Many of our materialist friends do not seem to know the difference between the epistemological categories of “self-evident” and “apparent.” I am providing this primer on the difference to help them understand. Here is a typical exchange where a materialist makes this category error. Barry: It is self-evident that torturing an infant for pleasure is evil. Materialist: Yeah, lots of things that have seemed self-evident have turned out to be false. For example, people used to believe it is self-evident that the earth is flat, and they were dead wrong. Where has M gone wrong? First, M has gone wrong on the basic factual premise of his comparison. The ancients knew the earth was round and even measured its circumference. Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: “We don’t know whether the crows have cumulative technological culture, and one of the reasons is that we don’t know how they learn,” said Logan. “There’s a hypothesis that says in order for cumulative technological culture to occur you need to copy the actions of another individual. And we don’t know whether the crows are paying attention to the actions of others when they learn from someone else.” … Logan and colleagues found that the crows don’t imitate or copy actions at all. “So there goes that theory,” she said. “Assuming how they learn in a non-tool context carries over to a tool context, they wouldn’t copy the actions of individuals they see cutting up Pandanus leaves to Read More ›

Sometimes, it is a sad necessity to make a public example. In this case, P has been attacking not only inductive reasoning but chains of reasoning in general, in order to try to make the generic chaining of warrant illustrated in the following infographic — and especially its focus on the trichotomy, (i) infinite regress, (ii) circularity, (iii) finitely remote first plausibles — seem dubious: (NB: To see where that frame of thought goes, cf here on in context. Also, here.) P commented at 101 in the DK etc thread, and I replied as follows, at 120 by clipping and commenting: _______________ >>Here is the bit of rhetorical trickery and attempted ridicule in the face of what you knew (as Read More ›

As usual, we close off our religion coverage for the week with inspirational messages from the new atheists. As many new atheists appear to have gone to relationship counselling (possibly why they are no longer threatening to sue each other or creating scenes in elevators for a global public?),  we are once again proud to serve our house product (; ) Richard Dawkins. We understand that the lost messiah portrait of Dawkins has been found: Hallelujah, the lost painting is found! I am so delighted. https://t.co/9aHaASQuNA — Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) August 7, 2015 Meanwhile, the second Volume of his autobiography is virtually in hand, https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/635868366679359493 Today arrived my first advance copy of the 2nd volume of my autobiography, UK Edition. Read More ›

… it turns out that he mainly means the ones from religious families: TPP’s basic philosophy was that while you are entitled to your beliefs you are not entitled to avoid discomforting or contradictory ideas, you are not entitled to a free-pass when it comes to a critical analysis of beliefs like yours (individuals were never picked on). After all this is about education. These days parents and students still want the higher education passport, a degree, to jobs and careers, but the current attitude is that when parents present you with a narrow-minded, anti-science, parochial, self-satisified, entitled little twerp, the twerp is to be returned in the same condition, which seems totally antithetic to higher education. Apparently though business Read More ›

Here is a “red pen” for all of those who insist that unborn babies are not human. Deny that baby’s humanity until you are red in the face. Your denial is insane. You know the truth.

From Science: Feature: Why big societies need big gods, by Lizzie Wade, Science’s Latin American correspondent: Although much of Egyptian cosmology is alien today, some is strikingly familiar: The gods of today’s major religions are also moralizing gods, who encourage virtue and punish selfish and cruel people after death. But for most of human history, moralizing gods have been the exception. If today’s hunter-gatherers are any guide, for thousands of years our ancestors conceived of deities as utterly indifferent to the human realm, and to whether we behaved well or badly. The theory introduced (and contested by other researchers) is that the idea of powerful and moral gods tracked the growth of large societies: Norenzayan thinks this connection between moralizing deities and Read More ›

In December 2013, I wrote a post on the subject of miracles in response to Professor Robert Greg Cavin and Dr. Carlos A. Colombetti, titled, Cavin and Colombetti, miracle-debunkers, or: Can a Transcendent Designer manipulate the cosmos? Today, I received an email from Professor Cavin, who claimed I had totally misconstrued his (and Colombetti’s) argument. In today’s post, I’d like to take the opportunity to respond. Professor Cavin’s email was courteously worded, so I shall attempt to maintain the same standard of civility in my reply. Cavin’s main complaint is that I presented a straw man caricature of his (and Colombetti’s) argument in my original post. Specifically, he writes that I appear to think that he (and Colombetti) maintain that Read More ›

Great article up at The Federalist. Excerpts: Political Correctness is all about Propaganda Compliance. PC is the engine of the propaganda machine that produces mass delusion. PC is basically a calculated process of molding public opinion through psychological manipulation. The process is twofold: saturation and suppression. Saturation is the practice of repeating a deception relentlessly and injecting it into every corner of public life so that it becomes accepted as truth. It involves control of most communications outlets. Political Correctness is all about Propaganda Compliance. PC is the engine of the propaganda machine that produces mass delusion. PC is basically a calculated process of molding public opinion through psychological manipulation. The process is twofold: saturation and suppression. Saturation is the Read More ›

First, only one-third of published psychology research is reliable. How do we respond? We sort of knew that but, from the Conversation: What does it mean if the majority of what’s published in journals can’t be reproduced? Publishing together as the Open Science Collaboration and coordinated by social psychologist Brian Nosek from the Center for Open Science, research teams from around the world each ran a replication of a study published in three top psychology journals – Psychological Science; Journal of Personality and Social Psychology; and Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition. To ensure the replication was as exact as possible, research teams obtained study materials from the original authors, and worked closely with these authors whenever they Read More ›

From Aeon: Curiosity about trivial things might have evolved. Not because it’s likely to be adaptive, but maybe as a necessary by-product of a drive to understand the world, which is itself useful. … But even if the truth is valuable in itself, that doesn’t mean it’s always better to know. There might still be situations where we should choose ignorance. Indeed, it’s important to distinguish here between intrinsic value and overriding value. Saying that truth has intrinsic value means that something being true is a reason in favour of believing it, and that it might sometimes be good to pursue the truth even when it’s not useful for anything else. It doesn’t mean that the truth is so valuable Read More ›

In the combox to a prior post KF brought this article to my attention: On the Nature of Debate, Denial and Refutation by Robert L. Kocher. It could not have come at a better time. In the past few weeks I have noticed an increase in plain old irrationality from our opponents. You catch them in outright falsehoods; they do not acknowledge it. They just spew out another comment. You catch them in a contradiction; again, they ignore it and act as if there was no contradiction and you did not catch them. You state a self-evident fact. They deny it. Quite honestly, they have begun to wear me down. It turns out I am not alone. Kocher writes: It Read More ›

In customer service: 7 Ways to Engage Your Customer’s Reptilian Brain According to SalesBrain and the Triune Brain theory, the reptilian region is the brain’s attention gatekeeper and decision maker. If you can grab the attention of a consumer’s reptilian brain with your landing page, advertisement, or commercial, you’ve got a much better chance of guiding them to conversion. Fortunately, there are specific techniques you can use to make your value proposition communicate directly to this region and give you the edge in engaging your audience from the start. Although the Triune Brain theory is sometimes controversial as experts argue about it’s accuracy – see this earlier Neuromarketing post, the theory provides a helpful, simplified view of how the brain Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Pygmies show growth plasticity is key to human evolution While the stature of pygmies is well-suited to tropical rainforests, the mechanisms underlying their growth remain poorly understood. In order to decipher these mechanisms, a team of scientists from the CNRS, IRD and UPMC studied a group of Baka pygmies in Cameroon. Their findings revealed that their growth rate differed completely from that of another pygmy cluster, despite a similar adult height, which implies that small stature appeared independently in the two clusters. This work is published on 28 July 2015 in Nature Communications. More. Sure, but so…? The scientists were thus able to show that although the body size at birth of the Baka was within normal limits, Read More ›

From RealClearScience: The pebble accretion model, as the idea is called, suggests that tiny objects first coalesce together due to drag then gravitationally collapse and form larger objects one hundred to one thousand kilometers in size. These larger objects, now referred to as planetesimals, than draw in all the remaining pebbles and become the cores of larger planets. Simulations completed last year cast doubt on this interesting theory. They suggested that — in the context of our solar system — too many planetesimals would form — as many as one hundred objects the size of Earth! Since our Solar System only contains eight planets and five recognized dwarf planets, this theory was mostly ruled out. However, a new simulation carried Read More ›