Author Archives: Aardvark

Probabilities And Skepticism

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I thought about including this in my previous thread, but it has grown so large that I suspect it would be lost in the abyss. If Skeptical Zone readers are interested I’ll write a series of these posts, in which I’ll develop a number of themes concerning why I abandoned evolutionary orthodoxy and became convinced that an inference to design is most reasonable.

As most of you know, I am a classical musician. All great musical compositions have a theme, and the theme of this site is “think it possible that you may be mistaken.” With that theme in mind, might I suggest some skepticism concerning probabilities?

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The Rules of Right Reason

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Barry Arrington and StephenB at Uncommon Descent have frequently invoked “the rules of right reason” in their arguments.

Today, Barry posts them thus:

The Rules of Thought.

The rules of thought are the first principles of right reason. Those rules are:

  • The Law of Identity: An object is the same as itself.
  • The Law of Non-contradiction: Contradictory statements cannot both at the same time be true.
  • The Law of the Excluded Middle: For any proposition, either that proposition is true or its negation is true.

And claims:

Note that the three laws of thought cannot be proven. They are either accepted as self-evident axioms – or not. The fundamental principles of right reason must be accepted as axioms for the simple reason that they cannot be demonstrated. There is no way to “argue for argument” and it is foolish to try to do so. If one’s goal in arguing is to arrive at the truth of a matter, arguing with a person who rejects the law of idenity is counterproductive, because he has rejected the very concept of “truth” as a meaningful category.

 

This seems to me fallacious. (heh.)

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Is postmodernism the evil twin of modern science?

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I don’t want to flood this place with items from Uncommon Descent, but as we have a certain overlap of members (and  ex members!) and certainly a common set of interests, there’s a post up now that I found interesting, not because of the board politics (which we will not of course discuss…) but because of an odd equation I see there that I have caught a sniff of before and is here made explicit, both in the OP and in some of the comments.

Its the equivalence between “post modernism” and the provisional nature of scientific inferences.

Which I find extraordinary because it’s always seemed to me that science and postmodernism are on two opposite poles.

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Anecdotal evidence

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The ‘here’ in the first para refers to Secular Cafe, from which this is reposted.

In a number of threads, here and in other places, I’ve seen discussions – sometimes more than a little vituperative – concerning the value or otherwise of anecdotal evidence.

To start with my current position on it before commenting further.

I think that anecdotal evidence is evidence, but with three little caveats.

It is often, IMV, poor evidence, it is sometimes evidence of something other than what the anecdote purports to be evidence of, and it is rather infrequently later confirmed by later observations which have physical rather than anecdotal evidence behind them.

Having got that out of the way, an in-exhaustive list to identify the sort of alleged phenomena in which anecdotal evidence raises its head, in no particular order but as they spring to mind, with a few exceptions which I am anxious to include.

Ghosts, the effectiveness of clairvoyance, the effectiveness of astrology, the effect (or otherwise) of the full moon on madness,  hospital admissions et al, sightings of monsters on various lakes, UFO sightings, alien abductions, the power of prayer, what may broadly be called religious or spiritual experiences, unusual and hard or impossible to replicate physical phenomena.

For all of these, and others, I’d see it as important to keep a few things in mind.

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Law of non-contradiction (“LNC” to its friends)

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On Uncommon Descent, Barry Arrington asks:

Let’s clear up this law of noncontradiction issue between StephenB and eigenstate once and for all. StephenB asks eigenstate: “Can the planet Jupiter exist and not exist at the same time in the same sense? That’s a “yes or no” question eigenstate. How do you answer it?

For some reason, Eigenstate’s response has gone astray, so here it is, as cross-posted elsewhere:

Eigenstate:

Theoretically, yes. In practice, the probabilities are so vanishingly small it’s indistinguishable from no.

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Methodological Naturalism

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I’ve always understood Methodological Naturalism to mean the assumption we make in science that things are predictable, probabilistically at any rate.

It needn’t be true, and nor do we make any conclusion as to whether it is true or not, we merely proceed under that assumption, because it underlies the methodology that we call science.

But clearly some people, often citing Plantinga (here and here) regard it as some kind of error made by scientists that enables them to fallaciously reject religion, or at least compromise “religious neutrality”.
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