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 at Big Questions Online: The answer is natural selection. So here we have the reason why final-cause talk is permissible and necessary. Thanks to the processes of evolution, organisms appear design-like, even though they are ultimately the result of random variations plus natural selection. In order to make sense of this fact, we often think and talk in terms of ends or purposes, although these Read More ›

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 are still untested, the result is ambiguous. Different models lead to very different predictions for not-yet made observations. Presently, it is therefore utterly pointless to twiddle with the details of inflation because there are literally infinitely many models that one can think up, giving rise to infinitely many different “predictions.” Rather than taking on this overproduction problem, however, Steinhardt et al. in their SciAm piece Read More ›

Paper. See also: The multiverse is science’s assisted suicide

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 future (hundreds of billions of years from now) many evidences for the big bang itself will be gone, preventing future cosmologists from even being able to detect evidence for it. … The conclusion that Krauss and Scherrer come to after this examination of the present and future state of cosmology is that we live in a very special time in the universe. We live in Read More ›

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 ‘human spirit’” (Stanford Plato) Philosopher of physics Dr. Bruce Gordon (Houston Baptist University) talks about the tension between Quantum physics and physicalism: Note: Gordon was one of the editors of The Nature of Nature See also: Consciousness as a state of matter Hat tip: Philip Cunningham

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 theory is equally valid whether or not gravitational waves are detected.” It fulfilled their needs. In 2017, cosmologist George Ellis, long a foe of post-modern cosmology, summed it up: “Scientific theories have since the seventeenth century been held tight by an experimental leash. In the last twenty years or so, both string theory and theories of the multiverse have slipped the leash.” We have so Read More ›

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:                          Critic’s Corner: Sahotra Sarkar     

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. Since its inception in the 1970s, the discipline has produced a sizeable body of work that purports to show that not just the agenda, but even the content of theories of natural sciences is “socially constructed.” All knowledge, in different cultures, or different historical times – regardless of whether it is true or false, rational or irrational, successful or not in producing reliable knowledge – Read More ›

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 example, the question is posed, “Are there any exceptions to the laws of physics?” or “Are miracles possible.” The answer given is, “…the modern scientists answer to question two [exceptions to the laws of physics]…is…a scientific law is not a scientific law if it holds only when some supernatural being decides not to intervene.” This is a clear example of the logical fallacy of “begging Read More ›

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 to verbal arguments. A few years ago I co-organized a workshop on this topic at the Konrad Lorenz Institute for theoretical biology in Vienna, and then published an edited volume of the journal Biological Theory collecting all contributions. It certainly sounds as though Pigliucci talking about the shot heard round the world, The Altenberg 16: An Exposé of the Evolution Industry (2009), though he does Read More ›

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 is a kind of physical disorder, it is, from a metaphysical perspective, a very clear kind of order in natural change: a consistent tendency for the net order of material things to decrease with change. As a consistent tendency, entropy is teleological. Teleology pervades nature: even disorganization in nature is teleological. Entropy isn’t a refutation of Aristotelian teleology. It’s a strikingly clear manifestation of it. Read More ›

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 shouldn’t be the case, if you think about it more carefully.” Assuming that current measurements are correct, the radiation must have exceeded the speed of light if it really communicated in this way, but that is forbidden by the standard Big Bang model of the universe. Then there is the “flatness problem”: “The matter density and expansion rate of the universe appear to be nearly Read More ›

The kalaam argument: The Cosmological Argument or First Cause Argument is a philosophical argument for the existence of God which explains that everything has a cause, that there must have been a first cause, and that this first cause was itself uncaused. The Kalam Cosmological Argument is one of the variants of the argument which has been especially useful in defending the philosophical position of theistic worldviews. The word “kalam” is Arabic for “speaking” but more generally the word can be interpreted as “theological philosophy.” (All About Philosophy) David Snoke, president of Christian Scientific Society, co-authored a paper with Michael Behe (2004). From his article, “Why Christians should not use the Kalaam argument,” The Kalaam argument is essentially as follows, although Read More ›

From Daniel Mallock at New English Review, a review of The Little Book of God, Mind, Cosmos and Truth by Kenneth Francis: The problem of meaning and values is a central issue. Regarding the philosopher Nietzsche and his famous assertion that “God is dead,” Mr. Francis writes that this concept “… gave great comfort to psychopaths and those seeking moral autonomy. In other words, everything is permitted if God does not exist.” The issue of meaning is one of the central issues of religion and of philosophy, too. If there is no God, then humanity itself and everything that we do is an accident—a galactic happenstance—that shatters human attempts to ascribe meaning and value to thoughts, actions, feelings, and to Read More ›

From Springer: To celebrate the 25th International Congress of the International Congress of History of Science and Technology (ICHST), from 23 – 29 July 2017, we have have commissioned a Virtual Special Issue, available for free until August 20. — Local and Global Properties of the World Jacques Demaret, Michael Heller, Dominique Lambert German Water Infrastructure in China: Colonial Qingdao 1898–1914 Agnes Kneitz From ecological records to big data: the invention of global biodiversity Vincent Devictor, Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent Moon-Struck: Artists Rediscover Nature And Observe Jay M. Pasachoff, Roberta J. M. Olson Reconfiguring the centre: The structure of scientific exchanges between colonial India and Europe Dhruv Raina Frits Went’s Atomic Age Greenhouse: The Changing Labscape on the Lab-Field Border Sharon Kingsland The ecological transformation of Cuba Read More ›