Philosophy

From James Blachowicz at New York Times: When a scientist tests a hypothesis and finds that its predictions do not quite match available observations, there is always the option of forcing the hypothesis to fit the data. One can resort to curve-fitting, in which a hypothesis is patched together from different independent pieces, each piece more or less fitting a different part of the data. A tailor for whom fit is everything and style is nothing can make me a suit that will fit like a glove — but as a patchwork with odd random seams everywhere, it will also not look very much like a suit. The lesson is that it is not just the observed facts that drive Read More ›

In this presentation from the AM-Nat conference, Mario Lopez points out the possibility that design itself may be able to serve as a neutral descriptor of what counts as science, where here “design” serves as a general description, not necessarily Intelligent Design.

In this presentation, Tom Gilson describes regularism, intended to be a metaphysically neutral philosophy of science to replace methodological naturalism. Regularism is intended to focus on the things that the scientific methodology needs to operate properly rather than assumptions about what it will discover. Find out more information about the Alternatives to Methodological Naturalism conference.

From astronomy journalist Stuart Clark at Aeon: To get computer models to look similar to the Universe around us, cosmologists have assumed that around 96 per cent of matter and energy are in forms that we cannot directly detect. You might think that this would make cosmologists wary of relying on such hypothetical substances. Yet for the majority working today, dark matter and dark energy are every bit as real as the stars and galaxies that we can see. Such corporate belief might work for business, but it has no place in science. Back in 1620, Francis Bacon published his Novum Organum (The New Method). In his description of how to investigate nature, he cautioned would-be scientists about four ‘idols of Read More ›

From the Guardian: Jerome Ravetz has been one of the UK’s foremost philosophers of science for more than 50 years. Here, he reflects on the troubles facing contemporary science. He argues that the roots of science’s crisis have been ignored for too long. Quality control has failed to keep pace with the growth of science. Excuse us. That is not growing pains. That is systemic rot. Under these harsh conditions, quality becomes instrumentalised. To strive for ‘excellence’ may be impractical; ‘impact’ is the name of the game. The self-sacrificing quest for scientific rigour is displaced by the need to jockey among journals, and perhaps also engage in p-hacking to obtain interesting results. Such conditions can go far to explain the Read More ›

Recently, our WJM offered: Debunking The Old “There Is No Evidence of God” Canard Atheists/physicalists often talk about “believing what the evidence dictates”, but fail to understand that “evidence” is an interpretation of facts. Facts don’t “lead” anywhere in and of themselves; they carry with them no conceptual framework that dictates how they “should” fit into any hypothesis or pattern. Even the language by which one describes a fact necessarily frames that fact in a certain conceptual framework that may be counterproductive. More. I sometimes get lassoed into such discussions and have found three rules to help: 1. First, find out if the person is a pure naturalist atheist who believes that nature is all there is, everything just somehow Read More ›

In the Alternatives to Methodological Naturalism conference, Paul Nelson gave a great talk on Design Triangulation – the inference from system-level functional necessity.
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Repackaged by PBS as defending “beauty”: From PBS: For example, while the Large Hadron Collider has so far failed to show evidence of supersymmetry, many have essentially said that the collision wasn’t powerful enough or that some small modifications are all that’s needed to fit the theory they love with the data they gathered. “Supersymmetry has been around since 1974, for 42 years, and it doesn’t really have any evidence that it’s there. But people really bet their careers on this,” Gleiser explains. “Many physicists have spent 40 years working on this, which is basically their whole professional life.” That may change in in ten years or so, he says, when further advances to the LHC could force the hangers-on Read More ›

Today? Looking back on the Darwin-in-the-schools wars from the vantage point of rethinking evolution, one calls to mind textbook author Douglas Futuyma’s dictum: Darwin showed that material causes are a sufficient explanation not only for physical phenomena, as Descartes and Newton had shown, but also for biological phenomena with all their seeming evidence of design and purpose. By coupling undirected, purposeless variation to the blind, uncaring process of natural selection, Darwin made theological or spiritual explanations of the life processes superfluous. Together with Marx’s materialistic theory of history and society and Freud’s attribution of human behavior to influences over which we have little control, Darwin’s theory of evolution was a crucial plank in the platform of mechanism and materialism Never Read More ›

From Jonah Goldberg National Review: For starters, why are liberalism’s pet issues the lodestars of what constitutes scientific fact? Medical science informs us fetuses are human beings. The liberal response? “Who cares?” Genetically modified foods are safe, sayeth the scientists. “Shut up,” reply the liberal activists. IQ is partly heritable, the neuroscientists tell us. “Shut up, bigot,” the liberals shriek. More. See also: Ignorance and cronyism are the only settled sciences and The Whole Foods circus Follow UD News at Twitter!

If humans are just meat robots, can we be rational creatures? Tim Stratton argues the case that libertarian free will is required in order to consider ourselves in any way rational – that if our decisions are solely the result of physics and chemistry, then we cannot then trust them to be rational in any significant sense. Even if naturalism were true, its being true would undercut our ability to justify the belief that it was true. Read Article

Transgenderism is when a person considers themselves to internally be the opposite sex of their physical body. They mentally “self-identify” in contradiction to the physical fact of their body sex. Transgender law advocates insist that self-identified “transgenders” be given legal right to have unfettered access to all public facilities currently reserved for one sex or the other (male and female restrooms, lockers, showers, women’s shelters, etc.) Obama has recently decreed that all schools that do not fully adopt transgender protections and policies will face the revocation of federal funding. Usually, when a person believes they are something in contradiction to the physical facts (such as believing one is Napoleon, or believing one is a horse), we call that view delusional, Read More ›

  From Clara Moskowitz, reviewing Sean Carroll’s The Big Picture at Scientific American, and interviewing Carroll: Naturalism is the viewpoint that everything arises from natural causes and that there is no supernatural realm. You coin the term “poetic naturalism” for your own particular brand of this guiding philosophy. Why the need for a new term? Naturalism has been certainly been around for a very long time, but as more people become naturalists and talk to each other, their disagreements within naturalism are interesting. I thought there was a judicious middle ground, which I call poetic, between “the world is just a bunch of particles,” and “science can be used to discover meaning and morality.” To me the connotations of “poetic” Read More ›

Michael Flannery, writes, An important point to remember when we talk about ID is what David Klinghoffer mentioned in an extremely insightful ENV article titled, “The Quality of ‘Shyness’ in the Evidence for Intelligent Design.” It bears reading (or re-reading) and reflection. David Kohn has said, I think accurately, that “for Darwin special creation is the equivalent of creation by the miraculous intervention of a personal God.” Now I happen to believe in both. But is this absolutely the only option when we talk about nature and design? Darwin’s mistake was attacking the notion of God as a wand-waving Wizard, not a real God ,and I think it was a failing of William Paley to leave that impression. It made Read More ›

Robbert Dijkgraaf muses on the barbarians at the gates of science at Nautilus: What does the evolving frontier of knowledge mean for society’s relationship with science? Long borders are difficult to patrol. Professional gatekeepers of scientific knowledge can no longer control the flow of information as they used to. In an age of the “University of Google,” people no longer rely on established, peer-reviewed literature but rather seek out manifold sources on the Internet. Fragments of scientific knowledge get absorbed into society this way, as do some scientific values and thinking—which by itself is good. But many of these fragmented bits of knowledge are also invalidated, politicized, and of dubious quality. Actually, a lot of what us rubes found has Read More ›