Here and below, Jeff Brown, offers his thoughts on the new pastiche religion that a writer at New Scientist would like to invent.
Brown, a pastor in Nuremberg, Germany, holds a B.S. in Biology and a Ph.D. in Systematic Theology. Read More ›
The debate: Does Good Come From God II by Sam Harris vs William Lane Harris 7 April 2011 at Notre Dame is now on YouTube.
Part 1 of 9 – Harris vs Craig – Does Good Come From God Read More ›
British physicist David Tyler, who posts here, has a comment in Nature on “Laird of physics” James Clerk Maxwell, particularly the Laird’s disquiet with materialism, a fact not noted in the article on maxwell: As the Victorian age matured, science leaders became increasingly materialistic. At a meeting of the British Association in 1874, President John Tyndall took the opportunity to advance his worldview (of materialism). In the audience was James Clerk Maxwell, who crafted this poem to express his disquiet: For poem, go here.
A fine tuning and multiverse advocate, Martin J. Rees, today won the 2011 Templeton Prize. The astrophysicist with no religion won the Prize originally “for Progress in Religion.”
The 2011 Templeton Prize was announced today.
LONDON, APRIL 6 – Martin J. Rees, a theoretical astrophysicist whose profound insights on the cosmos have provoked vital questions that speak to humanity’s highest hopes and worst fears, has won the 2011 Templeton Prize.
Rees, Master of Trinity College, one of Cambridge University’s top academic posts, and former president of the Royal Society, the highest leadership position within British science, has spent decades investigating the implications of the big bang, the nature of black holes, events during the so-called ‘dark age’ of the early universe, and the mysterious explosions from galaxy centers known as gamma ray bursters. Read More ›
Interesting article in PLoS Medicine (source): Why Most Published Research Findings Are False By John P. A. Ioannidis Abstract: There is increasing concern that most current published research findings are false. The probability that a research claim is true may depend on study power and bias, the number of other studies on the same question, and, importantly, the ratio of true to no relationships among the relationships probed in each scientific field. In this framework, a research finding is less likely to be true when the studies conducted in a field are smaller; when effect sizes are smaller; when there is a greater number and lesser preselection of tested relationships; where there is greater flexibility in designs, definitions, outcomes, and Read More ›
A friend points to this review of an interesting new book:
In Unsimple Truths: Science, Complexity, and Policy, Sandra D. Mitchell accomplishes an enormous amount in very short compass. Starting from the actual practice of (mainly) biological and (some) social sciences, she presents a workable and effective philosophy of science focused particularly on sciences dealing with complex subject matters. Drawing on nicely handled examples from psychiatry (e.g., major depressive disorder), biology (e.g., recent genetics and genomics, drug discovery, the study of insect societies), and the policy world (e.g., climate change and economic problems), Mitchell develops and illustrates a philosophy of science suited to the complexities scientists face. The result is a compact and elegant presentation of a philosophy she calls “integrative pluralism,” challenging many orthodox positions in the philosophy of science. While keeping her examples in the foreground, Mitchell provides a philosophical basis for rethinking the methods for analyzing complex systems in situations involving considerable uncertainty. She also demonstrates by example the value and reach of her philosophical approach in contrast with more conventional philosophies of science, from Popperian falsification and standard forms of inductive reasoning to sophisticated forms of theory and model testing.
Long overdue, if you ask me.
“Considerable uncertainty”? Um, yes. Most human systems are unthinkably complex.
That does not mean we can’t act or make decisions, but it does mean that we must work with fuzzy boundaries: Causes of Alzheimer? Dangers of radiation? Sin/salvation foods? Alternative medical treatments? Last ditch cancer fight? Simple answers, begone!
For example, Read More ›
First, it’s okay to doubt the received ape-ology nostrums. No, really. It is.
Re that: Memo to Templeton’s Rod Dreher: It is still okay to doubt received nostrums. And it had better be.
Tom Bethell, author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science (Regnery Publishing), wrote to introduce us to the “other side” of Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Marilynne Robinson (for Gilead, 2005), who recently took the occasion of her four Yale Terry Lectures to attack the evolutionary biologists who talk as if science were atheism writ large.
But let Bethell tell it: Read More ›
Courtesy Britain’s Royal Society. A friend notes that three Nobel Prize winners were among the speakers: Read More ›
THE NATURE OF NATURE is now finally out and widely available. If you haven’t bought it yet, let me suggest Amazon.com, which is selling it for $17.94, which is an incredible deal for a 7″x10″ 1000-page book with, for most of us, no tax and no shipping charge (it costs over $10 to ship this monster priority mail). This is a must-have book if you are interested at all in the ID debate. To get it from Amazon.com, click here. Below is the table of contents and some introductory matter.
(Other news coverage continues below)
———————————————
Seven years in the making, at 500,000 words, with three Nobel laureate contributors, this is the most thorough examination of naturalism to date.
<<<<<>>>>>
The Nature of Nature: Examining the Role of Naturalism in Science
Edited by Bruce L. Gordon
and William A. Dembski
ISI Books
Intercollegiate Studies Institute
Wilmington, DE 19807
Back Cover:
So here is our ID community reb Moshe Averick’s take on a bunch of complaints about his recent book: Rabbi, this is just the old “Argument from Ignorance” or a “god-of-the gaps” argumentRabbi, you ignored the implications of Darwinian Evolution Rabbi, you ignored current Origin of Life research, particularly the RNA-World research Rabbi, you are “quote mining” (i.e. presenting statements by scientists out of context and misleading the readers) Rabbi, this is just the “Argument from Incredulity” Rabbi, you are “primitive, backward, superstitious and anti-science” Rabbi, we must have unwavering faith in Science and Scientists Hey, I’m with the Reb. Okay, okay, yes, I am a Catholic, but if I had to choose, and the Church had never been invented, … Read More ›
PaV’s recent post Darwinn Step Aside – Survival of the ‘Quickest’ got me thinking again about natural selection and the role it supposedly played in evolution. The conventional wisdom among Darwinists, including Darwin himself, is that NS is a mechanism. The very title of Darwin’s famous tome suggests as much – On The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection . The clear implication is that NS is some sort of mechanism. A mechanism by definition is something that does something. Consider the simple dictionary definition of the term “mechanism”
1
a : a piece of machinery b : a process, technique, or system for achieving a result
2
: mechanical operation or action : working 2
3
: a doctrine that holds natural processes (as of life) to be mechanically determined and capable of complete explanation by the laws of physics and chemistry
4
: the fundamental processes involved in or responsible for an action, reaction, or other natural phenomenon
In “Science and religion are wise to talk”, a letter to Nature, UK Christian Darwinists Denis Alexander and Bob White explain,
As far as the mingling of scientific and religious language is concerned, we agree that this is a justifiable concern. In the United Kingdom, the Faraday Institute (our institution) is well known for its criticism of both creationism and intelligent design. Attempts to introduce theological language into the practice of science is as damaging for theology as it is for science. Each academic discipline has its own specialized language and its own criteria for justifying its claims; mixing them only creates confusion.However, we disagree with the scientists you cite who oppose any kind of interdisciplinary engagement between science and religion, or who maintain that they are in conflict. (Nature, 471, 166 (10 March 2011) | doi:10.1038/471166b)
Thought, on hearing the good word above: A widely used phrase like “conflict (or no conflict) between science and religion” is meaningless absent details about what science and whose religion.
For example, if someone, using advanced neuroscience, can exquisitely target and destroy brain areas so that people cannot form concepts that might include dissent from the government – and the Catholic Church opposes it? Is that a “conflict between science and religion”?
What if representatives of another religion come along and say, “Yes, this is wonderful, now there will be no more infidels and no more disobedience to the great prophet. It fits our theology because we don’t believe in free will anyway.” So that is “no conflict between science and religion”?
Must be. That’s pretty much how the debate on using stem cells from abandoned embryos has been understood.
Anyway, physicist David Tyler offers an interesting comment here: Read More ›
Our good friend and fellow UD commentator Denyse O’Leary recently wrote about John Farrel’s recent musings on Forbes on what evidence for God might look like…or least what sort of evidence might make him sit up and take notice. Here I want to go a step further than Denyse did, and look at this question of evidence a bit more in depth.
Of course, the question of what might constitute evidence for the existence of God is nothing new in the never ending atheism/theism debate. The more outspoken atheists such as those of the so-called “new” atheist variety (i.e. Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens, Dennett et.al.) make quite a fuss about saying that there is no evidence for any sort of God or gods at all. Indeed, Dawkins now well-known diatribe against theism, The God Delusion, is a tour de force of proclaiming the lack of any sort of scientific evidence for the existence of God. Hence anyone still clinging to such a belief is doing so sans evidence and is thus suffering a ‘delusion’. But is that really the case? Read More ›
Here’s a clip from an old (1998) debate between William Lane Craig and atheist Peter Atkins. Atkins, after touting scientism, is lectured by Craig on five things that cannot be justified by science but are nonetheless rational to believe: Beautiful! Here’s the YouTube link: click here.
Denyse O’Leary writes about Barbara Forrest’s fact-free attack on Frank Beckwith, which recently appeared in Synthese. While Denyse focused more on Beckwith’s response to Forrest’s scholarly article diatribe, it might be worth taking a closer look not only at Forrest’s article, but the entire issue of Synthese in which it is found. First Forrest. In the abstract for her article with the breathtaking title “The non-epistemology of intelligent design: its implications for public policy”, Bar writes:
Intelligent design creationism (ID) is a religious belief requiring a supernatural creator’s interventions in the natural order. ID thus brings with it, as does supernatural theism by its nature, intractable epistemological difficulties.
Okay, so we’re only 2 sentences into the abstract and we can already see that Bar has no clue what ID is about. Read More ›