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J. B.

Do our genes reveal the hand of God? - Telegraph - 0 views

www.telegraph.co.uk/...es-reveal-the-hand-of-God.html

Science and Theology Darwinism Scientism

shared by J. B. on 26 Feb 11 - Cached
  • I went into science because of these religious reasons, there's no doubt about that. I asked myself what were the two things that appear inexplicable and are used to support religious beliefs: the difference between living and nonliving things, and the phenomenon of consciousness.
J. B.

Living Fossils: A Powerful Argument for Creation - 0 views

creation.com/werner-living-fossils

Fossils

shared by J. B. on 24 Feb 11 - Cached
  • J. B. on 24 Feb 11
     
    Birds living at same time as dinosaurs?
J. B.

CultureLab: A tour of the multiverses - 0 views

www.newscientist.com/...a-tour-of-the-multiverses.html

Multiverse

shared by J. B. on 24 Feb 11 - Cached
  • J. B. on 24 Feb 11
     
    The universe a hologram?
J. B.

The decline effect and the scientific method : The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...101213fa_fact_lehrer

Philosophy of Science Science and Faith

shared by J. B. on 14 Feb 11 - Cached
  • Replicability is how the community enforces itself. It’s a safeguard for the creep of subjectivity. Most of the time, scientists know what results they want, and that can influence the results they get. The premise of replicability is that the scientific community can correct for these flaws. But now all sorts of well-established, multiply confirmed findings have started to look increasingly uncertain. It’s as if our facts were losing their truth: claims that have been enshrined in textbooks are suddenly unprovable. This phenomenon doesn’t yet have an official name, but it’s occurring across a wide range of fields, from psychology to ecology. In the field of medicine, the phenomenon seems extremely widespread, affecting not only antipsychotics but also therapies ranging from cardiac stents to Vitamin E and antidepressants: Davis has a forthcoming analysis demonstrating that the efficacy of antidepressants has gone down as much as threefold in recent decades.For many scientists, the effect is especially troubling because of what it exposes about the scientific process. If replication is what separates the rigor of science from the squishiness of pseudoscience, where do we put all these rigorously validated findings that can no longer be proved? Which results should we believe? Francis Bacon, the early-modern philosopher and pioneer of the scientific method, once declared that experiments were essential, because they allowed us to “put nature to the question.” But it appears that nature often gives us different answers.
  • “One of my mentors told me that my real mistake was trying to replicate my work. He told me doing that was just setting myself up for disappointment.”
  • J. B. on 14 Feb 11
     
    Replicability is how the community enforces itself. It's a safeguard for the creep of subjectivity. Most of the time, scientists know what results they want, and that can influence the results they get. The premise of replicability is that the scientific community can correct for these flaws. But now all sorts of well-established, multiply confirmed findings have started to look increasingly uncertain. It's as if our facts were losing their truth: claims that have been enshrined in textbooks are suddenly unprovable. This phenomenon doesn't yet have an official name, but it's occurring across a wide range of fields, from psychology to ecology. In the field of medicine, the phenomenon seems extremely widespread, affecting not only antipsychotics but also therapies ranging from cardiac stents to Vitamin E and antidepressants: Davis has a forthcoming analysis demonstrating that the efficacy of antidepressants has gone down as much as threefold in recent decades. For many scientists, the effect is especially troubling because of what it exposes about the scientific process. If replication is what separates the rigor of science from the squishiness of pseudoscience, where do we put all these rigorously validated findings that can no longer be proved? Which results should we believe? Francis Bacon, the early-modern philosopher and pioneer of the scientific method, once declared that experiments were essential, because they allowed us to "put nature to the question." But it appears that nature often gives us different answers.
J. B.

Hawking contra Philosophy | Philosophy Now - 0 views

www.philosophynow.org/...Hawking_contra_Philosophy

Philosophy of Science

shared by J. B. on 15 Feb 11 - Cached
  • Science has always included a large philosophical component, whether at the level of basic presuppositions concerning evidence, causality, theory-construction, valid inference, hypothesis-testing, and so forth, or at the speculative stage where scientists ignore the guidance offered by well-informed philosophers only at risk of falling into various beguiling fallacies or fictions.
  • this diagnosis, or something like it, applies to a great many of the speculative notions nowadays advanced by theoretical physicists including proponents of string theory (Hawking among them) and some of the more way-out quantum conjectures. These thinkers appear unworried – blithely unfazed, one is tempted to say – by the fact that their theories are incapable of proof or confirmation, or indeed of falsification as required by Karl Popper and his followers. After all, it is the peculiar feature of such theories that they posit the existence of that which at present, and perhaps forever, eludes any form of confirmation by observation or experiment.
  • reliance on theoretical commitments that exceed the utmost scope of empirical testing is something that some philosophers would attribute even to basic physical laws or widely taken-for-granted scientific truths. On their view there is no such thing as plain empirical self-evidence, since observations are always to some degree theoretically informed. By the same token, scientific theories are always ‘underdetermined’ by the best evidence to hand, meaning that the evidence is always open to other, equally rational interpretations given some adjustment of this or that ‘auxiliary hypothesis’ or negotiable element of background belief.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • scientific theories – especially theories of the ultra-speculative kind that preoccupy theoretical physicists like Hawking – involve a great deal of covert philosophising which may or may not turn out to promote the interests of knowledge and truth. This had better be recognised if we are not to be taken in by a false appeal to the authority of science as if it possessed the kind of sheer self-evidence or indubitable warrant that could rightfully claim to evict ‘philosophy’ as a relic from the pre-scientific past.
  • Here Hawking’s argument shows all the signs of a rudderless drifting between various positions adopted by different philosophers from Kant to the present. He spends a lot of time on what seems to be a largely unwitting rehash of episodes in the history of idealist or crypto-idealist thought, episodes which have cast a long shadow over post-Kantian philosophy of science. That shadow still lies heavy on Hawking’s two central ideas of M-theory and model-dependent realism. They both look set to re-open the old Kantian split between a ‘noumenal’ ultimate reality forever beyond human knowledge and a realm of ‘phenomenal’ appearances to which we are confined by the fact of our perceptual and cognitive limits. So if Hawking is right to charge some philosophers with a culpable ignorance of science then there is room for a polite but firm tu quoque, whether phrased in terms of pots calling kettles black or boots on other feet. For it is equally the case that hostility or indifference toward philosophy can sometimes lead scientists, especially those with a strong speculative bent, not only to reinvent the wheel but to produce wheels that don’t track straight and consequently tend to upset the vehicle.
  • Indeed, there is a sense in which the scientific enterprise stands or falls on the validity of counterfactual-conditional reasoning, that is to say, reasoning from what necessarily would be the case should certain conditions obtain or certain hypotheses hold. In its negative guise, this kind of thinking involves reasoning to what would have been the outcome if certain causally or materially relevant factors had not been operative in some given instance. Hawking constantly relies on such philosophical principles in order to present and justify his claims about the current and likely future course of developments in physics. Of course he is very welcome to them but he might do better to acknowledge their source in ways of thinking and protocols of valid argumentation that involve distinctly philosophical as well as scientific grounds.
  • To speak plainly: one useful job for the philosopher of science is to sort out the errors and confusions that scientists – especially theoretical physicists – sometimes fall into when they give free rein to a speculative turn of mind.
  • To adapt the economist Keynes’ famous saying: those scientists who claim to have no use for philosophy are most likely in the grip of a bad old philosophy or an insufficiently thought-out new one that they don’t fully acknowledge.
  • There is a large supply of present-day (quasi-)scientific thinking at the more – let us say – creative or imaginative end of the scale that falls into just this hybrid category of high-flown metaphysical conjecture tenuously linked to certain puzzling, contested, or at any rate far from decisive empirical results.
  • these are pseudo-dilemmas brought about by a mixture of shaky evidence, dubious reasoning on it, fanciful extrapolation, and a flat refusal to entertain alternative theories (such as that of the physicist David Bohm) which considerably lighten the burden of unresolved paradox.
  • J. B. on 15 Feb 11
     
    Christopher Norris critiques Stephen Hawking's claim that philosophy is dead.
J. B.

What Happened to Evolution at the NSB? | NCSE - 0 views

ncse.com/...ned-to-evolution-at-nsb-005412

Evolution Darwinism

shared by J. B. on 04 Feb 11 - Cached
  • There are many biologists and philosophers of science who are highly scientifically literate who question certain aspects of the theory of evolution
  • J. B. on 04 Feb 11
     
    John Bruer quote
J. B.

The NASA study of arsenic-based life was fatally flawed, say scientists. - By Carl Zimm... - 0 views

www.slate.com/...all

Scientific Bias Alien Life Peer Review

shared by J. B. on 08 Dec 10 - Cached
  • It turns out the NASA scientists were feeding the bacteria salts which they freely admit were contaminated with a tiny amount of phosphate.
  • I am strongly convinced that we are
  • Any discourse will have to be peer-reviewed in the same manner as our paper was, and go through a vetting process so that all discussion is properly moderated
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • The items you are presenting do not represent the proper way to engage in a scientific discourse and we will not respond in this manner.
  • If they say they will not address the responses except in journals, that is absurd," he said. "They carried out science by press release and press conference. Whether they were right or not in their claims, they are now hypocritical if they say that the only response should be in the scientific literature.
  • I suspect that NASA may be so desperate for a positive story that they didn't look for any serious advice from DNA or even microbiology people
  • The experience reminded some of another press conference NASA held in 1996. Scientists unveiled a meteorite from Mars in which they said there were microscopic fossils. A number of critics condemned the report (also published in Science) for making claims it couldn't back up. And today many scientists think that all of the alleged signs of life in the rocks could have just as easily been made on a lifeless planet.
  • J. B. on 08 Dec 10
     
    Apparently, having your papers published in peer reviewed journals isn't all it's cracked up to be.
J. B.

Taking Science on Faith - New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...24davies.html

Science and Theology Science and Faith

shared by J. B. on 04 Dec 10 - Cached
  • The problem with this neat separation into “non-overlapping magisteria,” as Stephen Jay Gould described science and religion, is that science has its own faith-based belief system.
  • Over the years I have often asked my physicist colleagues why the laws of physics are what they are. The answers vary from “that’s not a scientific question” to “nobody knows.” The favorite reply is, “There is no reason they are what they are — they just are.” The idea that the laws exist reasonlessly is deeply anti-rational. After all, the very essence of a scientific explanation of some phenomenon is that the world is ordered logically and that there are reasons things are as they are. If one traces these reasons all the way down to the bedrock of reality — the laws of physics — only to find that reason then deserts us, it makes a mockery of science.
  • The multiverse theory is increasingly popular, but it doesn’t so much explain the laws of physics as dodge the whole issue. There has to be a physical mechanism to make all those universes and bestow bylaws on them. This process will require its own laws, or meta-laws. Where do they come from? The problem has simply been shifted up a level from the laws of the universe to the meta-laws of the multiverse.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • namely, on belief in the existence of something outside the universe, like an unexplained God or an unexplained set of physical laws, maybe even a huge ensemble of unseen universes, too. For that reason, both monotheistic religion and orthodox science fail to provide a complete account of physical existence.
  • the laws should have an explanation from within the universe and not involve appealing to an external agency. The specifics of that explanation are a matter for future research. But until science comes up with a testable theory of the laws of the universe, its claim to be free of faith is manifestly bogus.
J. B.

The Disenchanted Naturalist's Guide to Reality « On the Human - 0 views

onthehuman.org/...d-naturalists-guide-to-reality

Science and Theology Darwinism Naturalism Atheism Scientism Scientistic

shared by J. B. on 01 Dec 10 - Cached
  • It is one that most naturalists have sought to avoid, or at least qualify, reinterpret, or recast to avoid its harshest conclusions about the meaning of life, the nature of morality, the significance of our consciousness self-awareness, and the limits of human self-understanding.
  • Scientism is my label for what any one who takes science seriously should believe, and scientistic is just an in-your face adjective for accepting science’s description of the nature of reality.
  • the answers to the persistent questions are not what people want to hear, and the bad news may lead them to kill the messenger—scientific research
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • So, scientists have an incentive to cover up
  • the mechanism Darwin discovered for building adaptations is the only game in town. Any explanation of the very existence of even the slightest adaptation must be Darwinian. 
  • Ever since Newton physics has ruled out purposes in the physical realm. If the physical facts fix all the facts, however, then in doing so, it rules out purposes altogether, in biology, in human affairs, and in human thought-processes.
  • the process that Darwin discovered–random, or rather blind variation, and natural selection, or rather passive environmental filtration–does all the work of explaining the means/ends economy of biological nature that shouts out ‘purpose’ or ‘design’ at us. What Darwin showed was that all of the beautiful suitability of living things to their environment, every case of fit between organism and niche, and all of the intricate meshing of parts into wholes, is just the result of blind causal processes. It’s all just the foresightless play of fermions and bosons producing, in us conspiracy-theorists, the illusion of purpose.
  • The fundamental laws of nature are mostly timeless mathematical truths that work just as well backwards as forward, and in which purposes have no role.
  • When it comes to life, natural selection, it turns out, is the only game in town.
  • One source of meaning on which many have relied is the intrinsic value, in particular the moral value, of human life. People have also sought moral rules, codes, principles which are supposed to distinguish us from merely biological critters whose lives lack (as much) meaning or value (as ours). Besides morality as a source of meaning, value, or purpose, people have looked to consciousness, introspection, self-knowledge as a source of insight into what makes us more than the merely physical facts about us. Scientism must reject all of these straws that people have grasped, and it’s not hard to show why. Science has to be nihilistic about ethics and morality.
  • Just because there is strong selection for a moral norm is no reason to think it right. Think of the adaptational benefits of racist, xenophobic or patriarchal norms. You can’t justify morality by showing its Darwinian pedigree.
  • The process of natural selection is not in general good at filtering for true beliefs, only for ones hitherto convenient for our lines of descent.
  • we can’t invest our moral core with more meaning than this: it was a convenience, not for us as individuals, but for our genes. There is no meaning to be found in that conclusion.
  • J. B. on 01 Dec 10
     
    Alex Rosenberg pops the Naturalist's bubble.
J. B.

AlbertMohler.com - The Predicament - Francis Collins, Human Embryos, Evolution, and the... - 0 views

www.albertmohler.com/...and-the-sanctity-of-human-life

Science and Theology Theistic Evolution

shared by J. B. on 01 Dec 10 - Cached
  • Harvard’s Steven Pinker declared that Collins is “an advocate of profoundly anti-scientific beliefs.” Other leading scientists said far worse. Why? As The New Yorker reports this week, Dr. Collins is “a believing Christian.” As writer Peter J. Boyer explains, “The objection to Collins was his faith—or, at least, the ardency of it.
  • Even with all of Francis Collins’ achievements, qualifications, and experience, the bare fact that he is a “believing Christian” is enough to draw the active opposition of many in the scientific establishment. Just being a “believing Christian” is reason enough for suspicion, condescension, and opposition from many. Even when Francis Collins presses his case for evolution, he is dismissed by many scientists simply because he believes in God. In other words, when we are told that we have to accept and embrace the theory of evolution in order to escape being considered intellectually backward, remember the opposition to Francis Collins. It just doesn’t work. When Collins’ elevation to the NIH post was announced, evolutionary scientist P. Z. Myers lamented, “I don’t want American science to be represented by a clown.” This is the predicament of those who argue that evangelicals must accept some form of theistic evolution — the guardians of evolution still consider them clowns.
  • J. B. on 01 Dec 10
     
    Some evidence that Theistic Evolutionists won't gain much respect with their attempt at a mediating position in the scientific community. (Or at least they'll have to be willing to capitulate some more of their religious metaphysic first.)
J. B.

Come and See | The BioLogos Forum - 0 views

biologos.org/come-and-see

Science and Theology Theistic Evolution

shared by J. B. on 01 Dec 10 - Cached
  • Evidence of the Spirit at work is the only true measure we have of our theology; all other measures, including whether it fits our carefully-reasoned arguments of who is in and who is out, are vanity.
  • J. B. on 01 Dec 10
     
    Mark Sprinkle writes that "Evidence of the SPirit at work is the only true measure we have of our theology..." So much for Sola Scriptura...
J. B.

Education Week: Efforts to Improve Evolution Teaching Bearing Fruit - 0 views

www.edweek.org/...12evolution_ep.h30.html

Darwinism Science and Theology Evolution

shared by J. B. on 25 Nov 10 - Cached
  • I wanted them to understand it as an explanation for the natural world
J. B.

Confrontation all the way : Pharyngula - 0 views

scienceblogs.com/...post_6.php

Science and Theology Darwinism Atheism New Atheism Evolution

shared by J. B. on 25 Nov 10 - No Cached
  • the great unifying principle of my discipline
  • wallowing in self-inflicted ignorance
  • weird fantasies
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • religious zealots who have been poisoning the minds of the young
  • Gnu Atheists are so dang angry. Damned right we are. The real question is why everyone else isn't.
  • Idiot America
  • The sea our country is drowning in is a raging religiosity, wave after wave of ignorant arguments and ideological absurdities pushed by tired dogma and fervent and frustrated fanatics.
  • The solution, the only longterm solution, is the sanity of secularism.
  • pseudoscientific BS like intelligent design
  • disease
  • if you're one of those people trying to defend superstition and quivering in fear at the idea of taking on a majority that believes in foolishness, urging us to continue slapping bandages on the blight of faith, well then, you're part of the problem and we'll probably do something utterly dreadful, like be rude to you or write some cutting sarcastic essay to mock your position. That is our métier, after all.
  • the Gnu Atheists have values, too, and premiere among them is truth. And that makes us uncivil and rude, because we challenge the truth of religion.
  • Evolution is a real, and it is a process built on raw chance driven by the brutal engines of selection, and there is no sign of a loving, personal god, but only billions of years of pitiless winnowing without any direction other than short-term survival and reproduction. It's not pretty, it's not consoling, it doesn't sanctify virginity, or tell you that god really loves your foreskin, but it's got one soaring virtue that trumps all the others: it's true.
  • J. B. on 25 Nov 10
     
    Atheist PZ Myers defends his anger toward religious people and has an interesting statement on what he believes the implications of Darwinism are (for those who consider themselves "Theistic Evolutionists").
J. B.

Evolutionary Science Reveals God's Character - Kathryn Applegate - 0 views

biologos.org/...science-reveals-gods-character

Science and Theology

shared by J. B. on 24 Nov 10 - No Cached
  • J. B. on 24 Nov 10
     
    Kathryn Applegate claims that evolution reveals the character of God, but fails to mention any unique contribution evolution might make to our insight into God's character.
J. B.

Response to Several Common ID Objections - 0 views

www.uncommondescent.com/...nists-unable-to-mount-argument

Intelligent Design

shared by J. B. on 24 Nov 10 - No Cached
  • J. B. on 24 Nov 10
     
    Jonathan M responds to several objections raised against ID in a pamphlet distributed by the Scottish Humanist Society
J. B.

Physicist Stephen Barr on Hawking and Mlodinow's "The Grand Design" - 0 views

www.firstthings.com/...and-the-self-creating-universe

Cosmology Hawking

shared by J. B. on 24 Nov 10 - No Cached
  • J. B. on 24 Nov 10
     
    Stephen Barr comments on the claim by Hawking and Mlodinow that the universe may have caused itself from "nothing"
J. B.

Is Scientism a Faith? - 0 views

www.magisreasonfaith.org/...-magis-contributor-bob-kurland

Scientism Philosophy of Science

shared by J. B. on 24 Nov 10 - No Cached
  • J. B. on 24 Nov 10
     
    Bob Kurland asks whether science can substantiate the claims of scientism.
J. B.

Antony Flew on Darwinism and Theology - 0 views

www.philosophynow.org/...47flew.htm

Darwinism Science and Theology Evolution

shared by J. B. on 24 Nov 10 - No Cached
  • J. B. on 24 Nov 10
     
    The late and former atheist Antony Flew writes a brief letter to Philosophy Now magazine, cautioning against drawing hasty theological conclusions from Darwinism
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