More Quora Inanity

Mike Flynn recounts another example of why the overwhelming amount of stuff on Quora is a waste of time (apart from things written by Tim O'Neill and that Batman post).

Busy Month

Well, it's been a busy month but it has seen some interesting stuff out there within my blogosphere light-cone.

The Maverick Philosopher has had an entertaining series of posts on the difference between fictional and impossible entities. Much of the technical discussion eluded me but I did like the characterisation of fictional as incomplete although I am not completely convinced by his critique of the "story operator".

Mike Flynn has also had a lot of fun in a series of posts on the Christian origins of the Scientific Revolution. He also brought to wider attention the fact that much of the US think that zombies would run their country better than the current Federal Government.

Over at Ed Feser's blog, there was a very interesting discussion about the AT conception of the soul and how it purports to avoid the interaction problem. This was particularly useful because it quoted Bill Vallicella articulating what I think is the most difficult thing to understand about the Thomistic line of reasoning, namely how it is that a form can interact with matter, and by interact he means as an efficient cause rather than a formal or final cause. I'm still not sure I understand the reply but I suspect that that is due to my poor understanding of the Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysics.

Brandon Watson at Siris echoes what I'm sure a lot of us are feeling when he takes Disney to task for its crass revisionism in the case of "Maleficent". Aside from the lamentably bad premise on which the new film appears to be based, the witlessness of this situation reminds me of the recent TV advert in which a CGI Audrey Hepburn, dazzling in her youth and vitality, rises from a scene in the film "Roman Holiday"... to appear in a chocolate commercial. I seem to recall something similar happened in the last episode of Bablyon 5, and that didn't turn out well either. The members of the Hepburn estate, moneygrabbing philistines that they are, apparently see nothing wrong with it but to me the commercial is a shibboleth which divides those who have an aesthetic sense from those who don't.

Crude, over at Crude Ideas, continues to fight the good fight against the Cult of Gnu. One of the best thing for those of limited intelligence like me is the sight of clever people discussing substantive issues on Faith, Science and Philosophy, e.g. on Feser's blog, but I must also confess to enjoying seeing fish shot in a barrel, and no-one does this better than Crude. I look forward to his new website.

Heuristics from the Citadel Library continues to provide more "beam me up, Scotty" moments and documents that there is nothing new under the sun.

And finally, a hilarious story about Richard Dawkins from Shadow to Light.

Mike Flynn's Great Ptolemaic Smackdown Series

A brilliant series of posts (Pt1, Pt2, Pt3, Pt4, Pt5, Pt6, Pt7, Pt8) from Mike Flynn on the Galileo controversy, rightly praised by Thony Christie at The Renaissance Mathematicus.

I will be so sorry when this series ends.

Brief Round-Up

Lots of interesting stuff around at the moment...

• Over at Mike Flynn's blog, a very nice post which ties together bats, birds, linguistic evolution, the philosophy of chemistry and dinosaurs.
• Over at Siris, Brandon Watson has an interesting post about edutainment. Given the current trend for "gamification" of educational resources in HE and the fact that research is fairly consistent in, at least, casting doubt on the fact that students always actually recognise when they have learnt something, this is something that should concern most educators.
• At The Renaissance Mathematicus, Thony Christie looks at Galileo's Theory of Tides and draws lessons for today's scientists.

The Age of the Hollow Men

Mike Flynn has a wonderful post on the "Passing of the Age of Reason".

It requires no commentary from me but it is interesting to note the difference in the presentation of argument between the scholastic method and most of the debate that takes place nowadays. The former required that you clearly counter the strongest objections first whereas the latter seems to take a perverse delight in the wilful misrepresentation of opposing views.

Facts Don't Dispel Belief in Creation Myths...

James Chastek's post on Science and Creation Myths on his ever interesting Just Thomism blog has been picked up by some of the big guns in the philosophy of science and religion blogs that I read (for example, Mike Flynn has a nice response here).  Something quite interesting happened in the comments of the original article: we were treated to a number of rather scientifically-questionable assertions by one overreaching commentator (... population genetics has proved the story of Adam and Eve to be false, original sin, etc, etc, etc) which is the standard, if mathematically illiterate, response of certain so-called gnu-atheists, as well as the usual disclaimer that scientism is a straw-man because no-one holds those views. This was followed by a very entertaining take-down of these views by one of Ed Feser's regularly commentators, a (Mr?) Crude.

Basically, it is a call-out of atheistic psychological projection and I can't do better than to quote some of it:

"Now, here’s where things really get interesting. Everything I just told you absolutely undercuts one myth – the one you’re propagating. It does so demonstrably, and it’s not even an exhaustive list of why you’re wrong. No, population genetics does not undercut a literal, historical fall. Not of Adam and Eve, and not generally. No, there are a variety of reasons that you’re utterly wrong about your claims on this topic, and a variety of ways to maintain a real and literal fall given our scientific knowledge.

But I have a prediction: You will not sacrifice your myth.

It’s too important to you, and really, that importance is just one facet of the scientism you claim does not exist, and is not actually a problem. You need, absolutely need, science to have put a stake through the heart of this religious claim – or, at the very least, it has to be capable of doing it in principle (preferably ‘any year now!’). Because if it doesn’t – if science really is not just limited, but limited in such a way that makes it incapable of giving you the intellectual certainty (and with it, authority) you desperately want it to… well, what a tremendous disappointment that would be. It’s so disappointing, that it’s an understanding that simply cannot be accepted."

This seems to me to be the underlying motivation for a lot of the new atheist rant about religion.

Update: Brandon Watson from Siris performs a clinical dismantling of the argument here and here.

What to say...in the subsequent posts, our new atheist friend retreats to an implicit fideism characterised by a refusal to engage with the arguments or withdraw statements which are shown to be false. I presume this is what geologists get when they talk to Young Earth Creationists. There's a curious symmetry about it. In any case, the rest of the commentary follows exactly the progression presicted by Crude who also gives a nice summary of the situation here. 

Adam an' Ev'ing It

Over the week, I re-read Mike Flynn's Essay on Monogenism.

I have to say that I have never entirely understood the difficulty here. I know that the Maverick Philosopher, who also wrote about this topic, would demure from the assertion, but there is clearly much to agree with in Chesterton's view that original sin is the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved.

I was partly thinking of this as I read that Iain Banks or (Iain M. Banks if you prefer) had been diagnosed with terminal cancer. I don't mean to speak ill of the dying and I quite like some of his science fiction although I think his "ordinary" fiction, e.g. The Crow Road or The Wasp Factory,  is pretty poor. I do, however, recall a quote from an interview he once gave in which he courageously defended his decision to make the terrorists in one of his books Christians rather than, say, Muslims 

"I thought [Christianity] was a great religion for terrorists. You can do anything as long as you confess, in Catholicism anyway. And together with the idea of 'original sin', Christianity seems to have a better set-up for terrorism than Islam. It would have been too easy to do Islamic terrorism".

To which the appropriate response is "Yeah, ... right!" 

Our Chatterati are sooo brave and never take the easy way out... except when they need to do some research to actually find out what Catholics believe before informing us of said beliefs.

Irrational Rationalists

Mike Flynn has some fun at the expense of our more scientistifical friends.

Hypatia and the Flight from Reality

Mike Flynn returns to one of his favorite topics and systematically takes apart the entry on Hypatia on the (so-called) RationalWiki. Again, it is rather like shooting fish in a barrel as the demolition is so comprehensive that it is clear that the poor individual, or group of individuals, who wrote the article had no understanding of any of the methods of historical analysis, such as, for example, the use of primary sources. It's a simple rehash of the anti-historical myths about the war between science and religion that produced the recent film Agora, which itself was the subject of a comprehensive analysis by Tim O'Neill on his old blog.

The post has a useful link to the TOF's previous writing on this matter in his Aulde Blogge.

Genetics and Environment

Interesting article by Mike Flynn on the relationship between genetics and environment - part of a longer pre-occupation of his on distinguishing between such stochastic concepts as non-random and deterministic.

The Galileo Farce

I despise Guardian writers even more than I despise Guardian readers who are a pretty moronic bunch (just see the comments here). I can't stand the smug, pseudo-intellectual, self-satisfaction that comes from the uncritical assumption that you are on "the right side of history" so that little things like facts and "the truth" don't matter.
A case in point is the lazy so-called journalism evident, this time, in the Science blog, which is torn to pieces with typical gusto by Thony Christie and Mike Flynn.