Philosophy

At Scientific American, John Horgan reprints his profile of  Bohm (1917-1992) shortly before his death, in which Bohm explains his view: Although he tried to make the world more sensible with his pilot-wave model, he also argued that complete clarity is impossible. He reached this conclusion after seeing an experiment on television, in which a drop of ink was squeezed onto a cylinder of glycerine. When the cylinder was rotated, the ink diffused through the glycerine in an apparently irreversible fashion. Its order seemed to have disintegrated. But when the direction of rotation was reversed, the ink gathered into a drop again. He was consistent: Bohm rejected the claim of physicists such as Hawking and Weinberg that physics can achieve a Read More ›

Recently, President Duterte of the Philippines issued a challenge to prove the existence of God. About a week ago, I showed that to believe in God is reasonable and responsible; indeed, he credibly exists.  (BTW, the hits:comments ratio was interesting.) Today, I will explore a bit on what it means for God to be the necessary being at the root of reality. Classically, a necessary being would exist in any possible world, while a contingent one (such as we are) exists in at least one possible world, but would not exist in at least one possible world. This is because contingent beings are causally dependent on external enabling factors. For example, ponder the fire tetrahedron: A fire, being contingent, has Read More ›

From Mind Matters Today: Succinctly, researchers using Bell’s theoretical insight into quantum entanglement have shown that there are no deterministic local hidden variables. This means that the final state of entangled quantum particles is not determined by any variables in the initial state. Nature at its most fundamental level is indeterminate. The states of bound particles are not determined by any local variable at the moment of separation. Bell’s inequality and the experimental work that has followed on it conclusively demonstrate that quantum entanglement, and thus nature, is not determinate, at least locally. There remains the remote possibility of non-local determinism, but that view is considered fringe and is rejected by nearly all physicists working in the field. It is Read More ›

Instead of meaningless? How exactly did we get from “Alone” to “Meaningless” via eloquence from tenured pundits? Where do we buy return tickets? A blogging neurologist asks this obvious question. From Steven Novella at The Ness: Until, however, we detect actual aliens or their signals, the rest of the factors in the equation are likely to remain a mystery. Put simply – we have a sample size of one. We don’t know how likely life is to develop intelligence, and intelligence technology, and how long such civilizations tend to last. We won’t know until we encounter evidence of aliens. And, if there are few or no other aliens out there, we will never know the full answer. We would only Read More ›

. . . given what it takes for us to be here as credibly responsible, rational, morally governed creatures. This is of course my response to UD News’ recent articles on the challenge to “prove” the existence of God, as was recently issued by the President of the Philippines, His Excellency Rodrigo Roa Duterte. Of course, much hinges on the meaning of “proof,” and so I first pause to note a point made by Simon Greenleaf in his treatise on Evidence: >>Evidence, in legal acceptation, includes all the means by which any alleged matter of fact, the truth of which is submitted to investigation, is established or disproved . . . None but mathematical truth is susceptible of that high Read More ›

That’s the claim by Paul Thagard at Psychology Today: In a recent New York Times column, Stephen T. Asma claims that religion can help people to deal with grief much better than science can. His case for religion over science has four flaws. It depends on a view of how emotion works in the brain that has been rendered obsolete by advances in neuroscience. It underestimates how much science can help to understand the nature of grief and to point to ways of overcoming it. It overestimates the consoling power of religion. Finally, it neglects how science can collaborate with philosophy to suggest ways of dealing with grief. … Science does not directly address normative questions concerning right, wrong, and Read More ›

From tipster Ken Francis again, who is currently sitting in for Richard Dawkins’s social secretary and wants us to know that at RT: Question More, ‘Tedious old racist’: Richard Dawkins under fire for dismissing ‘aggressive’ Muslim prayer Best-selling atheist author Richard Dawkins has once again been branded “racist” after he tweeted that the sound of cathedral bells is much more pleasant than the “aggressive-sounding Muslim Allahu Akbar.” More. Come to think of it, we hadn’t heard much from or about Dawkins lately; well, he has certainly fixed that. Francis adds, “Richard gives praise to the Lord (stop laughing, Denyse).” Okay, not laughing. He notes that Dawkins also wants more secular chaplains, Humanists UK has been advertising – including in the Read More ›

Ken Francis, hat tipped below, writes to inform us of this vid featuring Frank Turek, of I don’t have enough faith to be an atheist fame, debating non-theist anthropologist Dennis Nørmark last year: Nørmark: In his role as a critic of literature, and formerly also of television, for both the newspaper, ‘Morgenavisen Jyllands-Posten’, and from 2015 also, ‘Politiken’, he has to this day been an incisive critic of societal and political issues in a direct and unapologetic fashion. Turek remarks: Denis Normark fails to give a good argument as to why in his worldview if Stalin decided that the meaning of his life is to kill whoever gets in his way it would not be wrong. What do you think? Read More ›

From Carlo Rovelli at Scientific American: Against Philosophy is the title of a chapter of a book by one of the great physicists of the last generation: Steven Weinberg.1 Weinberg argues eloquently that philosophy is more damaging than helpful for physics—it is often a straightjacket that physicists have to free themselves from. Stephen Hawking famously wrote that “philosophy is dead” because the big questions that used to be discussed by philosophers are now in the hands of physicists.2 Neil de Grasse Tyson publicly stated: “…we learn about the expanding universe, … we learn about quantum physics, each of which falls so far out of what you can deduce from your armchair that the whole community of philosophers … was rendered Read More ›

From the BBC: Albert Einstein thought the three dimensions of space were linked to time – which serves as a fourth dimension. He called this system space-time, and it’s the model of the Universe that we use today. But Einstein also thought it was possible to fold space-time, creating a shortcut between two distant locations. This phenomenon is called a wormhole, and it can be visualised as a tunnel with two openings, each emerging at different points in space-time. Wormholes might exist naturally in the cosmos; indeed, scientists in Russia are trying to use radio telescopes to detect them. But using wormholes for time travel won’t be straightforward. Indeed not. Unless everything is absolutely determined, some wise person from the Read More ›

And Big Science is afraid to confront it. From Katherine Timpf at National Review: A course that will be taught at Hobart and William Smith Colleges next year will teach students that “objectivity” and “meritocracy” are examples of “white mythologies” and “social constructs.” … The idea that objectivity is somehow a myth, or that it has anything even remotely to do with “whiteness,” is so absolutely stupid that I feel like I don’t even have to spend time explaining why. Objectivity isn’t a myth. For example: … Truly, it is odd how often I see stories like this, because people on the left are always the ones claiming to stand for science. They often accuse the Right of refusing to Read More ›

From Amy K. Hall at Stand to Reason: Recently, when I asked an atheist why he was an atheist, the first reason he gave was that “science has disproved God.” When I asked what he meant by that, he started listing miracles in the Bible—such as the virgin birth—that were impossible for him to believe “because of science.” This is simply a misunderstanding of what a miracle is and, therefore, how one can evaluate it. Yes, people have used the methods of science to study the natural workings of the reproductive system and have very accurately said that virgins do not get pregnant naturally, but of course, no Christian ever claimed they did! We agree on how the reproductive system Read More ›

From Amy K.Hall at Stand to Reason: Are naturalistic assumptions necessary for doing science? In the video below (or see the transcript here), Stephen Meyer argues that not only is naturalism not necessary, but in fact, it was a Christian worldview that gave rise to modern science. More. From Transcript: The first thing to say is that science did not arise because of a set of naturalistic presuppositions. It actually arose because of a conviction that there was a lawful order in nature, that human beings could discern and understand it because they’d been made in the image of the creator of that order, and that also they needed to go investigate. While they might expect that there’s a rational Read More ›

From Sabine Hossenfelder, author of Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, at her blog Back(re)action: It occurred to me some years ago, however, that there is a much simpler example for how reductionism can fail. It can fail simply because the extrapolation from the theory at short distances to the one at long distances is not possible without inputting further information. This can happen if the scale-dependence of a constant has a singularity, and that’s something which we cannot presently exclude. With singularity I here do not mean a divergence, ie that something becomes infinitely large. Such situations are unphysical and not cases I would consider plausible for realistic systems. But functions can have singularities without anything becoming infinite: Read More ›

Here. Paper. See also: From Philip Cunningham: Darwin’s theory vs. falsification