Naturalism

Non-naturalist atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel, author of Mind and Cosmos, reviewing naturalist atheist philosopher Daniel Dennett’s Bacteria to Bach and Back at New York Review of Books: For fifty years the philosopher Daniel Dennett has been engaged in a grand project of disenchantment of the human world, using science to free us from what he deems illusions—illusions that are difficult to dislodge because they are so natural. In From Bacteria to Bach and Back, his eighteenth book (thirteenth as sole author), Dennett presents a valuable and typically lucid synthesis of his worldview. Though it is supported by reams of scientific data, he acknowledges that much of what he says is conjectural rather than proven, either empirically or philosophically. A question Read More ›

Just wanted to let everyone know that we have posted the abstracts for this weekend’s Alternatives to Methodological Naturalism in Biology conference online.
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In “Physics: A cosmos in the lab,” a review of A Big Bang in a Little Room: The Quest to Create New Universes by Zeeya Merali, cosmologist Andreas Albrecht writes at Nature, The question of cosmic origins, and the possibility that humans might create new universes, can connect with religious concerns. These form a substantial thread through A Big Bang in a Little Room that significantly reduced the book’s appeal to me. I am an atheist. I respect that many people are deeply religious (some are very close to me) and that religion can have a positive, even beautiful, role. And I know many religious people who do superb science. But I find most attempts to connect religious questions with Read More ›

The Alternatives to Methodological Naturalism in Biology conference is this Saturday February 25th. Since the conference is online, you can attend from anywhere in the world as long as you have an Internet connection.
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Further to Barry Arrington: Can science ground morality?, looking at James Davison Hunter’s and Paul Nedelisky’s  Where the New Science of Morality Goes Wrong: Indeed, some believe that we are at the start of a new age, when the power of science will dispel myths surrounding morality and moral difference and establish a truly rational foundation for ethical truth.1 If so, this age will be based on a new moral synthesis that derives from the conceptual architecture of three main schools of Enlightenment thinking on this matter. The first is the psychologized sentimentalism of David Hume: the idea that the basis of moral judgment lies in human psychology, which can be studied empirically, like any other aspect of the physical Read More ›

In a universe where we did not evolve so as to understand reality, someone is supposed to have developed a theory by which we need not worry about the Boltzmann brain From Anil Anathaswamy at New Scientist:  Any theory that lets bizarre brains randomly pop into existence can’t be a valid description of the universe. No? No? That might seem obvious, but such conscious observers, called Boltzmann brains, are inevitable in certain versions of cosmology. New work that claims to banish such theories not only suggests your brain isn’t such an oddity, but tells us which frameworks for the cosmos are the most sound. Cosmologist Sean Carroll can apparently save us. Whew. Carroll isn’t a fan of Boltzmann brains, and Read More ›

The second Alternatives to Methodological Naturalism online conference is right around the corner! On February 25th, we will convene AM-Nat Biology, focusing on biological applications for alternatives to methodological naturalism.
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From John Farrell, author of The Day Without Yesterday: Lemaiître, Einstein and the Birth of Modern Cosmology, at Nautilus: But Lemaître wasn’t satisfied. By 1931, he had come to believe that Einstein’s “initial condition” state could not be stable. Reaching back to Friedmann, he proposed his Primeval Atom hypothesis, essentially the Big Bang 1.0, that the universe must have initially started from a fantastically dense kernel and expanded outward. “The Cosmic Egg exploding at the moment of creation,” was how the priest phrased it. This was too much for Einstein, Eddington, and their other colleagues. They disliked the metaphysical implications of a universe with a temporal origin—it was too tempting for some to see God lurking behind it. Progress stalled Read More ›

From Dan Jones, reviewing naturalist philosopher Daniel Dennett’s Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds at Nature: Dennett reprises his long-held counter-intuitive idea that consciousness is a ‘user illusion’ similar to the interface of an app, through which people interact with the program without understanding how it works. Memetic apps in our brains, Dennett argues, create a ‘user interface’ that “renders the memes ‘visible’ to the ‘self’”, authoring “both words and deeds”. Critics often quip that Dennett doesn’t explain consciousness so much as explain it away, or duck the challenge entirely, and this chapter is unlikely to bring them around. When it comes to plugging the hole of subjective experience, sceptics are likely to see his solution as Read More ›

From Steve Petersen of Niagara University a paper (2014) arguing for a “normative yet coherent naturalism”: Naturalism is normally taken to be an ideology, censuring non-naturalistic alternatives. But as many critics have pointed out, this ideological stance looks internally incoherent, since it is not obviously endorsed by naturalistic methods. Naturalists who have addressed this problem universally forswear the normative component of naturalism by, in effect, giving up science’s exclusive claim to legitimacy. This option makes naturalism into an empty expression of personal preference that can carry no weight in the philosophical or political spheres. In response to this dilemma, I argue that on a popular (but largely unarticulated) construal of naturalism as a commitment to inference to the best explanation, Read More ›

From Tom Bethell’s Darwin’s House of Cards: A Journalist’s Odyssey Through the Darwin Debates: “The science of neo-Darwinism was poor all along, and supported by very few facts. I have become ever more convinced that, although Darwinism has been promoted as science, its unstated role has been to prop up a philosophy—the philosophy of materialism—and atheism along with it.” (Page 20) “The scientific evidence for evolution is not only weaker than is generally supposed, but as new discoveries have been made since 1959, the reasons for accepting the theory have diminished rather than increased.” Page 45 “Darwinian evolution can be seen as a way of looking at the history of life through the distorting lens of Progress. Given enough time, Read More ›

For those of you interested in the Alternatives to Methodological Naturalism series of online conferences, I thought I’d let you know that today is the last day you can submit an abstract for the conference.
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From ScienceDaily: Adults and children in the US, adults from a ‘low numeracy’ tribe in Bolivia and rhesus monkeys ALL possessed the ability to distinguish between large and small quantities of objects, regardless of the surface area they occupy. This ability is likely a shared evolutionary trait, according to a study. This is news? They’re surely reaching now. The ability to distinguish between more and less is, one need hardly be surprised, found among animals of all types. For example, In a study published last summer in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Kevin C. Burns of Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand and his colleagues burrowed holes in fallen logs and stored varying numbers of mealworms (beetle larvae) Read More ›

Two Views: Keep requiring evolutionary explanations by Don McLeroy Last year the Texas State Board of Education formed an advisory committee to help them streamline the state’s science standards. The committee, composed of a majority of evolutionists, has ignited a controversy by urging the board to delete the only two evolution standards that require evolutionary explanations. To help clarify what is at stake, consider this question: Do you believe that we humans are only a bunch of molecules that enjoy having conversations? Usually, only atheists will answer “Yes.” Most of us think the idea is ridiculous and answer “No” — it goes against our scientific common sense. Yet, this purely materialistic idea is, in essence, the only officially government sanctioned Read More ›

What? After all the naturalist pop psych lectures we paid good money for at the U? Well, suckers r’ us. From Medical News Today: A new research study contradicts the established view that so-called split-brain patients have a split consciousness. Instead, the researchers behind the study, led by UvA psychologist Yair Pinto, have found strong evidence showing that despite being characterised by little to no communication between the right and left brain hemispheres, split brain does not cause two independent conscious perceivers in one brain. Their results are published in the latest edition of the journal Brain. Split brain is a lay term to describe the result of a corpus callosotomy, a surgical procedure first performed in the 1940s to Read More ›