DBT01: Peter On The Bible & Germ TheoryHey all. I don’t have anything new to post so I thought I’d shoot you over to Peter’s blog where he’s finally gotten around to confronting my claim that the Bible provided precisely what he asked for when he wrote,
…knowledge of the germ theory of disease contained in the Bible rather than left to be discovered by fallible scientists would have saved billions of lives. Why [God] didn’t do so, given that it would prove [God’s] glory and goodness beyond a shadow of a doubt, is unknown.” [see Point Three under the section, Is Suffering Necessary for Consistent Physics?]
So if you’re interested, go read Peter’s response. All I’ll say for now is that I’ve noticed Peter getting increasingly cocksure lately. True to the trend, before even hearing what I have to say in response, he concludes his response with,
…this is enough to say that Cl’s proof is busted. Looks like I did have a rational alternative after all — The Bible’s medical knowledge is nowhere near remarkable as Cl made it sound, and this alleged overwhelmingly compelling superargument turned out to really just incomplete research.
Hardly. The show’s just getting started! Although, I’ll give him one thing: my original argument was incomplete. After all, it came as little more than a closing thought at the end of my opening piece and I had a very short amount of words to do so. Soon—and by “soon” I mean sometime this week, not three months from now like it took Peter—I’ll post my “more complete” version of the argument.
We’ll see how “busted” my proof is then.
And Your Point?This morning I was a little disappointed by this article (because I thought it would be about something else). Do we really need “objective data” to tell us that the overwhelming majority of scientists accept the contemporary evolutionary narrative? What does establishing this fact prove? How does it advance the debate? Pre-Einstein, things weren’t much different: the overwhelming majority of physicists accepted the then-contemporary narrative for physics. So what? Did that make them correct? There’s always a consensus, and many a consensus is often overturned. It’s happened with the evolutionary narrative several times before (fossil records falsified Darwinian gradualism, shorebirds are not a basal evolutionary group, homology often fails at the embryonic level).
I guess I just get annoyed when consensus is invoked or implied as direct evidence of truth.
A Legitimate QuestionAtheists are quite fond of claiming that science is the best method we have of uncovering truth, so why do they spend so much time using philosophy and logic to wage their assaults on religion? Consider your average (a)theist discussion. Almost invariably, they boil down to the so-called Problem of Evil, or the argument from divine hiddenness, or the cosmological argument, or some other non-scientific treatise. The only time I ever really hear science invoked at all is when the discussion turns to evolution or free-will.
What, if anything, can we infer from this state of affairs?
Science: It Works!…for completely robbing Earth of her natural resources, that is.
Atheists and skeptics—the faithful congregation of the First Church of Scientism—can often be found singing praises to their god, but we rarely hear them tell the whole story. The faithful are quick to chant, “science the best method we have of finding the truth,” but why don’t they also chant, “science is the leading cause of our destruction?” Why might that be? Is there a corollary between the religionist and the proponent of scientism in this regard?
Anyways. I’m back from vacation, hope you’re all well. Any suggestions for new posts?
Holding JT’s Feet To The FireToday’s post is a reprint of a comment I left on a thread at JT Eberhard’s blog. You can find the source article here.
JT, I would like to hold your feet to the fire. I concur with Jayman’s analysis. It’s fairly obvious to me that you *ARE* simply reading what you want to hear into the article. On what evidence do I make my claim? Well, to begin, you’ve framed the issue entirely in the context of religious tension, and completely omitted Gauchat’s salient points about other contributing factors which might also explain the data:
Study Suggests Atheists Suppress The TruthThere’s been a lot of hubbub over this “Atheists and Asperger’s” study that recently surfaced at the Scientific American blog. For me, this was the interesting line:
In a second experiment, Heywood and Bering compared 27 people with Asperger’s with 34 neurotypical people who are atheists. The atheists, as expected, often invoked anti-teleological responses such as “there is no reason why; things just happen.” The people with Asperger’s were significantly less likely to offer such anti-teleological explanations than the atheists, indicating they were not engaged in teleological thinking at all. (The atheists, in contrast, revealed themselves to be reasoning teleologically, but then they rejected those thoughts.)
The PZ Myers Memorial Debate, Round One: And The Winner Is…You can download the four letters that comprise Round One as a single PDF file, here [131KB]. If you don’t want to download it, simply copy the URL and paste it into your address bar. Or go check it out at VoxWorld. Be forewarned: Dominic’s piece is a bit sloppy grammatically, making comprehension a challenging at times. Vox, on the other hand, is at least articulate enough that intelligibility is not an issue.
For Your PerusalI added three new documents to the Papers page. If you don’t wish to download them, simply copy the URL and paste it into your browser’s address bar.
The Quest For Superintelligent AI: What Can We Infer?It’s no secret that people like Luke Muehlhauser endorse the creation of superintelligent AI as a means of saving the world. For me, a few questions arise.
1) Isn’t this a direct concession that human intelligence alone is incapable of creating a “perfect” world?
2) Per 1, mustn’t people like Luke Muehlhauser agree with me that a “perfect” world must follow given obedience to an all-knowing God Who has our best interests in mind?
3) What do you think people like Luke Muehlhauser would do if superintelligent AI came to conclusions that conflicted with their own moral preferences? For example, how do you think they would respond were AI to condemn homosexuality?
Isn’t Richard Carrier Putting The Cart Before The Horse?So you might have heard that the Loftus put out a new book pompously titled, The End of Christianity, which includes a chapter from self-proclaimed infidel Richard Carrier, titled, Moral Facts Naturally Exist (and Science Could Find Them). Can we agree that this is an empirical claim? If so, can you imagine the consternation that might ensue if a reputable physics journal published a paper titled: The Higgs Boson Exists, And Science Could Find It?
