Naturalism

From William Nardi at The College Fix: The latest “privilege” identified within the hallowed halls of higher education appears to be human privilege. This year, the Modern Language Association of America has put out a call for papers on “critical plant studies,” seeking papers addressing the “vitality, agency, sentience, and/or emotional life of plants.” Critical plant studies “aims to do for plants what human animal studies began to do for animal life over 20 years ago — attributing greater agency and autonomy to the non-human world strengthens the ethical standing of beings historically relegated to the lower rungs of the chain of life,” said John Ryan, honorary research fellow at the University of Western Australia, in a 2016 lecture hosted Read More ›

…but not for the reasons we might think. Let’s start with consciousness in general to see why. From Denyse O’Leary (O’Leary for News) at The City (Houston Baptist U): Science writer Margaret Wertheim, reflecting on why consciousness is such a hot topic now, notes that Giulio Tononi has described the idea that mere matter could generate mind as a mystery “stranger than immaculate conception… an impossibility that defie[s] belief.” (Phi, 2012) Nonetheless, he and many others appear resolved to believe and act on that admitted impossibility. Given their commitments, they have no choice. And given current research directions, there may never be a good theory of consciousness. More. See also: Would we give up naturalism to solve the hard problem of Read More ›

We get mail. A friend writes to explain why Richard Dawkins, even though he is a metaphysical naturalist (nature is all there is), trusts his own reason. The argument goes something like this: I trust my own reason because it proves itself useful time and time again, and until someone can demonstrate that reason isn’t to be trusted, there’s no reason to think otherwise. We thought that sounded odd because it is his reason that tells him that it is useful. But then it would, right? And what if it didn’t? What then? Other naturalist atheists say that our brains were shaped for fitness, not for truth, so Dawkins’s conclusion is part of a fitness function—but how would he know Read More ›

In place of “research misconduct.” From Helen Briggs at BBC News: The scale of “fake research” in the UK appears to have been underestimated, a BBC investigation suggests. Official data points to about 30 allegations of research misconduct between 2012 and 2015. However, figures obtained by the BBC under Freedom of Information rules identified hundreds of allegations over a similar time period at 23 universities alone. … Co-founder of Retraction Watch, Dr Ivan Oransky, told BBC News: “We do not have a good handle on how much research misconduct takes place, but it’s become quite clear that universities and funding agencies and oversight bodies are not reporting even a reasonable fraction of the number of cases that they see.” More. Read More ›

According to Sharon Woodhill, Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, Mount Saint Vincent University (Nova Scotia, Canada) at Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society (Summer 2016) The Sexual Politics of Intelligent Design Abstract: Intelligent design is creationism for the twenty-first century. It is the view that the natural world is best explained as the product of an intentional intelligent agent rather than undirected natural forces. Although there has been much ado about its scientific status, beyond the scientific face of intelligent design is a dense discourse that brings a compelling aspect into full relief. Intelligent design is a political movement that embodies aggressive and regressive sexual politics. This article suggests that, motivated by the belief that evolutionary thought has Read More ›

The first video release from the AM-Nat Biology conference is now available! In this video, Salvador Cordova talks about the possibility that many things that are commonly considered errors in biology actually have identifiable purposes. Cordova confronts what is both a theological and a scientific critique of design, and shows its limitations. As Sal points out at the beginning of this video, this talk was a special request of mine. Sal has posted on these topics here on UD, but I thought they got less attention than they should, as I think they are really important concepts. If you are interested in the Alternatives to Methodological Naturalism series, you should pick up our book, Naturalism and Its Alternatives in Scientific Read More ›

No, we hadn’t heard of it either. At Cerebral Faith, Christian apologist Evan Minton explains, Recently, William Lane Craig debated atheist Michael Nugent in Ireland on the existence of God. One of the arguments that Dr. Craig employed was The Fine Tuning Argument for design. I’m going to assume that readers of this article already have some familiarity with the fine tuning, so in case you’re new to the God debate, or this website, or apologetics in general, I discuss The Fine Tuning Argument in this blog post here. In response to the Fine Tuning Argument, Nugent said the following: “Theists believe that this God fine tuned the physical constants of the universe to allow life. But while these constants Read More ›

Part two of my series looking at Jeffrey Koperski’s paper ‘Two Bad Ways to Attack Intelligent Design and Two Good Ones’ is now up on my blog. This one is quite in depth, but a couple of interesting issues come up along the way. I examine the concept of soft and hard anomalies in scientific theories and how they might affect theory change. I then look at the claim that ID’s scientific core is too meagre to be considered serious science. The final objection I analyse is the claim that ID violates a metatheoretic shaping principle known as scientific conservatism. In part one of this series looking at Jeffrey Koperski’s paper, Two Bad Ways to Attack Intelligent Design and Two Read More ›

Political correctness decreed that there were no important brain differences between men and women but tests were done mainly on male animals. And, because the resulting problems didn’t help various political causes, they were dangerous to publicize. From Claire Lehmann at Commentary: The insistence that gender differences were and are immaterial to the proper functioning of a free society has been a feature of our common conversation since the 1970s. It was the key to “second-wave feminism,” the political and social movement that took women’s liberation beyond issues of suffrage and wages and employment to the question of how a just society orders itself. By the close of the 20th century, however, the insistence that gender differences be treated as Read More ›

From George Johnson at Undark: In November, Judge María Alejandra Mauricio of the Third Court of Guarantees in Mendoza decreed that Cecilia is a “nonhuman person” — one that was being denied “the fundamental right” of all sentient beings “to be born, to live, grow, and die in the proper environment for their species.” Agreeing to a petition by animal rights lawyers in Argentina for a writ of habeas corpus — a demand that a court rule on whether a prisoner or inmate is being legally detained — the judge ordered that the chimpanzee be freed from the zoo and transferred to a great ape sanctuary in Brazil. In an earlier case, an appeals court in Buenos Aires upheld a Read More ›

Well, what happens when human complexity foils electoral predictions? From Denyse O’Leary (O’Leary for News) at Salvo: The Pew polling group admits it was stumped by last November’s U.S. presidential election. The results “came as a surprise to nearly everyone who had been following the national and state election polling.” Most pollsters put Hillary Clinton’s chances of defeating Donald Trump at 70 to 99 percent. Few will care if fashion critics call the hemlines wrong this season. But election pollsters consider their work both important and scientific: “Polling is an art, but it’s largely a scientific endeavor,” says Michael Link, president and chief executive of the Abt SRBI polling firm in New York City and former president of the American Read More ›

In a review of Void: The Strange Physics of Nothing by James Owen Weatherall, Steven Poole writes at Spectator (UK): In an action-packed epilogue, the author describes how the contested field of string theory posits a bogglingly large number of possible kinds of nothingness, and impresses upon the reader how much of physics still depends on intuition and battling ‘interpretations’. The book is not an exhaustive typology of scientific nothings: not directly addressed, for example, is the nothingness that supposedly obtained before the Big Bang. But to regret this is just to emphasise the success of this stylishly written and admirably concise book, at the end of which you will be inclined to agree, along with the author and Freddie Read More ›

From Aatif Sulleyman at Independent: “Since civilisation began, aggression has been useful inasmuch as it has definite survival advantages,” he told The Times. “It is hard-wired into our genes by Darwinian evolution. Now, however, technology has advanced at such a pace that this aggression may destroy us all by nuclear or biological war. We need to control this inherited instinct by our logic and reason.” He suggests that “some form of world government” could be ideal for the job, but would itself create more problems. “But that might become a tyranny,” he added. “All this may sound a bit doom-laden but I am an optimist. I think the human race will rise to meet these challenges.” More. We didn’t realize Read More ›

Nuclear chemist Dr. Jay Wile recently wrote a review of the book Naturalism and Its Alternatives in Scientific Methodologies.
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Here’s my new article at Design Disquisitions. Enjoy: In the next two (potentially three) articles I’ll be taking an in-depth look at an excellent paper written by Jeffrey Koperski, a philosopher of science at Saginaw Valley State University. Koperski has written about ID in several publications (1), which I highly recommend, and he takes a balanced and sensible approach to this topic. As far as I can tell, he doesn’t accept ID, but takes a constructively critical stance, so his work is well worth engaging with. As one can tell from the title of the paper, Two Bad Ways to Attack Intelligent Design and Two Goods Ones(2), Koperski critically analyses two common criticisms of ID, suggesting that they are highly dubious lines of argument. He then Read More ›