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).

David Berlinki and the excesses of Darwinism

From Mike Flynn's Blog, an amusing deconstruction of Darwinism by mathematician, David Berlinski.

James Chastek on Methodical Naturalism vs Naturalism

A very nice post by James Chastek at his Just Thomism blog.

I never understood why the following was not blindingly obvious, but it clearly isn't.

"If, for example, you wanted to study and learn Euclid’s Elements you have to be “methodologically Euclidian” but this in no way commits you to Euclidianism, i.e. the claim that Lobachevsky’s or Reimann’s geometries were false; if you want to explain classical physics then you have to be “methologically Newtonian”, even if you think that Newtonianism is false."

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. 

Creation Myths

Over at Just Thomism, James Chastek has a nice post on scientific creation myth - in the sense of the stories that scientists tell themselves about the creation of the discipline and how it has apparently finally put paid to religious mythology as a source of truth. As he points out:

"Science in the popular imagination is idealized (science cannot explain everything or solve all our problems now, but just give it time!); and only its successes are seen as integral to it (i.e. vaccinations, space travel, and computers are seen as the direct and proper work of science while Hiroshima, Tuskegee, Mustard gas, scientific eugenics and sterilization programs, Josef Mengele, climate change, industrial pollution, etc. are never seen as the necessary products of “science”). IOW, this is obviously not a scientific view of science but one that makes it into an exalted, inerrant  messiah that will set everything right if we only give it our total devotion.  Ultimately, it’s not that we want to destroy creation myths with science but that we want to replace an ancient creation myth with a modern one."


This seems to me to be spot on. Anyone familiar with the history of the Galileo controversy cannot fail to appreciate how powerful the scientific creation myth has now become. despite being pretty much completely rejected by both historians and philosophers of science, it is nevertheless deeply embedded in the subconscious of almost all working scientists despite clear and historically compelling arguments to the contrary. (See the comments to this post on Geocentrism and the Galileo Affair by Thony Christie at The Renaissance Mathematicus for a hilarious example of this.) 

Eliminating Eliminativism

The Maverick Philosopher down among the eliminativists.

I have to confess that, as someone who was never formally trained in philosophy, I can't even begin to see how eliminativism can address the points that Bill Vallicella raises here, along with the ones Feser investigates in his series of posts on Rosenberg's book.

Irrational Rationalists

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

Noam Chomsky - "The machine, the ghost, and the limits of understanding: Newton's contributions to the study of mind"

Interesting lecture on the nature and limits of scientific enquiry by Noam Chomsky.

Shooting Fish

Feser on Krause.

It's getting a bit monotonous now but the earlier posts mentioned at the bottom of the post are very interesting as is Feser's defence of the Cosmological Argument.