God and Science Collide

Posted on May 16, 2008
Filed Under Religion, Science | 1 Comment

I’d seen ads for this in various journals. But I guess the full thing is out now. It’s an odd joint work between “Skeptic” magazine publisher Michael Shermer and the John Templeton Foundation. It’s a collection of answers by scholars to the question, “does science make belief in God obsolete?” There’s a discussion up at Live Science as well.

What’s nice is that the discussion isn’t biased to one side or the other. So the more atheistic perspectives are presented as well as the believers.

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Sider Defends Metaphysics

Posted on May 15, 2008
Filed Under Philosophy | Leave a Comment

Ted SiderRichard at Philosophy Et Cetera had a great Sider quote the other day. Sider is one of my favorite contemporary philosophers. He writes in a very clear and lucid way. He’s that rare soul who can take complex ideas and arguments and make them accessible. He also manages in his works to clearly present the best case for his opponents in away you can understand. Far too many people are great about their own ideas but not so hot about the ideas they disagree with.

Anyway I wanted to present my favorite Sider quote.


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Heidegger and Kuhn

Posted on May 12, 2008
Filed Under Philosophy | 1 Comment

One of the entries this month in the The 69th Philosophers’ Carnival was a post about normal and revolutionary science in Heidegger. That is the issue of some Kuhnian-like structures in Heidegger. As Bryan notes it is when there is a crisis that Being becomes most examined. I’m not sure this is necessarily quite the same as Kuhn’s paradigm shift. Rather I think that when something doesn’t “work” we notice it. While when it does work it tends to be invisible. I think this happens a lot in science - especially in physics. Scientists are able to do their work without being aware of many of the presumptions in their engagements with equipment and matter. It’s only when something goes wrong that they notice it. Now of course some can think through these issues independent of a failure. One might say that this is what philosophers of science often do. Which is, I think, a problem for reading Heidegger too much in light of Kuhn.

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Vaccines Again

Posted on May 12, 2008
Filed Under Politics, Science | 8 Comments

VaccineOK, I promise that forthcoming posts will primarily be focused on philosophy. I’ve got a bunch of fairly technical posts coming up. I wanted to comment a bit about all the controversy over vaccines though. It’s been a big topic of discussion at the various science blogs as well as being in the news a lot. (Primarily due to both Obama and McCain apparently supporting the silly autism/vaccine connection)

What drove me over the edge to write something was this latest post from Respectful Insolence on an outbreak of whooping cough at a Waldorf School. Read the link and scan the comments. There are some really good points made. The key point to recognize is that these “idiots” who don’t vaccinate their kids aren’t just a threat to their kids. They are a threat to your kids.

Having said that though I have a few other thoughts.


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Cult Book Meme

Posted on May 9, 2008
Filed Under Uncategorized | 2 Comments

Yes an other meme since the last one I contributed to didn’t go anywhere. This one is from Adventures in Ethics and Science although she didn’t originate it.

Basically you have a list of famous books - many of which no one finishes. You bold the books you’ve finished. You italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish. You leave alone the ones you never bothered with or haven’t got to you. Just to make it more interesting I’ll put asterisks beside the ones I want to get to. (Either make an other attempt or just make an attempt)


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The Problem with Metaphysics

Posted on May 9, 2008
Filed Under Philosophy | 2 Comments

PeirceMetaphysics has a bad name. Mainly because there’s very little that can be decided decisively in metaphysics. Some of that is pretty well deserved. I suspect metaphysics reached its nadir with the logical positivists. They thought metaphysics was literally meaningless since it couldn’t be verified.

I’m not willing to go that far. Indeed I think metaphysics to be pretty important. But I’ve been thinking about its utility the past few weeks as I’ve been getting back into technical philosophy.


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Higher Education Bubble

Posted on May 7, 2008
Filed Under Politics | 1 Comment

The higher education bubble? (HT: Instapundit) “Over the last 10 years, after adjusting for inflation, tuition is up 48% at public schools and 24% at private schools.” Are people with credit risk borrowing a lot of money to pay for something that doesn’t offer the returns necessary to pay off those loans?

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I Don’t Believe in Atheists

Posted on May 6, 2008
Filed Under Religion | 4 Comments

There’s a very interesting podcast up at Point of Inquiry titled “I Don’t Believe in Atheists”. The interview was with Chris Hedges - a figure I’m just not familiar with. Hedges main point is that the New Atheists adopt a position very much like fundamentalism. I thought Hedges made quite a few great points - especially with regard to factual claims about religion being the problem. (Something that New Atheists often claim) Having said that I couldn’t help but think he had his own problems with hyperbole.

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Evolution and the Problem of Evil

Posted on May 5, 2008
Filed Under Philosophy, Religion | 7 Comments

There were a few interesting posts on evolution and the problem of evil at ScienceBlogs over the weekend. The first was at EvolutionBlog. There were a few others but the other one I’ll link to is Rationally Speaking. The whole issue arose from an interview with Francisco Ayala by the New York Times on his views of science and religion. Ayala is a former Dominican priest and one of the top evolutionary biologists. However one of the things he says is that evolution solves the problem of evil. But of course it doesn’t.

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People Assign Blame to the Mentally Ill

Posted on May 5, 2008
Filed Under Philosophy, Science | 16 Comments

There’s a great post at Garden of Forking Paths on how people will assign moral responsibility to the mentally ill. I found this was something my wife had intuitions about as well. I took her down some thought experiments and she reconsidered her opinion. But I think this is a fairly common view.

Obviously it has huge implications for the free will debate to the degree that we take what the terms mean in terms of our societal linguistic use and intuitions. I’m not sure we should so conceive of the problem. I’m very, very skeptical about intuitions. But I have to admit this is an interesting study.


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Meltdown of the EPA

Posted on April 30, 2008
Filed Under Politics, Science | 4 Comments

Meltdown of the EPA (HT: The Intersection). I was pretty critical of the EPA under Clinton but what’s happened under Bush on so many things is horrific. He’s replaced political debate with fixing the science. I think on many issues (including global warming) there’s a big valid political disagreement about what to do and why. But one shouldn’t mislead with science for political expediency.

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Lehi, Opposition & Strife

Posted on April 30, 2008
Filed Under Philosophy, Religion | 1 Comment

LehiI was listening to Dennis Potter’s SMPT presentation today. It was called “Opposing Lehi’s Theodicy” and basically dealt with what Dennis calls the Opposition Theodicy based upon 2 Nephi. Now Dennis is careful to note that he doesn’t think this theodicy is actually what Lehi is asserting. Rather he brings it up as it is something he sees brought up a lot in Utah Valley University by his students to explain the problem of evil. Yet it is not something he encountered while at Notre Dame.

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Global Warming Doubters

Posted on April 29, 2008
Filed Under Politics, Science | 9 Comments

F28C2269-BE01-42CD-9999-280DFBFDCEBD.jpgNice discussion from January over at Dot Earth about scientists who are concerned about global warming. The article is about the American Geophysical Union statement on global warming. But in the comments they address the supposed experts on that supposed Senate report about climate skeptics that has been making the rounds. One of the more prominent names, Richard Courtney, is debunked here. There’s also a new list of purported doubters by the Heartland Institute that includes scientists who believe in global warming!

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Qualia, Quale and Peirce

Posted on April 29, 2008
Filed Under Philosophy | 2 Comments

Qualia pop up a lot in discussion of philosophy of mind. If you’re not familiar with the term the SEP on qualia is a great place to start. What’s weird is that several papers I’ve read the past few weeks have attributed the origin of the term or at least idea to C. S. Peirce. I don’t think this is correct. So far as I know the modern sense in analytic philosophy arises primarily from C. I. Lewis in his 1929 book Mind and the World Order. (Which, for the record, I’ve not read)

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Effects of Ending Drugs

Posted on April 27, 2008
Filed Under Politics | 4 Comments

Marginal Revolution has an interesting discussion on what would happen if drugs were legalized. I tend to agree that a lot of the problem are drug-users and not just the crime around selling. But the effects of the government war on drugs are horrendous. I wish we could end that.

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