We ask on account of this paper on how to talk to people who think that climate change isn’t as bad as many are making out. Rob Sheldon wonders why a science faculty is so much more concerned with psychology than facts.
Science
Granville Sewell: Darwinism as a form of losing one’s mind
In an age when objectivity is becoming science’s enemy in the United States and massive corruption is a norm in its former science competitor Russia, scientists can still make a virtue out of being true to Darwin. Wherever that lands them.
Is Buddhism really the most “science-friendly religion”?
Thompson’s point is applicable beyond Buddhism. “Theistic” evolutionists, for example, start with the premise that God wouldn’t “create” anything. That is really a message about God, not about nature, and it is bound to be a church-closer.
800 Russian journal papers retracted: The most interesting question is undiscussed
To the extent that science is global, tolerated fraud in one milieu taints an entire discipline. Recall the smug people who think that science is an infinitely superior way of knowing, Won’t that be an increasingly harder sell as more people become aware of these tip-of-the-iceberg “bombshell” revelations?
A classic reminder from MIT that most important science problems “await solution”
New discoveries don’t just add to old ones; they can greatly change or destroy their significance. That’s exactly what is happening to Darwinism today and we are living in the middle of it.
Is “social justice” destroying objectivity in science?
Prediction: The Darwinists will knuckle to the post-facts, post-objectivity rampage, leaving the non-Darwinists to defend science. This is your monkey brain on survival of the fittest: They will persecute Darwinians who speak out.
Harvard astronomer tells us why ultra-complex physics theories come to exist
They are not principally data-driven. “In today’s fierce job market, fledgling scientists sometimes attempt to impress their senior colleagues with lengthy derivations marked by challenging mathematical complexity.” If he thinks evidence is important, that should rule out the multiverse.
Ethan Siegel asks at Forbes, Did God create the universe?
Siegel makes an interesting comparison with, say, Sabine Hossenfelder. He does great graphics but to say that he is not a deep thinker is to shower him with imprudent praise. By contrast, we go on listening to Hossenfelder with great interest, whether the graphics are good or not.
Michael Egnor sympathizes with people who think the universe is conscious
Michaael Egnor: There is no doubt that consciousness is a fundamental property of animal and human existence. As philosopher Philip Goff notes, a philosophy that cannot plausibly account for it cannot be correct.
At Scientific American: Can science rule out God?
If Alpert’s speculation pans out, naturalism could end up with a religion where God is an unprincipled Narcissist. Cool.
Will AI replace scientists?
Jonathan Bartlett put that at #6 on his AI hype list
At Aeon: Religion, science, and post-modernism
McLeish: Much of ‘postmodern’ philosophical thinking and its antecedents through the 20th century appear at best to have no contact with science at all, and at worst to strike at the very root-assumptions on which natural science is built, such as the existence of a real world, and the human ability to speak representationally of it.
Are God and science good chemistry?
Oxford mathematician John Lennox offers some thoughts, speaking as a guest of the Claremont Center for Reason, Religion, and Public Affairs
Legal activism as one of the threats to science
The thing to see here is that when commentators go on about the public that doesn’t “believe in science,” Darwinism isn’t the only, um, “science” people don’t really believe in. It’s all worse than that, it seems.
Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor explains why new atheism was doomed to die young
Anyone who didn’t immediately accept all this new atheist rubbish as Big Insight was a moron, right? But Dr. Egnor goes on to warn that reason will not emerge victorious from a horse laugh at the declining new atheists’ expense.