You’ve gotta love Sev’s refreshing honesty. In this post I noted that killing little babies was not uncommon in ancient cultures. And then I asked: [Materialists] say that morality is a social construct; which means that “good” means what the people of a society collectively deem to be good. If that is so, was it an affirmatively good thing when an ancient pagan killed a baby girl because she was a baby girl instead of a baby boy? Sev’s response: it was an affirmatively good thing for them then but it is certainly not an affirmatively good thing for me now. Who is right? As far as I can see, there is no absolute standard against which to measure it. Read More ›

Photographer and philosopher Laszlo Bencze has been rereading Thomas Nagel’s Mind & Cosmos (2012), and he writes to say, I’m finding Mind and Cosmos to be a very thought provoking book. In it Nagel sets himself the task of explaining the existence of mind (or consciousness) without resorting to either materialistic evolution or to theism. I suspect that most of us on will feel that he’s missing the obvious answer, theism, but Nagel refuses to accept that. Therefore he goes through some rather elaborate mental contortions in trying to find a path which is “the territory between them.” He kindly sends us his notes from Nagel: The priority given to evolutionary naturalism in the face of its implausible conclusions about Read More ›

Here. Paper. See also: From Philip Cunningham: Darwin’s theory vs. falsification

From Nobelist Eugene Wigner (1902–1995): “The principal argument against materialism is not that illustrated in the last two sections: that it is incompatible with quantum theory. The principal argument is that thought processes and consciousness are the primary concepts, that our knowledge of the external world is the content of our consciousness and that the consciousness, therefore, cannot be denied. On the contrary, logically, the external world could be denied—though it is not very practical to do so. In the words of Niels Bohr, “The word consciousness, applied to ourselves as well as to others, is indispensable when dealing with the human situation.” In view of all this, one may well wonder how materialism, the doctrine that “life could be Read More ›

 Inspiring Philosophy Philip Cunningham kindly forwarded this, noting that “Quantum mechanics has repeatedly confirmed the startling conclusion that (material) reality cannot exist without consciousness.” True, but defenders of a rational approach to science tend to forget that many people today are educated to think that reason and evidence are tools of oppression, that only their feelings are valid. That won’t end well, no matter what their feelings are. See also: How naturalism rots science from the head down The illusion of consciousness sees through itself. and Question for multiverse theorists: To what can science appeal, if not evidence?

From Brian Miller at ENST: In a previous article I described how scientific training can condition some scientists’ minds to resist the evidence in nature for intelligent design. Now, I will demonstrate the effects of this process using as a case study the book Adam and the Genome: Reading Scripture after Genetic Science, co-authored by Dennis Venema. I must begin by stating that I have never met Dr. Venema, but I have met several of his colleagues, and from my encounters with them I have no reason to doubt that Venema desires to operate with complete integrity and to present scientific claims and arguments that are of the highest academic quality. The challenge he faces lies not with his character Read More ›

At ENV Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor exposes how materialist metaphysics flounders on logical grounds in its theory of mind: As an example, let us suppose that a certain pattern of neuronal activation in my cortex were shown to represent my thought about justice. Obviously that pattern is not my thought about justice itself — justice is a concept, not a bunch of neurons. And if that pattern of neuronal activation represented my thought about justice, it must map to my thought of justice, which presupposes my thought about justice and thus cannot explain it. Succinctly, mental representation of abstract thought presupposes abstract thought, and cannot explain it. It is on abstract thought that materialism, as a theory of mind, flounders. Abstract thought, Read More ›

Here is a piece I (O’Leary for News) wrote for the first edition of Salvo (2006). Interesting to see how it has held up after more than a decade has past. – 0 – About three years ago, I predicted that the intelligent design controversy would explode in a few years, with every instapundit punding away furiously — some thoughtful, some foolish, some merely malign. The latter mood was expressed beautifully by a board member of Kansas Citizens for [promoting materialism in] Science, who summarized her public relations strategy against intelligent design advocates in February 2005 as follows: She advised her troops to portray them “’in the harshest light possible, as political opportunists, evangelical activists, ignoramuses, breakers of rules, unprincipled Read More ›

Sources here. See also: Ribosome precisely structured for cell growth

Denyse recently linked to a presentation by Scott Minnich regarding the bacterial flagellum.  Minnich is probably among the dozen or so leading experts in the world on the bacterial flagellum.  Much of the information in his presentation will be familiar to followers of the issues, but a few points bear further examination. First a couple of bench-science items that jumped out at me: Minnich and his team discovered that DNA has a regulatory function in the form of a temperature switch.  Let me be clear, it is not that DNA codes for some molecular machine that is a temperature switch.  The DNA itself is the switch.  In simple terms, the coding portion that codes for a particular protein is bounded Read More ›

From Adam Frank at Aeon: It is as simple as it is undeniable: after more than a century of profound explorations into the subatomic world, our best theory for how matter behaves still tells us very little about what matter is. Materialists appeal to physics to explain the mind, but in modern physics the particles that make up a brain remain, in many ways, as mysterious as consciousness itself. … Some consciousness researchers see the hard problem as real but inherently unsolvable; others posit a range of options for its account. Those solutions include possibilities that overly project mind into matter. Consciousness might, for example, be an example of the emergence of a new entity in the Universe not contained Read More ›

A friend posts this quotation from Ayn Rand: Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism. It is the notion of ascribing moral, social or political significance to a man’s genetic lineage—the notion that a man’s intellectual and characterological traits are produced and transmitted by his internal body chemistry. Rand’s conclusion is correct.  And the reasoning by which she gets to that conclusion is also correct. So whence the title of this post you might ask. Good question.  The answer is that given her premises as a reductionist materialist, Rand is not permitted logically to make the argument that she has made, because a reductionist materialism, by definition, insists that “a man’s intellectual and characterological traits are produced Read More ›

To be held at Hughes Hall, Cambridge University. Full details are here: Book here. Note: It doesn’t cost a lot but tickets are limited. Conference Description Since Darwin, biology has been dominated by a bottom-up, materialistic framework in which living things are ultimately derived from undirected physical processes — at the origin of life itself — and then change via random variations sifted by natural selection (or drift) throughout three billion years of organismal evolution. Within the past three decades, however, the sufficiency of this materialist framework has been strongly challenged by unexpected evidence. What if information, and not physical or material causes, provides the key to understanding biology? What are the principles governing the origin and transmission of biological information? Read More ›

rvb8, one of our regular self-described atheistic materialists, makes some pretty interesting assertions, considering he admits he is not a scientist: That is where you stumble, because chance and the interaction of forces and matter can explain it. I’m with Mr Dawkins there; 99% sure, and am quite happy for you to build faith upon the remaining 1%. the building blocks of life came from the first stars, and continue to be produced by Super Novas, and are ubiquitous throughout the universe. The energy required to start this process of trial and error combinations of these chemicals and water, came from the sun, the heat of the earth, impacting astroids, electrical storms etc Wikipedia has an excellent article on Miller/Urey. Read More ›