Michael Egnor
My Right Hemisphere Is An Atheist! No, Wait …
In reality, split-brain surgery does not split consciousness in any meaningful senseThe atheist neuroscientist who has made bizarre claims about the outcomes of split brain surgery appears not to know much about neurosurgery.
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COVID-19: Atheism Went Viral As Well
Atheists are uniquely unsuited to accuse others of devaluing human lifeProfessor Steven Pinker’s quickly deleted tweet provides a window into anti-religious hate. In health and medicine, he is entirely mistaken.
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No Free Will Means No Justice
Materialist biologist Jerry Coyne doesn’t seem to understand what denying free will would mean for the criminal justice systemWithout free will, no one is innocent. Who asks cattle on the way to the abattoir if they are guilty or innocent?
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Neuroscience Can’t Dismiss Near Death Experiences
It’s sobering to note that neuroscience has utterly failed to explain how the brain and mind relateDespite claims, NDEs are radically different from any mental experience caused by brain impairment.
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Is Materialism Falsifiable? Yes, Easily.
Neurologist Steven Novella is sure that materialism is not falsifiable by scienceContrary to Steven Novella's claims, cosmological singularities refute materialism. Kurt Gödel can explain
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Thinking Outside the Box Is Not a Disease
Enforced orthodoxy, often described euphemistically as “scientific consensus,” is an impediment to scienceAt the Skeptical Inquirer, we read about the“Nobel Disease,” whereby Nobel Prize-winning scientists ditch critical thinking and embrace unorthodox views. In reality, unorthodoxy helped them win the Prize.
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Physicist Rejects Free Will — and Thus Fails Logic
If we accepted his argument for materialism, we would have to stop believing in it—a curious, self-refuting resultCarroll’s argument that man is wholly governed by physics is self-refuting. Because physics and logic share no commonality, materialists like Carroll implicitly assert that their own arguments lack logic. One might say that the only thing materialists get right is that their ideas are nonsense. If man is all physics, he can have no logic.
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Jerry Coyne Just Can’t Give Up Denying Free Will
Coyne’s denial of free will, based on determinism, is science denial and junk metaphysicsSome day, I predict, there will be a considerable psychiatric literature on the denial of free will. It’s essentially a delusion dressed up as science. To insist that your neurotransmitters completely control your choices is no different than insisting that your television or your iphone control your thoughts. It’s crazy.
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COVID-19: Remembering Dr. Jim Goodrich, 73, Pediatric Neurosurgeon
Born wealthy, he spent his life working 80-hour weeks, operating on poor kids in the BronxHis specialty was reconstruction of the skulls of children born with horrendous skull deformities, and he pioneered the surgery of separation of craniopagus (Siamese) twins.
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Jeffrey Shallit, a computer scientist, doesn’t know how computers work
Patterns in computers only have meaning when they are caused by humans programming and using them.Materialism is a kind of intellectual disability that afflicts even the well-educated. To put it simply, machines don’t and can’t think. Dr. Shallit’s wristwatch doesn’t know what time it is. Dr. Shallit’s iPod doesn’t enjoy the music it plays or listen to his phone calls. His television doesn’t like or dislike movies. And his computer doesn’t, and can’t, think.
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How Not To Debate Materialists
This is the story of how a gifted scientist lost a debate with a Darwinist — a debate he should have wonAlthough ape brains do differ somewhat from human brains in cortical anatomy, it is the similarity between the brains of apes and men, rather than the differences, that provide striking evidence of human exceptionalism.
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God’s Existence Is Proven by Science
Arguments for God’s existence can be demonstrated by the ordinary method of scientific inferenceIf we approach the arguments logically, as the ancient philosophers did, we will see that it is more certain that God exists than that anything else does. Atheist evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne should consider the arguments more carefully before assuming that prayer is foolish.
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Jerry Coyne Hasn’t Got a Prayer
He understands neither natural theology nor natural scienceWe are more scientifically certain of God’s existence than we are of quantum mechanics or Newtonian or relativistic gravitation. The logic is rigorous.
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Why prayer is wise during a pandemic
Evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne thinks that only fools would pray about coronavirus. He is wrong and here is whyIf God is real, then prayer is probably the first thing you want to do in a crisis. A plea to the Boss is a fine preamble to the grunt work of managing a crisis. I’m a neurosurgeon, and I pray before each operation. It really helps.
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Polly Want a … Statistician?
Ethology, the science of animal behavior, offers interesting data but the interpretations are too often witlessCan birds really do statistics? A reporter writing up the results of a study for a popular science magazine seems to think so. The researchers are (appropriately) more cautious. But what are the issues here?
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The Mind Is the Opposite of a Computer
Matthew Cobb, a materialist, only scratches the surface when he explains why your brain is not a computerMental activity always has meaning—every thought is about something. Computation, by contrast, always lacks meaning in itself. A word processing program doesn’t care about the opinion that you’re expressing when you use it. In fact, what makes computation so useful is that it doesn’t have its own meaning. Because the mind always has meaning and computation never does, the mind is the opposite of computation.
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How Can We Study Consciousness Scientifically?
Tam Hunt offers some ideas at Scientific American but his dismissal of objectivity is cause for concern. There is a better way.Hunt is right that the scientific study of consciousness using merely third-person objective data is flawed—it is the idiotic flaw of behaviorism—but the notion that “objective” data needs scare quotes opens the door to a deconstruction of our knowledge of the natural world that is every bit as idiotic and dangerous as the crude materialist objectification of consciousness.
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Did Consciousness Evolve?: A Darwinist Responds
Jerry Coyne argues that consciousness is a mere byproduct of useful traits that are naturally selected. But wait…The critical problem that consciousness poses for Darwinian evolution is that there is no survival advantage for subjective first-person existence over objective third-person existence.
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Meat has no opinions
Why you can't actually deny free willIf we are just meat, as evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne insists, we cannot have a true opinion of the matter. Meat is neither right nor wrong. To have an opinion about free will implies that we accept it.
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