Category: Scientism
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Modern Genetics and the Fall: Science and Religion in Collision?
John Farrell, a long-time friend of Maverick Philosopher, has an article in Forbes Magazine entitled Can Theology Evolve? Early in his piece Farrell quotes biologist Jerry Coyne: I’ve always maintained that this piece of the Old Testament, which is easily falsified by modern genetics (modern humans descended from a group of no fewer than 10,000…
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Physicists Should Do Physics but Otherwise Keep Their Mouths Shut
Proof.
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Scientistic Nonsense in the NYT Sunday Book Review
The review begins: The universe, the 18th-century mathematician and philosopher Jean Le Rond d’Alembert said, “would only be one fact and one great truth for whoever knew how to embrace it from a single point of view.” James Gleick has such a perspective, and signals it in the first word of the title of his…
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Multiple Universes and Possible Worlds
Tibor Machan makes some obvious but important points about multiple universes. One is that there cannot be two or more universes if by 'universe' is meant everything that exists in spacetime. I would add that this is a very simple conceptual truth, one that we know to be true a priori. It lays down a contraint that…
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Neuroscientistic Neurobabble
UCLA philosopher Tyler Burge scores some good clean hits against neuroscientistic Unsinn in a December NYT piece. (HT: Feser). For example, did you know that there is an area of the brain that wants to make love? (Is it equipped for any such thing, with a tiny penis or vagina? And what would it make love…
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Notes on Chapter One of Stephen Hawking, The Grand Design
Many thanks to reader David Parker for sending me a copy of Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, The Grand Design (Bantam, 2010). Not a book worth buying, but graciously accepted gratis! When physicists need money, they scribble books for popular consumption. But who can blame them: doing physics is hard while writing bad philosophy is…
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“We’re Just a Bit of Pollution,” Cosmologist Says
(People have been asking me to comment on Stephen Hawking's new book. As a sort of warm-up, I have decided to repost the following entry from the old site.) I am all for natural science and I have studied my fair share of it. I attended a demanding technical high school where I studied electronics and…
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Lupu on Rosenberg on Scientism: The Mother of All Self-Defeating Notions
Another guest post by Peter Lupu who apparently is as exercised as I am about the pseudo-philosophy that Rosenberg's been peddling. Minor editing and comments in blue by BV. Prompted by your recent post on Rosenberg, I checked again what he says about scientism. Here is the actual statement (emphasis added): Scientism is my label…
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From Naturalism to Nihilism by Way of Scientism: A Note on Rosenberg’s Disenchantment
The rank absurdities of Alex Rosenberg's The Disenchanted Naturalist's Guide to Reality are being subjected to withering criticism at Ed Feser's weblog here, here and here. But a correspondent wants me to throw in my two cents, so here's a brief comment. In the ComBox to the article linked to above, Rosenberg, responding to critics,…