The Warfare Is Mental

The Biblical Distinction Between Soul And Spirit: My Response To A Ghost In The Machine, I

October 4, 2008

Ebonmuse has on his site another much-talked-about essay titled A Ghost In The Machine which is a valiant argument against Cartesian duality, or the generally-theist idea that humans have a soul substance that can survive or somehow transcend the death of the physical body. While leaving a comment in the thread of On Expertise I noticed another comment by Heliobates which read,

“…if you want to read what I consider to be THE SLAM DUNK argument against theism, check out our host’s A Ghost In The Machine. Without Cartesian dualism, religion is dead in the water.”

To this I responded,

“IMO the error… is in assuming all religion dependent upon the Cartesian paradigm. Yes, I can and will offer a detailed counter-explanation, but it is far beyond the scope of the thread..”

So here we are. I said I would offer a detailed counter-explanation, and now I’ve got to stick to my word.

On Falsifiability: What Exactly Is Pseudoscience Anyways?

September 18, 2008

It's pretty simple to assume what pseudoscience means, right? "Pseudo" means fake, and "science" means, well…science. I didn't need to consult a dictionary for that. I decided to obtain a working definition of the word pseudoscience because upon going to use it, I realized I had only my personal interpretation of the word to draw upon, which I wanted to assure was correct and not skewed.

I will say that in the argument over pseudoscience, all roads lead to falsifiability. In general, any statement can fall into three categories:

1. A statement which is falsifiable, but has not yet been falsified;
2. A statement which is falsifiable, and has been shown to be false;
3. A statement which is not falsifiable.

Put simply, unfalsifiable statements or falsifiable statements that have been proven false are not scientific statements. For this reason, I currently don't think that creationism or intelligent design qualify as scientific ideas. There might be an isolated component in any form of either idea that is falsifiable, however. For example, the various forms of the moon-dust argument.

The Theist’s Guide To Converting Atheists: My Response To Ebonmuse

September 17, 2008

The atheist blogger Ebonmuse has for nearly a decade now hosted an essay on his website titled The Theist’s Guide to Converting Atheists. I was originally pointed to the essay from a link on another atheist blog asking believers to consider potential facts or situations that would sway them from belief.

What follows is my initial set of responses to this essay.

Thoughts on the Nature of Evidence

August 5, 2008

Today I thought about evidence. Not any evidence about anything in particular at first, but more about the root characteristics of evidence – what it is, what it isn't, when it is strong, when it is weak, etc. What we call evidence is merely nothing more than some fact or feeling, and it occurred to me that many of us (myself included) misunderstand the nature of evidence we often hang belief upon. Even more interesting was the discovery that in debates between atheists and believers, much evidence is inconclusive as opposed to genuine. Genuine evidence lends well to incontrovertible conclusions. On the contrary, inconclusive evidence cannot reliably sustain incontrovertible conclusions. Also note that several pieces of inconclusive evidence pointing to a conclusion carry greater weight than just one piece.

Are We Alone In The Universe?

June 20, 2008

In general, I take a non-committal stance on the question of extraterrestrial life. Like nearly every other question entangled in religion and metaphysics, the question of humanity’s role in the universe is inevitably muddied by pop culture, mass ignorance of science and ulterior motive. It’s fine if UFO enthusiasts and little green men supporters want to believe that carbon-based biogenetics also happened to evolve metazoa capable of traveling to Earth in mechanical craft ala Newtonian means, but don’t say the facts of astronomy, physics or statistics support it!

False Argument #13: Triumph Of Natural Explanations

May 30, 2008

[Blogger and The Dark Man author MS Quixote addresses this argument here]

There’s a rhetorically persuasive argument that alleges to confront the argument from design and goes something like this: Time and time again, natural explanations dethrone supernatural explanations for mysterious phenomena, while supernatural explanations never replace natural ones. What exactly do we mean when we use the word “natural?” Taken at face value, natural describes a mental construct with which we frame the phenomena of the physical universe.

In the context of arguing a natural cause for the universe while simultaneously rebutting the argument from design, one blogger explains the argument like this: “The number of times that a once-mysterious phenomenon had a divine or supernatural explanation successfully replaced by a natural one—thousands upon thousands upon thousands. The number of times that a once-mysterious phenomenon had a natural explanation successfully replaced by a divine or supernatural one—zero.” Rhetorically persuasive, isn’t it?

AB Doradus C

May 25, 2008

Mass is a defining factor of stars and gives researchers clues as to how dense a star is, the temperature of its core and the nature of thermonuclear reactions, if any, that occur inside. The general consensus of today is that any star smaller than 75 times the size of Jupiter contains insufficient energy to convert hydrogen into helium. Smaller stars eventually degenerate into brown dwarfs, once considered the main ingredient in universal dark matter by notable astronomers. Today they are believed to be minor players in the game. The New York Times reported that AB Doradus C, the smallest star to ever be reliably weighed, turned out to be twice it’s predicted mass, and as Dr. Laird Close of the University of Arizona notes, “Two times is a huge error.”

He then adds the following for humorous effect: “Imagine guessing your wife’s mass wrong by a factor of two…!”

Evolution

May 18, 2008

Like God, the word evolution has unfortunately brought untold suffering and confusion to the human race, but it need not be this way.

At the most basic level the definition of the word evolution is change. The American Heritage Dictionary more specifically defines evolution as, “…a gradual process in which something changes into a different and usually more complex or better form.” That's pretty general, perhaps too general, so in scientific, religious or philosophical discussions like the ones we have here, I define evolution as the idea that all organisms on Earth derived sequentially from a LUCA (lowest universal common ancestor) in a process that produced descendants who differed morphologically or physiologically from their ancestors. Use of the word evolution can also refer to the historical development of a group of organisms such as the evolution of insects.

On November 24th, 1859 Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection made its debut. Thomas Malthus' Population, combined with observations made while sailing on the H.M.S. Beagle influenced Darwin's theory of evolution by descent with modification via natural selection. In Origin we find two related but quite distinct meanings of evolution: special and general theory. Loosely defined, Darwin’s special theory refers to the tendency of an organism or group of organisms to adapt in response to changes in their environments, and microevolution, variation, mutation, adaptation and natural selection are all related, and in some cases, synonymous terms. Using the classic example of the finches, geographical isolation of a species can prevent interbreeding with the parent population so that a series of minor variations may eventually result in an entirely new daughter population or subspecies. Biologists, writers and other scientists have referred to such changes as microevolution.

Darwin’s general theory is the extrapolation of microevolutionary principle to explain the full sum of living organisms and postulated that all life came from a lowest universal common ancestor, and is sometimes referred to as macroevolution, but don't let these seemingly innocent prefixes fool you, as they also afford plenty of misery to intelligent discussions about evolution (see the related posts at the bottom for examples).

The theory of evolution itself has also evolved, and continues to evolve as scientific knowledge continues to grow and self-correct. Darwin didn't have the knowledge of genetics he needed to really complete his puzzle, but his ideas of natural selection with genetic mutation as described by Gregor Mendel (geneticist) became known as the modern synthesis. Theodosius Dobzhansky (geneticist), Julian Huxley (zoologist), Ernst Mayr (ornithologist), Bernhard Rensch (zoologist), George Gaylord Simpson (vertebrate paleontologist) and George Ledyard Stebbins (botanist) were among those who called the ideas the Synthetic Theory of Evolution, which interpreted evolution as the results of gene flow, genetic drift, mutation and natural selection. By the early 1970's, Stephen Jay Gould (paleontologist / evolutionary biologist) and Niles Eldredge (paleontologist) focused on concepts of stasis and cladogenesis, and their ideas are sometimes referred to as punctuated equilibrium.

Steven M. Stanley (paleontologist / evolutionary biologist) has noted the introduction of entirely new species of Polynesian butterflies exclusive to Hawaiian banana trees. His documentation of the devil’s pupfish, found in the 92-degree springs of Death Valley exclusively, represents what appears to be an entirely new species that has appeared on the scene in the last 10-30,000 years. I'm no biologist, but I've read that under such harsh conditions, bacteria can create new proteins and metabolic pathways, which is something a punctuated evolutionary sequence would anticipate.

Related Posts:

False Arguments #23 & #24: The Sufficiency Of Microevolution Tropes

False Argument #14: Microevolution & Macroevolution Are Creationist Fabrications

False Argument #8: Science Has Proven The Soul

May 17, 2008

The twentieth-century frontier experiments conducted by Duncan MacDougall M.D. of Havervill, Massachusetts are worthy of mention. As a skeptic, it should be noted that MacDougall approached his research from a methodological naturalist’s point of view, writing with detectable resentment towards the blind faith demanded from theologians and so-called metaphysicians regarding the existence of the spirit / soul. Thus his experiments suffer from confirmation bias in that McDougall set out with a specific goal, to disprove existence of a soul that transcends death.

His hypothesis was simple enough:

…the soul substance so necessary to the concept of continuing personal identity after death of the material body must still be a form of gravitative matter…”

Hence it must have weight.

On The Nature Of Truth

May 16, 2008

Truth almost escapes definition. Rather, it is what is. Houghton Mifflin defines truth as, “conformity to fact or actuality; fidelity to an original or standard; reality; actuality.” Thus it can be said with confidence that the truth regarding any particular event can only be what actually exists or happened, and the truth of any belief can only be its correspondence to that reality. Any given statement regarding life or history can either be true or false, fact or opinion, and while some are easily verifiable, others are not. Especially in the arenas of religion, politics and science, most facts are buried under tons of corporate agenda, human ambition and political motive.

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