CategoryPhilosophy
How Is Intentionality Embedded in the Universe?
All efforts to extinguish intentionality and morality only serve to further establish their inescapable realityCan Informational Realism Help Sort Out the Mind–Body Problem?
According to William Dembski, informational realism asserts that the ability to exchange information is the defining feature of realityWhy Doesn’t God Just Do Something Dramatic to Prove He Exists?
The Divine Hiddenness argument for atheism, espoused by Matt Dillahunty, is that, if a perfectly loving God existed, reasonable unbelief would be impossibleBigfoot and Trust in Science: A Cautionary Tale
Of three men searching for Bigfoot in 1969 — a hunting guide, an enthusiast, and a physical anthropologist, which seemed surest that the monster was real?Are the New Atheists Losing Their “Cool” Quotient?
And taking Darwinism with them? A look at what’s happened in the last two decades would seem to suggest thatWilliam Dembski: Destroy the AI Idol Before It Destroys Us
Design theorist Dembski points to the way that chess adapted to computers to become better than ever as a way forward in the age of AIWhy Is Theology the Most Important Empirical Science?
Arguing pro or con about the existence of God has resulted in many successful and/or widely accepted theories in scienceFive Trends That Help Us Make Sense of Space Science Today
The five trends noted below aren’t the only trends of importance but they are worth noting — they result in the kinds of stories that keep appearing in one form or another because the concept has enduring appeal. 1.The multiverse persists as a belief without evidence. At Cosmic Log, science writer Alan Boyle discusses why scientists take the multiverse — the idea that there might be an infinite number of universes — seriously? He points to the book The Allure of the Multiverse (Basic Books 2024) by Saint Joseph’s University physicist Paul Halpern: Scientists have searched for traces of the multiverse at work in the temperature variations of cosmic microwave background radiation — the so-called afterglow of the Big Bang. Read More ›
Citizen Scientist Forrest Mims Tells His Remarkable Life Story
In his new book “Maverick Scientist,” he details the ups and downs of an extraordinarily productive life in science, with few credentials to hide behindForrest M. Mims III (1944–) has so many accomplishments in science and electronics — with little formal training — that they would make your head spin. Getting Started in Electronics, originally written for RadioShack (now the Source), is one of dozens of electronics books Mims has produced over the years, sold more than 1.3 million copies. Introducing his autobiography, Maverick Scientist: My Adventures as an Amateur Scientist (Make Community, LLC, April 2024), the publisher notes, At thirteen he invented a new method of rocket control. At seventeen he designed and built an analog computer that could translate Russian into English and that the Smithsonian collected as an example of an early hobby computer. While majoring in government at Texas A&M Read More ›
Will Scientists Be Forced to Consider the Occult as Science?
When the World Economic Forum invited a witch to Davos to offer incantations, it was more than just window dressingIn the aftermath of the recent plagiarism scandal at Harvard University, in which president Claudine Gay had to resign, one commentator at the Wall Street Journal reminded readers of something she had said earlier. Her earlier, disastrous testimony before Congress on anti-Semitism paved the way for the scandal. Her response to the subsequent widespread criticism was that she had failed to convey “my truth.” Hold on to that phrase. It represents a shift in the intellectual currents of our time. “My truth” or (for grammatical convenience) “private truth” is making serious headway against public truth. That headway is beginning to impact science, as we shall see in later posts. But first it impacts culture. A witch at Davos In line Read More ›
Does Mathematics Belong to an Eternal Realm?
In a recent episode of Closer to Truth, Robert Lawrence Kuhn hosted California State University philosophy professor Mark Balaguer, who defended the proposition that mathematics belongs to an eternal realm. This realm is frequently referred to as the Platonic realm, after the philosopher Plato (approx 424– 348 BC) who first espoused the idea. From the introduction to “Mark Balaguer – Is Mathematics Eternal?” (January 12, 2023); Mathematics is like nothing else. The truths of math seem to be unrelated to anything else—independent of human beings, independent of the universe. The sum of 2 + 3 = 5 cannot not be true; this means that 3 + 2 = 5 would be true even if there were never any human beings, Read More ›
Fighting Pseudoscience With Empathy? Try a Little Humility First…
The accusation of “pseudoscience,” under the current science regime, has often become little more than an elite-driven smear against inconvenient dataStony Brook astrophysicist Paul Sutter has decided to take on the big topic of pseudoscience, which, he says, he encounters “everywhere I go.” He admits that there is no clear definition of pseudoscience. For example, is controversial string theory, which he supports, pseudoscience? Some say it is “practically pseudoscience.” He says no. But happily, he has a personal definition: “pseudoscience has the skin of science but misses its soul.” The soul of science? It involves skills like rigor, where we take our own statements seriously and follow them to their full logical conclusions. Or humility, where we learn to accept that any statement can be proven wrong at any time. There’s also fundamental skepticism, in that we allow the evidence Read More ›