Doesn’t seem like Oxford liked him much for that. And then there’s what Gertrude Himmelfarb had to say at the same time… Hey, a walk through history when it is fun and instructive.
Tag: Laszlo Bencze
Laszlo Bencze offers a thought experiment on whether a random mistake can create information
Bencze: Even in this rare case of a random mistake seemingly creating information (Elizabeth Bishop’s poem, The Man-Moth), the ability of an intelligent agent to notice and respond was critically important.
Laszlo Bencze responds to the view that evil is the absence of good
Bencze: I have found that all people, even diehard progressives,agree that there are some things that are prohibited. They might balk at homophobia. Surely that can’t be permitted? … So, if not all things are permitted, then, logically speaking, god must exist. In this way the existence of evil points to god.
Laszlo Bencze: Just another gratuitous use of the word “evolution” in the WSJ
Bencze: Did the arterial network sprout long before the giraffe’s long neck evolved? Sadly evolution can’t look ahead to provide things that will be useful in the future, so no go.
Philosopher: Darwinism vs. evidence was always a sore point
Laszlo Bencze: As Gertrude Himmelfarb (who did more than any other critic to unmask Darwin’s rhetorical evasions) noted, Darwin’s technique here and elsewhere was “to assume that by acknowledging the difficulty, he had somehow exorcized it,” coming up with a faux confession aimed at propitiating critical dissent.
Are there really any “primitive” animals?
Our philosopher and photographer friend Laszlo Bencze proposes a cultural reason why Darwinism sounds believable. He points out that Charles Darwin lived in an era of continuous mechanical improvements. Did that shape his — and others’ — optimism about things that “just sort of happen” in nature?
Darwinism as useless padding for news media prose
Bencze: the “evolutionary hack” is … “the task of safely raising the next generation.” That is certainly an odd way of referring to parenting but, by alluding to evolution, the tone of the review rises to a more exalted scientific level thus confirming that reviewer Emily is no mere mommy but sort of a scientist herself.
Farewell to Tom Bethell (1936–2021), one of the earliest modern Darwin skeptics
Laszlo Bencze, writes to say, “I am very saddened to hear of Tom Bethell’s death. Not only was he pivotal in my turning away from Darwinism due to his 1976 Harper’s article which I clipped from the magazine and still have but we also became friends during one of his visits to California.”
Trying to subtly deflate Karl Popper’s falsification—again
The war on falsification is like the war on math. Causes with nonsense or destruction at their heart cannot succeed while such values remain in place.
Laszlo Bencze: Karl Popper never really retracted his doubt of Darwin
Bencze: Furthermore [in his recantation], he writes that natural selection is “a most successful metaphysical research program.” Wait a minute. Wasn’t that what he was to apologize for? So within his recantation he is reaffirming his original point of view, the very one that got him in trouble.
Laszlo Bencze on the claim that falsifiability in science is a “myth”
Bencze: Multiverse theory has no falsifiers. It excludes nothing. No potential fact of existence can falsify it. By contrast Relativity has plenty of falsifiers: Something exceeding the speed of light,…
The key to falsifiability of not evidence but observability
Laszlo Bencze: The multiverse theory is irrefutable because alternate universes are, by definition, forever inaccessible. (If they were accessible through some very difficult convoluted route, they would still be part of our universe.)
J.P. Moreland on Darwinism and “reverse intelligent design”
Our philosopher-photographer friend Laszlo Bencze sends us some thoughts on J. P. Moreland’s recent book, Scientism and Secularism: Learning to Respond to a Dangerous Ideology: – (O’Leary for News) I just finished my reading of this book and I think it’s an excellent analysis of the issues which undergird evolution, namely that science and only Read More…