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.
Science
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.
Sabine Hossenfelder on avoiding cognitive biases
Hossenfelder: But the most problematic cognitive bias in science is social reinforcement, also known as group think…
Asked at The Scientist: “Does science describe experience or truth?”
As it happens, the loss of theism puts science in an impossible position. A traditional monotheist (and probably most deists) would assume that God creates according to logic and reason and that the scientist can indeed find out the truth by “thinking God’s thoughts after him.” But otherwise, why? Loss of the theistic perspective leads directly to the current demands that science credentials and acknowledgements be apportioned on the basis of fairness as if they were public goods of some kind.
Would Hooker, Boyle, Pascal, and Newton all be out of work today?
The original main reason that science was so largely the preserve, for centuries, of well-to-do European men (many of whom were clergy or religious brothers) is circumstantial: They were available in considerable numbers in the right places at the right time.
What difference did Protestantism make to modern science?
In reality, it is mixed. For example, consider eugenics. The Catholic Church always opposed that dreadful scourge of people armed with strong opinions passing laws compelling some of their neighbors to be sterilized. When they did so, these eugenicists were acting explicitly as the priests of science. That was their idea of a vocation and Protestant churches largely supported it.