Category: Philosophy
From Philip Cunningham: Darwin’s theory vs. falsification
| April 23, 2018 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Philosophy, Science |
Here: Paper. “Popper, in approx 1978 for the most part, took his criticisms of Darwinism back. But when John Horgan interviewed Popper in 1992, Horgan noted that Popper “blurted out that he still found Darwin’s theory dissatisfying. “One ought to look for alternatives!” Popper exclaimed, banging his kitchen table.” ” See also: Laszlo Bencze on the current […]
Maverick Philosopher on Daniel Dennett, who objects to post-modernism but helps it along anyway (without meaning to)
| April 23, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Intelligent Design, Naturalism, Philosophy |
From Maverick Philosopher: From an interview with Daniel Dennett in the pages of The Guardian (2017) … My understanding of postmodernism – and you’re a very prominent atheist – is that in the absence of a single meta-narrative, which is God, you had competing narratives… [Dennett:] Yes and one’s true and the others are false. […]
Does a “fetish for falsification and observation” hold back science?
| April 7, 2018 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, Philosophy, Science |
From astrophysicist Adam Becker at Aeon: Falsifiability doesn’t work as a blanket restriction in science for the simple reason that there are no genuinely falsifiable scientific theories. I can come up with a theory that makes a prediction that looks falsifiable, but when the data tell me it’s wrong, I can conjure some fresh ideas […]
Did the universe never have a chance?
| March 30, 2018 | Posted by News under Fine tuning, Intelligent Design, Philosophy |
From C. D. McCoy: Abstract: Demarest asserts that we have good evidence for the existence and nature of an initial chance event for the universe. I claim that we have no such evidence and no knowledge of its supposed nature. Against relevant comparison classes her initial chance account is no better, and in some ways […]
Does eternally inflating cosmology cause probabilities to fail?
| March 27, 2018 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Philosophy, Physics, Probability |
From John D. Norton: (2018) Eternal Inflation: When Probabilities Fail. [Preprint] In eternally inflating cosmology, infinitely many pocket universes are seeded. Attempts to show that universes like our observable universe are probable amongst them have failed, since no unique probability measure is recoverable. This lack of definite probabilities is taken to reveal a complete predictive […]
From Philip Cunningham: Copernican Principle, Agent Causality, and Jesus Christ as the “Theory of Everything”
| March 25, 2018 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, Philosophy, Physics, Religion |
Here. Paper. See also: Film night with Philip Cunningham: Atheists’ reasons for not believing in God are not scientific, and more…
The “difficult birth” of science’s assisted suicide, the multiverse
| March 23, 2018 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, Multiverse, Philosophy, Science |
From Adam Becker at Scientific American: Quantum physics, Everett pointed out, didn’t really reduce to classical physics for large numbers of particles. According to quantum physics, even normal-sized objects like chairs could be located in two totally separate places at once—a Schrödinger’s-cat–like situation known as a “quantum superposition.” And, Everett continued, it wasn’t right to […]
In what sense is Stephen Hawking equivalent to Isaac Newton?
| March 22, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Intelligent Design, Philosophy, Physics |
Pos-Darwinista writes to say that Stephen Hawking’s ashes are to be interred beside those of Isaac Newton at Westminster Abby, as reported at BBC: The Dean of Westminster, the Very Reverend Dr John Hall, said: “It is entirely fitting that the remains of Professor Stephen Hawking are to be buried in the Abbey, near those […]
Stephen Hawking continues to talk widely celebrated nonsense about the Big Bang
| March 6, 2018 | Posted by News under Atheism, Big Bang, Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Mathematics, Philosophy |
From Meghan Bartels at MSN: Hawking approaches the problem by offering a detailed analogy, comparing space-time to any other continuous, curved surface, like the surface of the Earth. “There is nothing south of the South Pole,” Hawking says. The same principle holds with the universe: “There was nothing around before the Big Bang.”More. “Nothing” is […]
Jordan Peterson on how post-modernism kills science: by destroying categories
| February 16, 2018 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Culture, Intelligent Design, Naturalism, Philosophy, Psychology, Religion |
Reflecting on Jordan B. Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, from Denyse O’Leary at ENST: Measurement, and thus categories, come to be seen as oppressive. Recently, David Klinghoffer drew attention to modern heretic Jordan B. Peterson, a once-obscure Canadian clinical psychologist and professor of psychology at the University Toronto (formerly of Harvard), […]
Are some infinities bigger than others?
| February 15, 2018 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Mathematics, Philosophy |
From theoretical physicist Paul Davies at Cosmos: It turns out that the set of all points on a continuous line is a bigger infinity than the natural numbers; mathematicians say there is an uncountably infinite number of points on the line (and in three-dimensional space). You simply can’t match up each point on the line […]
William Lane Craig, Jordan Peterson, and Rebecca Goldstein on the meaning of life
| February 11, 2018 | Posted by News under Atheism, Intelligent Design, Naturalism, Philosophy, Religion |
Here. Readers will recall William Lane Craig and Jordan B. Peterson. They may not know of Rebecca Goldstein but, by way of brief introduction, she is Steven Pinker’s wife and he has been on our radar a few times. Enjoy! On January 26th at the University of Toronto 1500 people packed into Convocation Hall to […]
Philosopher Alvin Plantinga, sympathetic to ID, in animated form
| February 11, 2018 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, Philosophy |
As videos: In April 2017, philosopher Alvin Plantinga received the Templeton Prize. To celebrate Plantinga’s most influential ideas and arguments, the Center for Philosophy of Religion at Notre Dame is producing a series of ten videos that explore his philosophical contributions. More. First four launched. Plantinga bio here. See also: First Things, on Plantinga’s surprising […]
New Scientist also embraces the love drug
| February 7, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Intelligent Design, Media, Medicine, Philosophy, Religion, Science |
Further to “New Scientist embraces politics,” we also learn, from Alice Klein at New Scientist, The love drug that could draw people away from any addiction: The “cuddle chemical” oxytocin boosts social bonds. Soon a version of it will be tested in pill form to see if it can reset the brain wiring that gets […]
Memo to Marx: Technology, not religion, is now the opiate of the people
| February 4, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Intelligent Design, Naturalism, Philosophy, Religion, Science |
From Ken Francis, journalist and author of The Little Book of God, Mind, Cosmos and Truth, at New English Review: The atheist Karl Marx—whose belief in moral autonomy and non-belief in Hell was his opium—said that religion was the opium of the people. But nowadays, it seems technology, consumerism and opiates have replaced that for many. But, […]
Philosopher: Materialist claims to explain the mind are like claims to have squared the circle
| February 2, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Intelligent Design, Naturalism, Philosophy |
From philosopher Edward Feser at Claremont Review of Books, reviewing Daniel Dennett’s Bacteria to Bach and Back: How do you get blood from a stone? Easy. Start by redefining “blood” to mean “a variety of stone.” Next, maintaining as straight a face as possible, dramatically expound upon some trivial respect in which stone is similar […]
Philosopher: “Self” is a scientific concept
| January 31, 2018 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, Mind, Naturalism, Neuroscience, Philosophy, Science |
From Serif Tekin at Aeon: I call my proposed model the ‘multitudinous self’. ‘Do I contradict myself?’ asks the poet Walt Whitman in ‘Song of Myself’ (1891-92), ‘Very well then I contradict myself, / (I am large, I contain multitudes.)’ The multitudinous self is empirically tractable and responsive to the experiences of ‘real people’ who […]
Last Call for “Natural Evil” meet at Biola U, January 26-27
| January 24, 2018 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, Philosophy, Religion, Science |
From Christian Scientific Society: The meeting will take place January 26-27 at Biola University. On Friday night, we will have a debate between David Snoke (me) and Mike Keas on “Are predatory animals a result of the Fall?” (Mike: yes; David: no). This question lies at the core of much of the debate about science […]
Actually, the multiverse is cheerfully beyond falsifiability
| January 20, 2018 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, Multiverse, Philosophy, Science |
From math prof Peter Woit at Not Even Wrong: Sean Carroll has a new paper out defending the Multiverse and attacking the naive Popperazi, entitled Beyond Falsifiability: Normal Science in a Multiverse. He also has a Beyond Falsifiability blog post here. Much of the problem with the paper and blog post is that Carroll is […]
In a world with no truth, fake news can somehow be false anyway
| January 18, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Naturalism, Philosophy |
From the Babylon Bee: One Oregon man, who rejects the idea that humanity can even be sure the universe exists in any meaningful sense, was nonetheless disturbed by the idea that websites could publish completely false information, for anyone in the world to read. “It’s just absolutely wrong, in my opinion,” said the man who […]
