01.31.07
Darwin day: time for ‘Grubby Whigs Award’
UW-Whitewater 9th Annual DARWIN DAY, 2007.
Time to award this years ‘Grubby Whigs Award’. Dawkins and Dennett are currently the two finalists.
01.30.07
Randi’s million dollar reward fraud
One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge. Read the rest of this entry »
The basic Darwin fallacy
Wild Neighbors: Bug Bombs: The Stink Beetle Meets the Killer Mouse
I’ve always been fascinated by evolutionary arms races. In his The Ancestor’s Tale Richard Dawkins makes the point that if you can see progress anywhere in evolution, it’s in these ongoing duels between predator and prey. Each, over time, gets better at attack or defense, or dies out. At a minimum, as Geerat Vermeij has argued, arms races have made the natural world a more complex place.
This passage is a giveaway for the basic Darwinian fallacy, with its dangerous consequences. Darwinism can’t define evolutionary progress and sinks back to the disguised ideologies of conflict to define, a potentially disastrous confusion that Darwinists are simply incapable of correcting.
The harm being done by Dawkins in the educational system is fairly evident here.
Myers, Dawkins collude
PZ Myers exchanges theories with Richard Dawkins
Paul Z. “PZ†Myers, assistant professor of biology at the University of Minnesota, Morris, has a theory of evolution that he recently took right to the source – the birthplace and home of Charles Darwin. Myers’ long-time colleague, Larry Moran of the University of Toronto, arranged for Myers to accompany him on a trip to England. While in England they talked with Richard Dawkins, who currently holds an endowed chair as the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University.
01.19.07
Harris, free will, and scientific incoherence
Sam Harris’ End of Faith is such a curious hybrid. Scientism, a bit of Buddhism, a mishmash of post-analytic philosophy, a washed out discussion of ethics … This is no way to challenge religion.
The principle difficulty is that, despite the surface eloquence about the problems with religion, what is provided as a substitute is inadequate for those ejecting from belief bondage.
A good example is the dishwater treatment of the subject of ethics. Given the context of assumptions Harris works in this problem is inevitable. Check out the discussion starting p. 272 in the footnotes. Harris declares against free will in proper submission to the tenets of scientism. Then why bother will discussing ethics at all?
The question of free will is the acid test for those who promote scientific culture. And yet they can’t even grasp that there is a difficulty.
This is not a demand for a dogma about free will, and yet it is hard to see how the truncated positivistic dismissal by Harris can amount to anything.
In any case, the interesting thing is that Harris declares the idea of free will to be incoherent. I think the incoherence is that created by scientific reductionism. Is there anything more incoherent than the current scientific dogmatism about what science is?
In fact, what is curious is that this statement of incoherence is really a restatement of one half of Kant’s Third Antinomy, with its classic attempt to formulate a response to the incoherence of Newtonian physics rising to dominate all knowledge.
So Harris is really reflecting the incoherence being generated by science itself as it reflects with precision the analysis of the antinomy of reason analyzed in the critiques of Kant.
So at least Harris leaves you at the threshold of the ‘critique of reason’.
01.16.07
Why does Darwin debate persist?
The Chronicle of Higher Ed has an opinion piece: Why Can’t We Discuss Intelligent Design?. Since the article is by subscription, Recursivity has posted some excerpts, below. Read the rest of this entry »
01.15.07
Buddhism non-violent? Maybe they’re kidding
Robert Thurman (Buddhist scholar) on Buddhism and violence.
The Buddhist tradition has no theory of “just war.” Its major relevant doctrine is that of “nonviolence” (ahimsa). “Hatred will not put an end to hatred; only love can put an end to hatred.” Such is a central tenet of all forms of Buddhism.
However,…
The question of Iraq apart, the issue of Buddhism and violence is not so simple. The multitude of non-violent Buddhists have been betrayed by the concealed violence in ‘Buddhist history’ (I won’t say ‘Buddhism’). This stealth factor, including the occult operation via proxies, is far more insidious openly violent action. It is the grossest, most perverted dishonesty, and has put the reputation of faithful and unwitting. Buddhists at risk.
01.13.07
Reincarnation–hopeless confusion
Googling ‘reincarnation’.
Ancient Buddhism spoke of the special attainment of those who could grasp the issue of reincarnation, a very rare attainment. Read the rest of this entry »
Reincarnation, Schopenhauer and death
The controversy over Harris, reincarnation, and religion is hampered by the confusions believers in reincarnation bring to the subject. One of the best ways to approach the subject is to reconstruct the issue via ‘transcendental idealism’ (which isn’t ‘transcendental’ or necessarily an idealism) and the questions of ‘representations’, a la Schopenhauer: Schopenhauer on death
01.06.07
15 questions for the militant atheists
15 Questions Militant Atheists Should Ask Before Trying to “Destroy Religion” Read the rest of this entry »
Top ten myths, plus the Darwin myth
Dispel the top 10 myths about evolution
Average Americans misinformed about the science behind evolution
By: Prometheus Books
Read the rest of this entry »
01.05.07
Robert Solomon obit
Robert Solomon obit: I am only familiar with Robert Solomon’s In the Spirit of Hegel, which might induce in the New Atheists a kind of hem-hawing double take: Solomon attempted to show that Hegel, behind all his Geist fireworks was an atheist. Your move.
…better off without religion…
Richard Dawkins and Fundamentalist Atheism with a quote from E.J. Eskow:
Read the rest of this entry »
End of Science?
From Edge World Question Center
\dusting off ‘Canticle for Leibowitz’ Read the rest of this entry »
Are Harris/Dawkins Buddhist proxies?
Sam Harris’s Faith in Eastern Spirituality and Muslim Torture
By John Gorenfeld, AlterNet. Posted January 5, 2007.
01.03.07
Did Armstrong read World History and The Eonic Effect?
New in paperback: A Short History of Myth,” by Karen Armstrong (Canongate): the incoherence of Armstrong’s treatment of the Axial Age in her book on the subject comes out in this treatment of myth, where the rise of the modern suddenly becomes the (other) great transformation.
I have a feeling Armstrong was writing her book on the Axial Age, saw my World History and The Eonic Effect, and wished to hedge her bets on the issue of modernity.
As usual, her confused nonsense about ‘logos’ vs ‘mythos’ vitiates her analysis.
Myths have always served as a “counternarrative,” a way of coming to terms with mortality, Armstrong writes in this lucid introduction to Canongate’s “Myths” series, a collection of works retelling the world’s classic tales. Armstrong takes readers through the ages, from the hunting mythology of the Paleolithic period to the “death of mythology” in the “Great Western Transformation” (1500-2000). The other inaugural titles in the series are “The Penelopiad,” Margaret Atwood’s story of Penelope, the faithful wife of Odysseus, told in her own words; and “Weight,” Jeanette Winterson’s rendering of the story of Heracles and Atlas.
Worms
Earthworms, Burrowing and Evolution
Darwin is well known for advancing Evolution into the scientific mainstream. His last work though is not as well known. Bioturbation is the science of biological reworking of the local soils, in this case, by the lowly but pretty important earthworm.
Does anyone trust scientists on evolution?
Refuting evolution’s Cambrian controversy; Read the rest of this entry »
Fundamentalist scavengers
In Search of the Designer of Intelligent Design
The movement known as intelligent design (ID) is gaining momentum across the nation, and even beyond America’s borders, causing considerable alarm among Darwin’s disciples.
Darwinists have only themselves to blame for this situation. Their position is something frozen from the eighteenth century, and now they confront the worst case substitute for the Romantic reaction against scientism that began during the ‘crisis of the Enlightenment’.
So, science education has destroyed the basis even for understanding modernity leaving the mess of pottage to fundamentalist scavengers.
Dawkins echoes the left’s ignorance of religion
From richarddawkins.net:
If they preach the cause of the poor, they’re my people
ID coopting Darwin critique
Evo-News picks up on Orr’s critique of Dawkins. No sooner said than ID is given its false plus. There is a critique of Darwin beyond the ID argument. In fact the term ‘design’ is a complex pun: any complex molecular structure/sequence shows ‘design’, but that doesn’t tell us how it evolved. Complexity is merely an indication of low probability, i.e. the failure of random evolution.
The hypothesis that there exists in nature real design is a testable, scientific hypothesis which can be settled by data. Nature may show signs of real design even if we don’t know everything about the designer, such as where the designer originally came from. As far as intelligent design is concerned, in our experience high levels of specified complexity makes for a reliable indicator of intelligent design. Thus when we find high levels of specified complexity (such as in DNA or in the fine-tuning of the laws of the universe to allow for life), we can infer design. Design is testable, it has been tested, and it passes the test.
01.02.07
Science muddles free will antinomy.
Free Will: Now You Have It, Now You Don’t . Read the rest of this entry »