When Scientific American withdrew its offer of a column, on learning that Mims doubted Darwinism, we all learned what matters most to the science elite.
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Given the growing power of private truth, the future of science which, like religion, represents public truth is more uncertain than some expect.
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Whether Platonism is the only possible approach or not, positions like anti-realism seem like an effort to evade the reality of immaterial things.
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Sutter would be better off to worry more when things are called pseudoscience because, despite evidence in their favor, they contradict fashionable thinking.
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When Anthony Fauci claimed to “represent science” — a claim no mortal should make — he probably knocked several points off trust in science immediately.
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Ann Gauger holds that truth, beauty, and goodness are hallmarks of a designed world.
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Philosopher Antony Flew believed that evidence matters; that is why fine-tuning turned him from atheism to deism. Can science do without an evidence base?
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Ancient philosophy can be extremely useful, and entertaining, even when contrary to modern science! See it in the movies!
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What’s really interesting is that all these neuroscientists see panpsychism as just as much of a threat to easy abortion as traditional monotheistic ethics is.
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Can Goff get science gatekeepers to accept fine-tuning simply by slamming traditional religion? If he does, we will certainly know that things are changing.
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One reason there can’t be Final Answers in science is that the questions keep changing as we learn more, and in some cases we are asking the wrong ones.
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Science is more likely to be a decade-long fuss over the ninth decimal place of the muon than about Contact! or Boldly Go. But real learning is like that.
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Although Barbieri depicts the origin of life as the production of “artefacts,” he certainly does not see himself as an intelligent design theorist.
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Decades ago, better informed people trusted ongoing science research. Today, “Trust the Science!” is becoming a jibe — and for good reason.
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In 2016, University of Ferrara theoretical biologist Marcello Barbieri wrote a rather interesting open access paper on a key philosophical conflict in biology: Is life only chemistry or is it chemistry plus information? In it, he says that many biologists see information in life forms — biological information — as something that “does not really belong to science.” How did they get there from here? Author of Code Biology: A New Science of Life (Springer, 2015), Barbieri offers a history, a critique, and a proposed solution. In this three-part series, I will look at all three elements. First, the history. Molecular biology understands genes as transferring linear sequences of information to proteins that carry out instructions. That’s information as it Read More ›
When philosophers of science assume agency without an agent and laws without a lawgiver, they fare no better than ancestors placating fickle gods.
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No day that we can’t provide materialist explanations for everything can even be contemplated and that is where “emergence” stands bravely in the gap.
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Physicist and astronomer Marcelo Gleiser (pictured) offered some thoughts recently on faith and science, noting that the scientific revolution has hardly changed the picture of faith much: “the great scientific advances of the past four centuries have not radically diminished the number of believers” in transcendent realities: If science is to help us, in the words of the late Carl Sagan, by providing a “candle in the dark,” it will have to be seen in a new light. The first step in this direction is to admit that science has fundamental limitations as a way of knowing, and that it is not the only method of approaching the unattainable truth about reality. Science should be seen as the practice of Read More ›
If we can uncover the smallest quantum particles in nature, will we have uncovered the fundamental secrets of reality? A longstanding philosophical tradition in the sciences claims “yes.” Uncovering the mystery of the world lies in the ability to interrogate the smallest of the small. But is that the right way to approach it? What special status does the tiny have over the large? A paper at IAI News by London philosopher Peter West argues that reality can’t in fact be elucidated simply by observing quantum mechanics. He talks in some length about the 17th century text Micrographia by Robert Hooke, which features various images of insects and other organisms under the microscope. West notes that Hooke set the stage, Read More ›
Conundrums like this help us understand why panpsychism (all life forms/cells are conscious in some sense) is beginning to replace materialism in science.
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