He hopes to address common science, philosophy, and faith issues.
Science
Alister McGrath imagines Richard Dawkins and C.S. Lewis in conversation
Nathan Muse: Regarding faith and reason, McGrath does an excellent job showing how many of Dawkins’ arguments for atheism can easily be turned on their head to prove the opposite and that this actually tells the reader something about the meaning of life.
Bernardo Kastrup: There is an “impassable explanatory gap between material quantities and experiential qualities.”
Kastrup: Even the output of measurement instruments is only accessible to us insofar as it is mentally perceived.
Philosophers: Must science be materialist? Vickers: Yes Kastrup: No
To claim that science must oppose non-materialist ideas is to make it into an ideology. We know little about some aspects of our universe.
Rob Sheldon responds to News’s recent Salvo article, “War on Math”
Sheldon: Talking to a retired St Louis public high school math teacher, the battle was first enjoined 30 years ago over Geometry–eliminating it from the curriculum. Why? Because it was the only course that taught logic, he said.
Authors of article on female vs male mentorship have now retracted their own paper
The bottom line is that—in a move worthy of an existentialist writer like Kafka—Cancel Culture has succeeded in making actual issues around mentorship dangerous to discuss. The big loser is equity, of course, because if one can’t discuss actual issues (like guys are higher in the hierarchy at present), then one can’t propose useful approaches. But there is always, of course, a bureaucrat out there (many, actually), quite ready to conduct a seminar, etc., which will change nothing because no one can afford to be honest.
At Nautilus: How Einstein reconciled religion to science
Actually, despite the article’s title, Einstein didn’t reconcile anything. He said different things at different times to different people. And it didn’t matter. People took what they wanted from it. It sounds as though he didn’t really have a firm opinion.
Gizmodo asks experts to name the biggest science frauds of the past 50 years
Dr. Hesselmann’s probably right but how depressing. In a world where so much research that doesn’t involve fraud fails replication, it’s just a fact that most published research papers in many fields are probably wrong or at least sloppy. So why bother with fraud? But not exactly a good look for science.
Engineer Stuart Burgess on “bad design” in nature
Burgess: Some of the biological elements called bad design are actually ones that systems engineers value quite a bit and use in their work frequently.
The bill collector comes. “Science” candidates did poorly in the US election
Don’t believe us. This is Scientific American talking: ” In the House of Representatives, just two endorsed challengers out of eight won, though one race remains too close to call because mailed ballots are still being counted.” Yuh. If you are a player, you can lose. That’s why we thought it would have been smarter for the Big Science types to stick to their traditional position as referees instead of jumping into the fray with all the others.
We are urged: Keep science irrational
It turns out that Michael Stevens, the author of The Knowledge Machine, is not part of the current assault on math, science, and reason. Rather, he is a fan of hard evidence, however unreasonably sought.
How post-modernism can strangle research
We may need to prepare for truckloads of “research” that can’t be defended on a factual basis, done by and for people for whom “facts” are problematic in principle.
Evidence of loss of faith in science due to political partisanship
Time will tell but the effect may prove cumulative. People lose trust for different reasons and the numbers add up, not down … When the next “Trust the Science!” panic sweeps the internet, a third group will join them, asking, “So what’s in this latest crazy for the Voice of Science?”
Jonathan McLatchie: What about Carl Sagan’s claim about “extraordinary evidence?”
McLatchie: The problem with the word “extraordinary” here is that it is rarely clearly defined. The mantra that I would adopt instead is that all claims require sufficient evidence.
Online Encyclopedia of Nature in English and German announced
One gets the sense that these people are not interested in being mobbed by a swarm of Wikipedia trolls. Let’s hope that’s a trend.