Category: Philosophy
Nature cannot be all there is. Science demonstrates that.
| October 17, 2017 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, Mind, Multiverse, Naturalism, Neuroscience, Philosophy |
From Denyse O’Leary at Evolution News & Views: Naturalists (who say nature is all there is) have recently sought to jimmy the rules around evidence to accommodate their strong belief that a multiverse really exists. Astrophysicist Ethan Siegel offers a glimpse of the future they propose, in a piece at Forbes titled “The multiverse […]
Dan Brown smacked down by real-life physicist he wrote about
| October 17, 2017 | Posted by News under Culture, Intelligent Design, Naturalism, Philosophy, Physics, Religion |
Jeremy England. From John Ellis at PJ Media: In his new novel Origin, Brown includes a character named Jeremy England who is a physics professor. This fictional character based on the real-life Jeremy England has “identified the underlying physical principle driving the origin and evolution of life.” Furthermore, according to the book, Professor England has […]
Neuroscience: Walking back “Perception a controlled hallucination”
| October 16, 2017 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, Mind, Neuroscience, Philosophy |
From Ari N. Shulman at Big Questions Online: Is human perception a controlled hallucination? That was the claim advanced in a pair of talks at the Human Mind Conference in Cambridge, England in June, one by Anil Seth, a neuroscientist at the University of Sussex, the other by Andy Clark, a philosopher at the University […]
Philip Cunningham’s critique of methodological naturalism
| October 14, 2017 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, Naturalism, Philosophy, Science |
Here. From the paper: “Contrary to what many people believe, “Methodological naturalism is certainly NOT a ‘ground rule’ of science today”. Paper. See also: Why the “Naturalism” Part of “Methodological Naturalism” is Both Misleading and Unnecessary (Barry Arrington)
At Forbes: Wishing the multiverse into existence
| October 13, 2017 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Multiverse, Naturalism, Philosophy |
From astrophysicist Ethan Siegel at Forbes: The multiverse is inevitable and we’re living in it What is the Multiverse, then? It may go well beyond physics, and be the first physically motivated “metaphysics” we’ve ever encountered. For the first time, we’re understanding the limits of what our Universe can teach us. There is information we […]
Physicist Rob Sheldon responds to Objectivity is a myth. Bring the social justice warriors into science!
| October 13, 2017 | Posted by News under Culture, Intelligent Design, Philosophy, Science |
He concedes that William A. Wilson makes some good points at First Things but … A truly excellent article on the metaphysics underlying the scientific enterprise. Every debate on MN needs to begin with this essay. I know the first paragraph sounds very post-modern, but by the time you reach the end of the essay, […]
Another view: Objectivity is a myth. Bring the social justice warriors into science!
| October 12, 2017 | Posted by News under Culture, Intelligent Design, Naturalism, Peer review, Philosophy, Science |
From software engineer William A. Wilson at First Things: My friends who work in scientific fields were aghast when they saw that the organizers of a planned “March for Science” had tweeted that “colonization, racism, immigration, native rights, sexism, ableism, queer-, trans-, intersex-phobia, & econ justice are scientific issues [black power emoji][rainbow emoji].” Who can […]
Not just the Third Way or ID: The floodgates are opening against Darwinism
| October 9, 2017 | Posted by News under Books of interest, Culture, Darwinism, Evolution, Intelligent Design, Philosophy |
A lot of people are now reading Scott Turner’s Purpose and Desire:What Makes Something “Alive” and Why Modern Darwinism Has Failed to Explain It, and one of them is retired linguist Noel Rude (Native American languages). Turner’s challenge to Darwinism is the fact that life shows internal purpose, which cannot be accounted for by the […]
Darwinian philosopher asks: Do we need purpose in biology?
| October 9, 2017 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Evolution, Intelligent Design, Naturalism, Philosophy |
J. Scott Turner’s recent Purpose and Desire:What Makes Something “Alive” and Why Modern Darwinism Has Failed to Explain It makes the case that life is not comprehensible without the concept of purpose and that Darwinism’s failure to explain is an “impending crisis.” Michael Ruse, author of many books on the triumph of Darwinism, tells us […]
Physicist at Forbes: The inflationary universe is not science any more
| September 29, 2017 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Philosophy, Science |
From theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder at Forbes: The problem with inflation isn’t the idea per se, but the overproduction of useless inflationary models. There are literally hundreds of these models, and they are – as the philosophers say – severely underdetermined. This means if one extrapolates the models that fit current data to regimes which […]
Philip Cunningham: Multiverse mania vs. reality
| September 24, 2017 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Culture, Intelligent Design, Multiverse, Philosophy, Science |
Paper. See also: The multiverse is science’s assisted suicide
Do we live at a special time in the history of the universe, for making science observations?
| September 20, 2017 | Posted by News under Big Bang, Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Naturalism, Philosophy |
Our Jonathan Bartlett (johnnyb) wrote recently at Answers in Genesis: Lawrence Krauss and Robert J. Scherrer surprised the cosmology world in 2007 when they published an essay titled “The Return of a Static Universe and the End of Cosmology.” The paper showed that, assuming the truth of the current big bang model, in the far […]
Philosopher of physics: Physics and physicalism are mutually incompatible
| September 17, 2017 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Naturalism, Philosophy, Physics |
Physicalism is a variant of naturalism: “Physicalism is the thesis that everything is physical, or as contemporary philosophers sometimes put it, that everything supervenes on the physical. ” (Stanford Plato) Naturalism: “… reality is exhausted by nature, containing nothing “supernatural”, and that the scientific method should be used to investigate all areas of reality, including […]
The multiverse is science’s assisted suicide
| August 22, 2017 | Posted by News under Multiverse, Naturalism, Philosophy, Science |
From Denyse O’Leary at Evolution News & Views: For many people today, post-modern science is more of a quest to express an identity as believer in science, irrespective of evidence. Cosmologist Paul Steinhardt got a sense of this in 2014, when he reported that some proponents of early rapid cosmic inflation “already insist that the […]
Design Disquisitions: Critic’s Corner-Sahotra Sarkar
| August 22, 2017 | Posted by Joshua G under Biology, Darwinism, Evolution, Evolutionary biology, Food for thought, ID, Philosophy, Science |
My latest ‘Critic’s Corner’ post is now up. This one features the work of ID critic Sahotra Sarkar. Sarkar is one of the more sophisticated critics of ID so his work is worth engaging with. I have responded to some of his arguments in a previous post and plan to do more in the future: […]
Philosopher of science: Science “studies” are a stealth face of post-modernism
| August 22, 2017 | Posted by News under Culture, Intelligent Design, Philosophy, Religion, Science |
From Meera Nanda, author of Prophets Facing Backward: Postmodern Critiques of Science and Hindu Nationalism in India, at Butterflies and Wheels: Science studies, as I said, is not an ordinary academic discipline. It constitutes the beating heart of postmodernism, for it aims to “deconstruct” natural science, the very core of a secular and modern worldview. […]
Why Michael Strauss finds Hawking and Mlodinow’s The Grand Design disappointing
| August 20, 2017 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, Philosophy, Physics |
The Grand Design Here: Perhaps the most disappointing aspect of The Grand Design is that the attempts made to support Hawking’s and Mlodinow’s case are, in many cases, simply unsophisticated, unsupportable, naive, and even fallacious. I believe that in a college class on logic, philosophy, or religion, this book would receive a failing grade. For […]
Philosopher of science: Are there laws in biology, as in physics?
| August 19, 2017 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, Philosophy, Science |
From Massimo Pigliucci at Footnotes to Plato: Theoretical biology’ is a surprisingly heterogeneous field, partly because it encompasses ‘‘doing theory’’ across disciplines as diverse as molecular biology, systematics, ecology, and evolutionary biology. Moreover, it is done in a stunning variety of different ways, using anything from formal analytical models to computer simulations, from graphic representations […]
Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor replies to “nature shows no purpose” philosopher
| August 7, 2017 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, Naturalism, Philosophy |
From neurosurgeon Michael Egnor at Evolution News & Views: Materialists struggle with purpose in nature, because their ideology rules out natural purposes, and yet purpose is obvious everywhere in nature. How can materialists reconcile their ideology with quite contradictory facts? They talk gibberish. The current buzzword is entropy, which allegedly prevents purpose. … While entropy […]
Cosmic inflation theory outgrows the scientific method
| August 1, 2017 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Naturalism, Philosophy, Science |
And thrives anyway. From Denyse O’Leary (O’Leary for News) at Evolution News & Views: Two features of our universe puzzle cosmologists: One is the horizon problem: The universe looks the same in all directions and the cosmic microwave background radiation is about the same temperature everywhere. As String Theory for Dummies puts it, “This really […]
