[In response to Daniel Dennett’s appeal to computer scientist Alan Turing as reductionist materialism’s greatest champion next to Darwin:] …  at first blush one would think that because Turing had “invented” a “machine,” this might give even Dennett pause and lead him to take a second look at his claim that competence precedes comprehension. For any competence exhibited by a Turing machine would, on its face, presuppose comprehension by, in this case, a mathematician named Turing, who understood the nature of computability and invented a machine (albeit an abstract one) that could perform any and all computations. And one would be wrong — atheists like Dennett have a knack for turning even the most damning evidence against their position into Read More ›