Actually, multiverse cosmology would make a starting point irrelevant or else subject to endless redefinition. Powell’s bookmark-able summary can’t address the problem, of course, but that’s precisely what the multiverse does. Facts no longer matter much because contradictory facts have equal status.
Philosophy
Is today’s biology missing a Big Idea?
Talbott: Every organism is an entity in which certain ideas and intentions are manifest — observably expressed and realized. We have to be willing to say, as everyone does say, “This cell is preparing to divide.” We would never say (as I mentioned earlier), “This planet is preparing to make another circuit of the sun.”
Inferring onward, from design to designer
One of the notorious talking points used by inveterate objectors to design theory, is that it is about stealth creationism. Closely tied, is the suggestion (or, assumption) that the claim that design inference on empirical sign only warrants inference to design as process is a dishonest stalking horse. Given a long saddening track record of […]
Atheists suffer apocalypse anxiety too, it seems
Reviewer: Routledge suggested the behaviour of religious doomsday fretters was similar to atheist political activists. ‘I’m increasingly seeing a similar sort of fatalism on the secular left,’ he continued.
New vid series takes aim at toxic materialism in science
Science Uprising calls out indoctrination by people such as Richard Dawkins and Neil deGrasse Tyson.
What does it mean to say, in physics, that something like the Higgs boson “exists”?
Sabine Hossenfelder’s view: Realism is a philosophy. It’s a belief system, and science does not tell you whether it is correct.
Making a mess of understanding eternity
Perhaps this is why the raging Woke would prefer to smash things rather than study.
Disproofs of God’s existence are falling on hard times these days
Omnipotent means the power to do any possible thing. Christians, for example, say that God “became man and suffered for us under Pontius Pilate.” So the answer to McGinn’s questions (“does he have the power to sneeze or digest food or pick his nose”) is yes, though it requires incarnation in a human body.
Science philosopher attempts to repair split between science and philosophy
The main disadvantage of not acknowledging the philosophy from which we proceed is that we assume it to be “the correct view of all right-thinking people.” That’s almost a definition of narrow-mindedness. It’s worth considering that many Darwinians who can’t get with the times about problems in evolution may have precisely that problem: They have never asked themselves why they are attached to a picture of the world of life that does not appear to be correct or complete.
Proposed new definition of life would include embryos, exclude AI
To be honest, we were fully expecting that the next thing we’d hear is that AI is life and embryos aren’t. These guys must be doing some thinking.
Jerry Coyne vents about David Klinghoffer
He tells readers, “The “Darwinian Perspective,” or at least the atheistic one, hadn’t at all proved terribly corrosive. Indeed, people found it liberating.” ENST editor Klinghoffer disagreeswith that.
Falsifiability is overrated, some cosmologists say
The article doesn’t explain what the “fine-tuning problem” means. It means that the universe shows evidence of design. No one has been able to explain that away. However, if basic thinking in science is jerked around enough, maybe ideas that don’t work can be offered social promotions and sit right alongside demonstrated ones.
The key to falsifiability of not evidence but observability
Laszlo Bencze: The multiverse theory is irrefutable because alternate universes are, by definition, forever inaccessible. (If they were accessible through some very difficult convoluted route, they would still be part of our universe.)
Sabine Hossenfelder on the flight from falsifiability
Hossenfelder is right to be concerned. Some cosmologists would like to dump falsifiability as a criterion. If they could, they would remove an obstacle to demanding public belief in ideas like the multiverse, ideas that cannot be falsified because there is no evidence for them.
Jonathan Bartlett and the war on Occam’s Razor
Bartlett on Sober’s Occam’s Razors: I’m only 30 pages in, and its already worth the time and price of reading. Even if it were all downhill from here, I highly recommend it! A great discussion on the philosophy of science and the principles of reasoning from Copernicus forward.