Category: Philosophy
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 […]
Why we can’t really live forever via advanced technology
| September 9, 2018 | Posted by News under Human evolution, Intelligent Design, Mind, Philosophy |
It wouldn’t really be “us” anyhow. Some thoughts from a political theorist: The moral philosopher Samuel Scheffler at New York University has suggested that the real problem with a fantasy of immortality is that it doesn’t make sense as a coherent desire. Scheffler points out that human life is intimately structured by the fact that […]
Particle physicist: Science is suffering from “baked in” bias
| September 4, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Intelligent Design, Philosophy, Science |
From Sabine Hossenfelder, author of Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, says science has a problem and we need to talk: For the past 15 years, I have worked in the foundations of physics, a field which has not seen progress for decades. What happened 40 years ago is that theorists in my discipline […]
Eric Holloway: ID as a bridge between Francis Bacon and Thomas Aquinas
| September 2, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Intelligent Design, Philosophy, Science |
Eric Holloway, an electrical and computer engineer, offers some thoughts on how to prevent science from devolving into “scientism.” For an example of scientism, see Peter Atkins’s claim that science can answer all the Big Questions. Here’s John Mark Reynolds’s outline of the general problem: Sometimes a culture takes a right road, sometimes it passes […]
Suarez: Quantum nonlocal correlations come from outside space-time
| September 2, 2018 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, Philosophy, Physics |
Philip Cunningham writes, I just happened to check quantum physicist and philosopher Antoine Suarez‘s youtube channel. He loaded a new video a few months ago after being silent for a few years. Quantum nonlocal correlations come from outside space-time, they cannot be explained exclusively by material links. If the experimenter has free will, then there […]
A novel suggestion at Nature: Publish the peer reviews
| September 1, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Intelligent Design, Peer review, Philosophy, Science |
But can the internet handle all the spite and unseemliness? Another risk is the ‘weaponization’ of reviewer reports. Opponents of certain types of research (for example, on genetically modified organisms, climate change and vaccines) could take critical remarks in peer reviews out of context or mischaracterize disagreements to undermine public trust in the paper, the […]
Karl “falsification” Popper was dogmatic, but was that such a bad thing?
| August 29, 2018 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Philosophy, Physics |
Science writer John Horgan well remembers going to interview Popper, who had strong views on subjectivism in physics: Words poured from him so rapidly and with so much momentum that I began to lose hope that I could ask my prepared questions. “I am over 90, and I can still think,” he declared, as if […]
Renowned chemist on why only science can answer the Big Questions
| August 26, 2018 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, Philosophy, Religion, Science |
Peter Atkins, author of Atkins’ Physical Chemistry (11th edition, 2017) and Conjuring the Universe (2018), divides the Big Questions into two classes: One class consists of invented questions that are often based on unwarranted extrapolations of human experience. They typically include questions of purpose and worries about the annihilation of the self, such as Why are we here? and […]
And now black holes can be ghosts…
| August 24, 2018 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Naturalism, Philosophy, Physics, Science |
From previous universe: In Penrose and similarly-inclined physicists’ history of space and time (which they call conformal cyclic cosmology, or CCC), universes bubble up, expand and die in sequence, with black holes from each leaving traces in the universes that follow. And in a new paper released Aug. 6 in the preprint journal arXiv—apparent evidence […]
What is “dualism” and why is it controversial?
| August 19, 2018 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, Mind, Naturalism, Philosophy |
Most people think we are more than just live bodies but what is the “more”? Frank Turek explains, Here are some types of dualism: 2. Varieties of Dualism: Ontology 2.1 Predicate dualism 2.2 Property Dualism 2.3 Substance Dualism 3. Varieties of Dualism: Interaction 3.1 Interactionism 3.2 Epiphenomenalism 3.3 Parallelism (Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy) More. If […]
Philosopher wants to free “emergent” universe from the clutches of mystics
| August 16, 2018 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Philosophy |
f course, once he uses the term “emergent,” it’s game over. Philosopher Paul Humphreys explains, While atomism is all about burrowing down to basic building blocks, emergence looks upward and outward, to ask whether strange new phenomena might pop out when things get sufficiently large or complex. … Emergence was popular in philosophy of science more than […]
