Problems with science – and fixing them with more science

My last post might have given the impression that I think science is infallible, or at least that I do not think there is room for improvement. That is the unfortunate side-effect of defending something from a specific claim. For that reason, it is prudent to offer a counterbalance. Science is imperfect in a number…

Science and Censorship

Is science censored? The answer depends entirely on the definitions you use. (That’s a cliche answer and often a cop-out, but it’s actually a dig at the sophistry used by people claiming science is censored.) The TL;DR answer is: no. Science is flawed, but censorship is not that flaw. For our purposes here, science is…

What are the odds against a Life Permitting Universe

There is a claim that forms an integral part of the Teleological Argument for the existence of God, an argument that claims the universe has clear signs of purpose. This claim is that a life-permitting universe is so unbelievably unlikely that no thinking person should be able to say it happened due to chance. The…

Are theism and science incompatible?

It’s a long standing argument: can theism be justified within scientific thinking? There have been attempts to bypass the argument, by calling the two concepts “non-overlapping magisteria”: the claim that the two concepts simply answer different questions and therefore are never justified by each other and never in conflict (Gould, 2011). However, that is not…

Is there a supernatural realm?

Watching a debate between Matt Dillahunty and Mike Licona on whether Jesus was raised from the dead was a weird experience. Licona’s approach relied heavily on the supernatural is real therefore literally anything could have happened. And his defence for the supernatural also helped a lot in defining the supernatural. And it is to that…

Values and Evidence

In the last post I discussed a spectrum of genres of existence. They went from a physical reality to a conceptual reality unbounded by sense data. I finished talking about the need for evidence when one is talking about the physical reality and existence, and so the appropriate follow up, so far as I see,…

To exist

What does it mean to exist? I obviously can’t answer that ― no one can. But permit me, if you will, a perspective. I think existence can be subdivided into genres of existence, and not everything that is ‘true’ necessarily exists. There is the most obvious kind of existence, which is a physical presence in…

Experts, Nonexperts and Metaexperts

Expertise is a very specific quality. Dorion Sagan said of scientists ― but it applies to expertise in general ― that an expert who continues to make progress in their field “learns more and more about less and less until [they] know everything about nothing”. Admittedly, experts tend to retire or die before they meet…

Many Worlds or a Straight Jacket? The pseudointellectual tantrum of Evolution News

This is part 2 of looking at how a blogger, Michael Egnor, has assessed the mental competence of the Caltech physicist, Sean Carroll. Last time we assessed the claim that Carroll’s ideas on Boltzman brains make him illogical. This time, we are looking at whether finding a multiverse more believable than a God makes Carroll…

Boltzman Brains and a False Universe? Does the content of Naturalism undermine the philosophy?

I have recently been introduced to Evolution News; in particular, their opinions on the physicist Sean Carroll. One particular author ― Michael Egnor ― takes umbrance with Carroll’s discussions, discoveries and publications in physics, and this comes up in two of his articles: An Infinite Number of Universes Is More Plausible Than God and Is…