Category: Philosophy
Biologist Wayne Rossiter on non-religious doubts about universal common ancestry
| December 9, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Origin Of Life, Philosophy, theistic evolution |
Wayne Rossiter, author of Shadow of Oz: Theistic Evolution and the Absent God, talks about predictable claims from theistic evolution: To catch people up to speed, in a facebook conversation, [Jim] Stump made the statements, “Common ancestry [here he means Universal Common Ancestry] is a multiply confirmed theory that explains the observable data in detail. […]
A TED talk for the truly erudite
| November 26, 2018 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, Just For Fun, Philosophy |
Your co-workers just won’t know WHAT to think, when they hear you expound this Ted Talk: Self proclaimed “thought leader,” Pat Kelly gives his talk on “thought leadership” at the annual This Is That Talks in Whistler, B.C. In the seminar, Kelly covers: How to talk with your hands, how to get a standing ovation, and […]
Does time exist and do we experience it?
| November 18, 2018 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Philosophy, Physics |
That’s a perhaps surprisingly contentious topic among theoretical physicists: You see, whether time flows forward, or doesn’t flow at all, or moves back and forth, our resulting subjective experience would be identical in all cases: we would always find ourselves in an experiential snapshot extending smoothly backwards in memory and forwards in expectation, just like […]
Requests for actual statistics FRAUD not unusual, science writer finds
| November 7, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Intelligent Design, Philosophy, Science |
There may be an additional, more sinister explanation for the ongoing reproducibility crisis, he suggests: A stunning report published in the Annals of Internal Medicine concludes that researchers often make “inappropriate requests” to statisticians. And by “inappropriate,” the authors aren’t referring to accidental requests for incorrect statistical analyses; instead, they’re referring to requests for unscrupulous […]
John Gray: New Atheists don’t acknowledge their myths and beliefs
| November 4, 2018 | Posted by News under Atheism, Intelligent Design, Philosophy, Religion, Science |
British political philosopher John Gray, author of Seven Types of Atheism (2018) and also of Straw Dogs, comments in an interview: Indeed. I’m a skeptic by nature, so I’m resistant to claims by anyone to have complete answers to intractable human problems. I’m particularly annoyed by what’s now called “New Atheism,” and I react strongly […]
J.P. Moreland on Darwinism and “reverse intelligent design”
| October 28, 2018 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Design inference, Intelligent Design, Philosophy, Religion |
Our philosopher-photographer friend Laszlo Bencze sends us some thoughts on J. P. Moreland’s recent book, Scientism and Secularism: Learning to Respond to a Dangerous Ideology: – (O’Leary for News) I just finished my reading of this book and I think it’s an excellent analysis of the issues which undergird evolution, namely that science and only […]
J. P. Moreland: How scientism leads to post-modern relativism
| October 21, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Intelligent Design, Philosophy, Religion, Science, science education |
From an interview with J. P. Moreland, author of Scientism and Secularism: Learning to Respond to a Dangerous Ideology (2018): RC: How does science differ from scientism and why does it matter? JPM: Claims of science—water is H20, electro-magnetic fields behave in such and such a manner—what science is limited to. But scientism is a […]
Rob Sheldon: If you want laws of nature, you must accept miracles
| October 20, 2018 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, Naturalism, Philosophy, Religion, Science |
And Christianity too, says our physics color commentator Rob Sheldon. He explains: Proposition: Miracles are violations of natural law. 1. What is natural law; Who invented it? Who enforces it? Who interprets it? a) One argument is that natural law is merely inductive. The sun has risen daily for the past 5000 years of written […]
Ayn Rand had misgivings about “evolution”
| October 19, 2018 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Intelligent Design, Mind, Philosophy |
That might not be what we’d have expected to hear about the twentieth century novelist and philosopher but reader Eric Holloway sends us this item: I am not a student of the theory of evolution and, therefore, I am neither its supporter nor its opponent. But a certain hypothesis has haunted me for years; I […]
Psychology undergrads misled about science by their textbooks?
| October 17, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Intelligent Design, Philosophy, Psychology, Science, science education |
Could that be a factor in the recent meltdowns? A recent open access study of textbooks out of the University of Nevada addresses that case: Almost a quarter of the sampled textbooks explicitly and boastfully stated that there is no difference between psychology and other “hard” sciences such as chemistry and physics. Yet only one textbook […]
J. P. Moreland on claims we know better than we know science truths
| October 7, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Ethics, Intelligent Design, Mathematics, Philosophy, Science |
Youth speaker Sean McDowell interviews J. P. Moreland on his new book, Scientism and Secularism: Learning to Respond to a Dangerous Ideology: J.P. Moreland is one of the 50 most influential living philosophers. He’s also a colleague and friend of mine at Talbot School of Theology, Biola University. He has spent his career writing largely […]
What “territory” does Thomas Nagel find between materialism and theism?
| September 30, 2018 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, Mind, Naturalism, Philosophy, theism |
Photographer and philosopher Laszlo Bencze has been rereading Thomas Nagel’s Mind & Cosmos (2012), and he writes to say, I’m finding Mind and Cosmos to be a very thought provoking book. In it Nagel sets himself the task of explaining the existence of mind (or consciousness) without resorting to either materialistic evolution or to theism. […]
Why proving the Riemann hypothesis matters
| September 30, 2018 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, Mathematics, Philosophy |
Prime numbers are the “building blocks for larger numbers”: The Riemann hypothesis is a statement about a mathematical curiosity known as the Riemann zeta function. That function is closely entwined with prime numbers — whole numbers that are evenly divisible only by 1 and themselves. Prime numbers are mysterious: They are scattered in an inscrutable […]
At Aeon: Do philosophy and math still need each other?
| September 30, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Intelligent Design, Mathematics, Philosophy |
One question is whether people are looking for logically certain answers any more: Whereas mathematics seeks precise and certain answers, obtaining them in real life is often intractable or outright impossible. In such circumstances, what we really want are algorithms that return reasonable approximations to the right answers in an efficient and reliable manner. Real-world […]
J. P. Moreland’s new book on scientism is out
| September 23, 2018 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, Naturalism, Philosophy, Science |
Christian philosopher J. P. Moreland’s Scientism and Secularism: Learning to Respond to a Dangerous Ideology makes clear he doesn’t like it: Rigid adherence to scientism―as opposed to a healthy respect for science―is all too prevalent in our world today. Rather than leading to a deeper understanding of our universe, this worldview actually undermines real science and […]
Britain appoints first Humanist as head chaplain
| September 23, 2018 | Posted by News under Atheism, Culture, Intelligent Design, Philosophy, Religion |
For a hospital in the National Health Service: Lindsay van Dijk will lead three Christian chaplains and a team of 24 volunteers, including a Catholic nun, a Buddhist and a Bahá’í, at the Buckinghamshire Healthcare NHS trust. The world-renowned spinal injuries unit at Stoke Mandeville hospital is part of the trust. … Humanists do not […]
“Perhaps physics has slipped into a post-empirical era…”
| September 14, 2018 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Naturalism, Philosophy, Physics |
Science writer David Appell suggests this, in all seriousness, in his review of Sabine Hossenfelder’s Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, at Physics World: Hossenfelder confronts physicists to ask them why their ideas aren’t working. Michael Krämer, who heads the new-physics group at the LHC and works on supersymmetry, tells her that he is “honestly […]
Food for thought: ScuzzaMan on Design Law Theory
| September 14, 2018 | Posted by kairosfocus under Philosophy, Religion, theism, UD Guest Posts |
Here at UD, we often find food for thought in the comment box. The following by ScuzzaMan, is worth pondering as a particular, from the horse’s mouth philosophical-theological perspective within the Christian frame (and yes, it is Creationist-Biblical in focus rather than empirical-inferential on reliable signs of design). Here is a Christian voice, in his […]
At Scientific American: Quantum theory does not require a conscious observer
| September 10, 2018 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Mind, Philosophy, Physics, Science |
Science writer Anil Ananthaswamy Intro of surveys current theories: If nothing else, these experiments are showing that we cannot yet make any claims about the nature of reality, even if the claims are well-motivated mathematically or philosophically. And given that neuroscientists and philosophers of mind don’t agree on the nature of consciousness, claims that it […]
Sam Harris vs. Jordan Peterson on whether an “objective” moral code is possible
| September 10, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Evolution, Intelligent Design, Mind, Philosophy, Science |
We’ve written some things about Jordan Peterson and a fair bit about Sam Harris: Here’s an appraisal of their recent debate in Vancouver, moderated by Bret Weinstein : Peterson and Harris spent a large part of the first night discussing what they had in common. For example, both agreed that it was important to establish […]
