Philosophy

It’s been a while sorry, but here’s my latest:   Quote of the Month: Robin Collins on why ID isn’t a part of science

From Mike Klymkowsky at PLOS blogs: So where do (scientific) theories come from? Initially they are guesses about how the world works, as stated by Richard Feynman and the non-scientific nature of vague “theories”. Guesses that have evolved based on testing, confirmation, and where wrong – replacement with more and more accurate, logically well constructed and more widely applicable constructs – an example of the evolution of scientific knowledge. That is why ideas are cheap, they never had, or do not develop the disciplinary rigor necessary to become a theory. In fact, it often does not even matter, not really, to the people propounding these ideas whether they correspond to reality at all, as witness the stream of tweets from Read More ›

At PhilEvents: Recent epistemology has seen an explosion of interest in disagreement and other related questions in social epistemology. While much progress has been made on abstract and general epistemological issues relating to disagreement, there has been surprisingly little discussion of how, if at all, these lessons can be applied to disagreement within science in particular. Furthermore, several aspects of the topic go beyond merely applying lessons from analytic epistemology. For example, scientific disagreement is unlike many ordinary cases of disagreement in that there is often little reason to think that the disagreement is due to a simple mistake by one of the parties of the type often appealed to in the epistemology of disagreement literature. Rather, if there is Read More ›

Sometimes, one of our frequent objectors has a truly noteworthy letting- the- cat- out- of- the- bag moment that is worth headlining. In the still live CT2 thread, AK unwittingly exposes the incoherence and implied amorality of atheistical, evolutionary materialism when he comments in key part: AK, 80: >>Since the moral fabric is man made, all we are doing is seeing it change, as it has done over the centuries. Sometimes history shows that the change has been for the good, and sometimes for the bad. But since civilization is thriving, it is reasonable to conclude that we have had more wins than losses.>> Note first, “[s]ince the moral fabric is man-made.” Here, the question is clearly begged in grand Read More ›

It goes downhill from there. If I were a Darwinian, I would be embarrassed by this stuff. From Jeremy E Sherman at Psychology Today: I’m an atheist with a PhD. in evolutionary theory. I spend much of my time encouraging a new relationship with religion and spirituality modeled on our relationship with fiction. For example, I wish that Christians believed in Christ the way they believe in Santa Claus, as a fictional character based loosely on a historical one, reconfigured to embody a first-cut simplification of Christian values for kids that remains vivid and valued by nostalgic and conscientious adults. Most of the world, for whatever reason, continues to distinguish between apparent truth and admitted fiction. Now, as to Sherman’s main Read More ›

A philosophical question to wake you up. A reader directs our attention to a 2015 piece by cosmologist Alexander Vilenkin at Inference Review (2015): THE ANSWER to the question, “Did the universe have a beginning?” is, “It probably did.” We have no viable models of an eternal universe. The BGV theorem gives us reason to believe that such models simply cannot be constructed. More. He offers the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin (BGV) theorem by way of evidence: Loosely speaking, our theorem states that if the universe is, on average, expanding, then its history cannot be indefinitely continued into the past. More precisely, if the average expansion rate is positive along a given world line, or geodesic, then this geodesic must terminate after a Read More ›

The other day, I ran across the Wiki article on Laws of Science. While there is much good there, such as: The laws of science, scientific laws, or scientific principles are statements that describe or predict a range of phenomena as they appear in nature.[1] The term “law” has diverse usage in many cases: approximate, accurate, broad or narrow theories, in all natural scientific disciplines (physics, chemistry, biology, geology, astronomy etc.). Scientific laws summarize and explain a large collection of facts determined by experiment, and are tested based on their ability to predict the results of future experiments. They are developed either from facts or through mathematics, and are strongly supported by empirical evidence. It is generally understood that they Read More ›

In his final paper, with Hertog, scaling back the multiverse? From Philip Goff at the Guardian: But if all of the universes have exactly the same laws – as in Hawking and Hertog’s proposal – the problem returns, as we now need an explanation of why the single set of laws that govern the entire multiverse is fine-tuned. Hertog seems not to agree, arguing that the paper does make progress on fine-tuning: “This paper takes one step towards explaining that mysterious fine-tuning … It reduces the multiverse down to a more manageable set of universes which all look alike.” However, this merely puts off the explanation of fine-tuning, for the result is that the laws underlying the generation of the Read More ›

From science historian James Gleick at the New York Times, reviewing astrophysicist Adam Becker’s What Is Real?: So quantum physics — quite unlike any other realm of science — has acquired its own metaphysics, a shadow discipline tagging along like the tail of a comet. You can think of it as an “ideological superstructure” (Heisenberg’s phrase). This field is called quantum foundations, which is inadvertently ironic, because the point is that precisely where you would expect foundations you instead find quicksand. … The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics When scientists search for meaning in quantum physics, they may be straying into a no-man’s-land between philosophy and religion. But they can’t help themselves. They’re only human. “If you Read More ›

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 campaign against Karl Popper’s falsification criterion for science. “I assume that these critics have only read other people’s writings about Popper and not Popper himself.” and Question for multiverse theorists: To what can science appeal, if not evidence?

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. One of those narratives is the truth and the others aren’t; it’s as simple as that. Maverick Philosopher observes, Is it really so simple? Dennett is suggesting that his naturalist narrative is not a mere narrative, but the true narrative. If so, then there is truth; there is a way things are in themselves apart from our stories and beliefs and hopes and desires. I Read More ›

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 to plug the hole and save the theory. The history of science is full of examples of this ex post facto intellectual engineering. In 1781, William and Caroline Herschel discovered the planet Uranus. Physicists of the time promptly set about predicting its orbit using Sir Isaac Newton’s law of universal gravitation. But in the following decades, as astronomers followed Uranus’s motion in its slow 84-year Read More ›

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 worse, than its alternatives. More. Hat tip: Pos-Darwinista See also: (if you have the day off) Does the size of the universe sweep us toward atheism? Philosopher: If there is something rather than nothing, questions around God cannot be ignored Waghorn: “Firstly, that on the most plausible demarcation criterion for science, science is constitutionally unable to show theism to be a redundant hypothesis; the debate Read More ›

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 failure. Inductive inference over the pocket universes, it would seem, is impossible. I argue that this conclusion of impossibility mistakes the nature of the problem. It confuses the case in which no inductive inference is possible, with another in which a weaker inductive logic applies. The alternative, applicable inductive logic is determined by background conditions and is the same, non-probabilistic logic as applies to an Read More ›

Here. Paper. See also: Film night with Philip Cunningham: Atheists’ reasons for not believing in God are not scientific, and more…