Philosophy

From Notes and Comments at The New Criterion: If you are thinking of building a bridge, be careful if your engineer went to Purdue University. Donna Riley, the head of the engineering department at Purdue, has put the world on notice that “rigor” is a dirty word. In an article for Engineering Education called “Rigor/Us: Building Boundaries and Disciplining Diversity with Standards of Merit,” Professor Riley, who is also the author of Engineering and Social Justice, argues that academic “rigor” is merely a blind for “white male heterosexual privilege.” Yes, really. “The term,” she writes, “has a historical lineage of being about hardness, stiffness, and erectness; its sexual connotations—and links to masculinity in particular—are undeniable.” There follows a truly surreal Read More ›

A friend writes to draw our attention to this 2014 book: by James Stroud, The Philosophy of History: Naturalism and Religion: What is philosophy? What is history? Is much of what we have been taught false concerning these two? Author James Stroud not only breaks down the often neglected field of philosophy of history but shows why much of what we have taken for granted in the subject of “”Origins”” belongs just as much in the field of history as it does in science. Supporting an open-philosophy of history versus the current closed-philosophy in place, Stroud systematically shows why the paradigm of Naturalism is most likely false and should therefore not influence the way the historian is forced to interpret Read More ›

From Ken Francis, journalist and author of The Little Book of God, Mind, Cosmos and Truth, at New English Review: Isn’t it odd that the enormous volume of highly artistic works—from movies, drama, literature, poetry to music—are invariably bleak but give us immense joy? (This is especially evident in the yesteryear world of popular music, but I’ll come to that later.) One wonders are we better off living in a fallen world after all, as a perfect one without strife would lack in artistic excellence. But does a world with immense suffering justify moments of optimism through the transient pleasures of the arts, despite their dark themes? After all, one can’t have Shakespeare’s work without its tragedy, or W.B. Yeats without a Read More ›

Physics Today’s media analyst., Steven T. Corneliussen, whom we quoted earlier on the downturn of pop science writing drew attention to the fate of the March for Science, as covered by Kate Sheridan and Lev Facher at STAT: The event’s official diversity policy, posted just days after the march was announced in January, has undergone repeated revisions, and is now in its fourth version. They were not inclusive enough, it seems. The statement was designed to be an evolving document, Holloway said, but the massive early interest led to a level of scrutiny the march’s organizers didn’t expect. It was rewritten and expanded in late January, and tweaked again in February to add language about disability and inclusiveness. The official Read More ›

He offers assorted notes… In a compiled video of 50 elite scientists, no scientific evidence was ever presented for atheism but their arguments were philosophical and theological, i.e. ‘their typical arguments are rather common and shallow – god of the gaps and the existence of evil.’ Elite Scientists Don’t Have Elite Reasons for Being Atheists: (November 8, 2016) Excerpt: Dr. Jonathan Pararejasingham has compiled a video of elite scientists and scholars to make the connection between atheism and science. Unfortunately for Pararejasingham, once you get past the self-identification of these scholars as non-believers, there is simply very little there to justify the belief in atheism…. What I found was 50 elite scientists expressing their personal opinions, but none had some Read More ›

And we can still read him. From Suzan Mazur at HuffPost, including a 2008 interview: We are grateful to Jerry Fodor—perhaps the most substantial philosopher of our time, who has now died—for exposing what he called the “empty” Darwinian theory of natural selection and for his courage as well as his superb humor in the face of unrelenting opposition. “I’m in the Witness Protection Program,” Fodor joked when I called him to request an interview following publication of his provocative article in the London Review of Books (“Why Pigs Don’t Have Wings,” October 2007) about the problems of Darwin’s selectionist theory. Fodor never claimed to be a biologist. “It’s not my field,” he told me. But he was the son Read More ›

From Jeanne Lenzer at Undark: In another case of cure as cause, a landmark study of Prozac to treat adolescent depression found that it increased overall suicidality — the very outcome it is intended to prevent. In the study, 15 percent of depressed adolescents treated with Prozac became suicidal, versus 6 percent treated with psychotherapy, and 11 percent treated with placebo. These numbers were not made obvious by Eli Lilly, the manufacturer, or the lead researcher who claimed that Prozac was “the big winner” in the treatment of depressed teens. Doctors, unaware that the drug could increase suicidality, often increased the dosage when teens became more depressed in treatment, thinking the underlying depression — not the drug — was at Read More ›

Philosopher Étienne Gilson (1884–1978): A scientist never begins by defining the method of the science he is about to initiate. Indeed, the surest way of recognizing false sciences is by the fact that they make the method come first. The method, however, should derive from the science, not the science from the method.” – Etienne Gilson, Methodical Realism. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2011, p. 100. Evolution does not exist in order to make Darwin right. One thinks here of molecular evolutionist Dan Graur’s war cry: “… if ENCODE is right, then evolution is wrong. ENCODE argues that there is not much “junk” in our DNA. Graur disagrees. How about: Either ENCODE or Graur could be wrong but the facts are never Read More ›

Because it pays. From physicist Sabine Hossenfelder at BackReaction: To the end of producing popular papers, the best tactic is to work on what already is popular, and to write papers that allow others to quickly produce further papers on the same topic. This means it is much preferable to work on hypotheses that are vague or difficult to falsify, and stick to topics that stay inside academia. The ideal situation is an eternal debate with no outcome other than piles of papers. You see this problem in many areas of science. It’s origin of the reproducibility crisis in psychology and the life sciences. It’s the reason why bad scientific practices – like p-value hacking – prevail even though they Read More ›

In a recent thread, the Kalam Cosmological argument family was challenged on the issue: can an actual infinity exist? If not (presumably due to Hilbert’s Hotel-like absurdities), then God could not be an infinite being as such is impossible of being. A thread of discussion developed, and I thought a summary intervention may be helpful. On further thought, perhaps it should be headlined: _________________ KF, 12: >> I think several themes are worth highlighting. It can be discussed that non-being, true nothingness cannot be a causal source. Were there ever utter nothing, such would therefore forever obtain. There would be no world.But, manifestly, there is a world. So, we must ponder the logic of being, at least in a nutshell. Read More ›

Information, of course, is notoriously a concept that has many senses of meaning. As it is central to the design inference, let us look (again) at defining it. We can dispose of one sense right off, Shannon was not directly interested in information but in information-carrying capacity; that is why his metric will peak for a truly random signal, which has as a result minimal redundancy. And, we can also see that the bit measure commonly seen in ICT circles or in our PC memories etc, is actually this measure, 1 k bit is 1,024 = 2^10 binary digits of storage or transmission capacity. One binary digit or bit being a unit of information storing one choice between a pair Read More ›

Ken Francis, journalist and author of The Little Book of God, Mind, Cosmos and Truth, reviews C. R. Hallpike’s Do We Need God To Be Good at New English Review: … Dr. Hallpike continues in his book: We can therefore agree with Hitchens that there is no reason to expect any special differences here between the conduct of believers and unbelievers, and the same would be true as well of many immoral actions that are also generally agreed to threaten the social order, such as theft, rape, and murder. To this extent it is clear that one does not need God to be good, and we also have to consider the influence of the traditional culture. So it is not particularly surprising Read More ›

From Evan Minton at Cerebral Faith: In defense of the Kalam Cosmological Argument, apologists such as William Lane Craig, Frank Turek, and myself will argue for the second premise (i.e that the universe had a beginning to its existence) by arguing that an actually infinite number of things are impossible. If an actually infinite number of things are impossible, then a beginningless universe cannot exist since it would involve an actually infinite number of things existing, namely, past events. If you’ve read my book Inference To The One True God, you’ll know that the reason to believe an actually infinite number of things cannot exist is that if they could, various absurdities would result. For example, if I had an Read More ›

From CBS: NEW PALTZ, N.Y. (CBSNewYork) — At a time when participation in traditional religions is declining among Americans, the practice of witchcraft is said to be on the rise. CBS2’s Ali Bauman went inside the secret world of modern-day witches to explore why so many say they’re falling under its spell. “I am the high priestess,” Lisa Stewart said. “To be a witch is incredibly relevant in today’s society,” Anton Stewart explained. More. It sure is. As noted elsewhere, witchcraft is, in principle, compatible with naturalism: Although they were not materialists, our ancestors do appear to have been naturalists. They believed in gods, but gods were merely beings with considerable powers over nature. They were usually placated. But they Read More ›

Recently, we posted a link to  Ken Francis’s item at New English Review, which addresses, in part, the question of whether angels exist: The atheist philosopher, David Hume, said if rational people have a choice to believe more than one explanation of an event, they should choose to believe that explanation which is most probable. Hume would argue that such a supernatural event of an angelic encounter, by definition, is unbelievable. For Hume, an encounter with an angel would be a violation of the laws of nature. In An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, he writes: “There must, therefore, be a uniform experience against every miraculous event, otherwise the event would not merit that appellation. And as a uniform experience amounts Read More ›