Philosophy

For the past several weeks, there has been an exchange that developed in the eduction vs persuasion thread (put up May 9th by AndyJones), on first principles of right reason and related matters.  Commenter RDF . . .   has championed some popular talking points in today’s intellectual culture. We can therefore pick up from a citation and comment by Vivid, at 619 in the thread (June 12th), for record and possible further discussion. Accordingly, I clip comment 742 from the thread (overnight) and headline it: _____________ >>. . . let us remind ourselves of the context for the just above exchanges, by going back to Vivid at 619: [RDF/AIG:] And once again I must remind you that you are mistaken. Read More ›

This my third installment of a discussion I began here and continued here on the validity of the claim that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”, or what I call the EC-EE claim. In the first installment we looked at the EC-EE claim itself and asked whether the EC-EE claim is an example of an EC-EE claim that failed to live up to its own standard. In the second installment, we looked at what exactly are the extraordinary claims being made by ID that so require such extraordinary evidence, or is it Darwinian evolution that is really making the extraordinary claim and so far has failed the EC-EE test? In this third post I want to look at the evidentiary side Read More ›

Over at the KF blog, we have recently been entertaining some ghosts from our civilisation’s past, who are concerned about its present and now sadly likely future in light of the sad history recorded in Acts 27, of a sea voyage to Rome gone disastrously wrong because the voyagers were manipulated into venturing back out at Fair Havens, when they ought to have been wintering. That is, while democracy is obviously better than realistic alternatives, there is nothing sacred or necessarily sound and wise about majority rule (even when minorities are heard out, respected and protected — as seems increasingly to be fading away . . . ), especially when the majority view has been manipulated by agenda driven interests. Read More ›

In all things there are two different kinds of characteristics: quality and quantity. While quantity is relatively easy to define, quality is difficult to define or specify. Consider an apple. It is easy to grasp what is the difference between one apple, two apples, three apples… only an integer number changes, representing the amount of apples. Differently, it becomes hard to define in detail what an apple is, what are its essential properties and its intrinsic attributes, ─ in a single word ─ what is its quality, which distinguishes it from anything else. This is more true more the thing investigated is complex and rich of information and organization. Often a quality of a thing is related to its shape. Read More ›

The late Carl Sagan is credited with popularizing the phrase “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”. (hereinafter this will be referred to as the “EC-EE” claim) While the phrase has become the skeptic’s mantra, its original roots probably trace back to the French mathematician and astronomer Pierre –Simon LaPlace (1749-1827) who once wrote: “the weight of evidence for an extraordinary claim must be proportioned to its strangeness”. Regardless of its origins, the sentiment expressed in the quote has, over the last few years, become one of the bedrock critiques against ID. The notion seems to be along the lines that ID’s core claim is that only an unembodied supernatural intelligence can account for the specified complexity exhibited in biological systems, and Read More ›

It seems I need to headline a corrective footnote on basic reasoning, from an ongoing exchange in a current discussion thread: ________ >> I decided to take a look around via Google. It was saddening but unsurprising to see the party-spirited objections to first principles of reason coming from the circle of objector sites. Inadvertently, they show the very reason why there is a serious problem of want of basic rationality in our civilisation in general, but in particular among those strongly influenced by avant garde, ideologically popular secularist, evolutionary materialist progressivism and that species of ultra-modernity that likes to call itself post modernism. A few points: 1 –> The first steps in reasoning do start with our common sense status Read More ›

This morning, CH has by implication raised the issue that has been hotly debated recently: getting a cosmos out of “nothing.” I thought it would be helpful to headline my comment: ______________ >>  . . . “Something from nothing” is always problematic. Now, I know I know, here is Ethan Siegel of Science Blogs in partnership with Nat Geog, inadvertently illustrating the problem: It’s often said that you can’t get something from nothing. And while this may be true for most practical applications of your life, it isn’t true for our physical Universe. And I don’t just mean some tiny part of it; I mean all of it. When you take a look at the Universe out there, whether you’re Read More ›

Over on The Panda’s Thumb blog, Darwinian apologist P.Z. Myers recently posted a pejorative laden critique of a review article by Casey Luskin. Luskin was responding to a recent New York Times article on a study purporting to show how certain genes in fish might hold an important clue on how fins turned to feet. I won’t rehearse the articles here, you can read them in the links. Rather, I want to look a bit more closely at Myer’s critique of Luskin’s article and the supposedly “scientific” problems he has with Luskin. He begins by highlighting a quote from Luskin’s article where Luskin writes, “Hox genes are known to be widely conserved among vertebrates, so the fact that homology was Read More ›

In answering yet another round of G’s talking points on design theory and those of us who advocate it, I have outlined a summary of design thinking and its links onward to debates on theology,  that I think is worth being  somewhat adapted, expanded and headlined. With your indulgence: _______________ >> The epistemological warrant for origins science is no mystery, as Meyer and others have summarised. {Let me clip from an earlier post  in the same thread: Let me give you an example of a genuine test (reported in Wiki’s article on the Infinite Monkeys theorem), on very easy terms, random document generation, as I have cited many times: One computer program run by Dan Oliver of Scottsdale, Arizona, according Read More ›

The Omega watch company’s co-axial chronometer  is billed as the most precise mechanical device in the world.  In their video ad featured here, the images associate the intricate design of the cosmos with the design of the watch…a classic teleological argument.  The implication seems to be that the intricate, superb design of the watch is equal to that of the Cosmos itself.  But if you’re a philosophical naturalist, as nearly every ID critic is, then you accept that the watch requires an intelligent design, the forces of matter and energy interacting over eons of time through chance and/or necessity not being adequate to explain a watch.  However, that same ID critic accepts that the Cosmos, and everything in it, which Read More ›