Nature itself published a May 10 editorial, “Beware the anti-science label.” It warned against using the term lightly and urged that “Presenting science as a battle for truth against ignorance is an Read More ›

From Denyse O’Leary at Salvo: s there a “crisis” in cosmology, as science writer Dennis Overbye tells us at the New York Times? Or does cosmology merely face “challenges,” as we read at Scientific American? Either way, the tale grows strange. We have so much more data now, but it does not provide the evidence many expected. For example, the ardent faith placed in string theory—the hypothesis that the particles of conventional physics are actually vibrating, one-dimensional “strings”—has proven fruitless for decades. But what if evidence, or its absence, actually matters? Peter Woit, a Columbia University mathematician, is a brave academic. He is an atheist who has long critiqued fashionable string theory (Not Even Wrong, 2007) and the multiverse it Read More ›

Sure he was. But, see, he bought the “Science” brand. From Jon Cassidy at the American Spectator: Darwinism led to Social Darwinism. As the paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould has written, after 1859, “subsequent arguments for slavery, colonialism, racial differences, class struggles, and sex roles would go forth primarily under the banner of science.” Most of those arguments have been banished, but were they ever less scientific than Darwin’s own work? After all, Darwin didn’t use the scientific method, either, and worried that his work was “grievously hypothetical.” When you’re working outside of falsifiable propositions, what qualifies a work as science rather than speculation? More. See also: Neuroscience tried wholly embracing naturalism, but then the brain got away Follow UD News Read More ›

From New Scientist: IT IS just over a decade since Richard Dawkins lit the blue touchpaper with his book The God Delusion. It introduced much of the world to the so-called new atheism – a forceful rejection of religion based on the premise that scientific materialism offers a superior explanation of the universe, while religion is a corrosive influence on society: a pathological meme planted in the minds of defenceless children. Though a great read and a liberating influence for many closet atheists, The God Delusion largely omitted a new strand of scientific enquiry emerging around the time it was published. Those working on the “science of religion” – a motley crew of psychologists, anthropologists and neuroscientists – explained it Read More ›

HAL: Here. Inspired by Galileo’s principle of inertia, the “default state” of inert matter, we propose a “default state” for biological dynamics following Darwin’s first principle, “descent with modification” that we transform into “proliferation with variation and motility” as a property that spans life, including cells in an organism. These dissimilarities between theories of the inert and of biology also apply to causality: biological causality is to be understood in relation to the distinctive role that constraints assume in this discipline. Consequently, the notion of cause will be reframed in a context where constraints to activity are seen as the core component of biological analyses. Finally, we assert that the radical materiality of life rules out distinctions such as “software Read More ›

From Martin Seligman and JohnTierney at the dying New York Times: We are misnamed. We call ourselves Homo sapiens, the “wise man,” but that’s more of a boast than a description. What makes us wise? What sets us apart from other animals? Various answers have been proposed — language, tools, cooperation, culture, tasting bad to predators — but none is unique to humans. What best distinguishes our species is an ability that scientists are just beginning to appreciate: We contemplate the future. Our singular foresight created civilization and sustains society. It usually lifts our spirits, but it’s also the source of most depression and anxiety, whether we’re evaluating our own lives or worrying about the nation. Other animals have springtime Read More ›