http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2014/06/09/pinker-discusses-his-new-book-on-edge/

Steven Pinker is about to release a new book on writing. I’m holding my breath.

When you write you should pretend that you, the writer, see something in the world that’s interesting, that you are directing the attention of your reader to that thing in the world, and that you are doing so by means of conversation.

That may sound obvious. But it’s amazing how many of the bad habits of academese and legalese and so on come from flouting that model. Bad writers don’t point to something in the world but are self-conscious about not seeming naïve about the pitfalls of their own enterprise. Their goal is not to show something to the reader but to prove that they are not a bad lawyer or a bad scientist or a bad academic. And so bad writing is cluttered with apologies and hedges and somewhats and reviews of the past activity of people in the same line of work as the writer, as opposed to concentrating on something in the world that the writer is trying to get someone else to see with their own eyes.

If I were running a forum, I would ask posters to follow Pinker’s rules for writing.

Religion is notorious for requiring and valorizing faith.  Consider the story of Doubting Thomas, or this bit of “infallible” dogma that every Roman Catholic is required to believe:

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William has taken exception to the current state of science and its ‘overreach’.

He claims, “IMO, all that is left of materialism/physicalism/naturalism is really nothing more than a hidden (even subconscious) anti-theistic agenda.”

This is a thread for William to guide us in a detailed exploration of the alternatives, their mechanisms, how we might test them and how we might benefit from them.

<video snipped on request>

From the video description:

<redacted> TEDx presentation speaks to the debate over innovation of ideas specifically regarding evolution, creation and intelligent design. He asks whether or not science can have the courage to work together with philosophy and religion or worldview to discover where humanity is headed and presents the idea of human extension as a way to promote human dignity, cooperation, altruism and flourishing instead of Darwinian dehumanisation, conflict and struggle.

Just some random, unorganized thoughts regarding the recent hostilities.

1. I don’t care if you are wrong.
2. Your disagreeing with me does not diminish my life.
3. I have no need to beat you into submission.
4. If I disagree with you, I would like to know why you believe what you believe.
5. I would like for you to understand my position, and I appreciate any effort you make to understand me.
6. To these ends I will ask questions designed to probe our differences.
7. If you don’t or can’t respond to my satisfaction, I will try to accept the impasse and move on.
8. These are more what you’d call “guidelines” than actual rules.

I’ve just started reading philosopher Roger Scruton’s new book The Soul of the World, in which he defends the transcendent against the scientific conception of reality. Chapter 3 contains an interesting but wrong-headed argument to the effect that evolutionary explanations of human altruism are superfluous, because altruism can be explained perfectly well in moral terms. It’s particularly interesting in light of our discussions on the Critique of Naturalism thread, so I thought I’d share it:

An organism acts altruistically, they tell us, if it benefits another organism at a cost to itself. The concept applies equally to the soldier ant that marches into the flames that threaten the anthill, and to the officer who throws himself onto the live grenade that threatens his platoon. The concept of altruism, so understood, cannot explain, or even recognize, the distinction between those two cases. Yet surely there is all the difference in the world between the ant that marches instinctively toward the flames, unable either to understand what it is doing or to fear the results of it, and the officer who consciously lays down his life for his troops.

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In the late 1960’s, the British Broadcasting Corporation commissioned Jacob Bronowski to prepare a television series entitled “The Ascent of Man”. Apparently, the series was meant to be a scientific bookend to Kenneth, Baron Clark of Saltwood in the County of Kent OM CH KCB FBA’s “Civilisation” series, which was an historian’s view of how we ended up where we are.

Bronowski’s series aired across the world (and even this benighted high-school student watched it gobsmacked in Brisbane, Australia). Bronowski died in 1974, not long after the series was published. He also wrote a “book of the series”, which came out in 1973 (it is one of my treasured possessions, moth-eaten as it is).

A brief biography:

Jacob Bronowski was born in 1908 into a Jewish family in the Polish city of Lodz. His parents moved to Britain in 1920 and Bronowski pursued his senior studies in mathematics at Cambridge University. He later studied and conducted research in physics. He taught at the University College of Hull during the 1930s. During the Second World War, he conducted research on the effectiveness of Allied bombing campaigns, culminating in being part of a British Government survey of the results of the attack by the United States on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As a result of his experiences in Japan, he turned from physics to biology to try to understand the nature of violence in humans.

His subsequent career includes many writings on what knowledge means: he concerned himself with the epistemological question of “what can we reliably know?”. The Ascent of Man series seems to have been his attempt to answer this question.

(I may have his history wrong, in which case, I apologise).

If you wish to see what he said in the series, fragments of the Ascent of Man series are available on Youtube via a search for “Bronowski Ascent of Man”.

My question is this:

Now, after forty years, how much did Bronowski get right?

My personal view is that Bronowski is mostly right. My version of his argument is that we construct useful knowledge out of a combination of imagination and observation. Science is philosophy (what can be) constrained by evidence (what is).

I am interested to know what this community thinks about Bronowski’s work, with the benefit of forty years of hindsight.

(my thanks to Gregory for alerting me to my misattribution of the “Civilisation” series to Sir Arthur C Clarke CBE FRAS).

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2014/05/02/maine-teenagers-deny-animal-cruelty-charges-alleging-put-kitten-in-running/

A few months ago we had a discussion of whether non-human animals can be the subject of morality.

Over on UD, Mung opined that animals are meat robots, incapable of suffering.

EDIT: Wrong UD poster. Mapou, not Mung. Apologies.

The Myth of the Continuum of Creatures: A Reply to John Jeremiah Sullivan (Part Two)

Apparently the Bible neglects to mention the possibility that animals can be the subject of morality, or that torturing animals can be a sin. But some IDists have declared that torturing babies is self-evidently wrong.

So is microwaving kittens self-evidently wrong? Or self-evidently okay, because it isn’t forbidden by scripture? What Would William Do? Or Mung? Apparently we have secular laws against this. Why?

I’d like to ask this at UD, but I can’t.

For those interested in creationism and the culture wars, I bring to your attention the forthcoming A Matter of Faith (trailer here).  [And could someone explain to me how to post the trailer directly in my post?]

Several things fascinate me about this development, among which are:

(a) comments on the YouTube video are disabled, so there can be no debate about a movie which centers on a debate;

(b) this movie is produced and endorses by Answers In Genesis, which explicitly refused to endorse “God’s Not Dead” in their review of it (which comes through, in their terms, in the conflict between “evidential” and “presuppositional” apologetics);

(c) the same aesthetics as “God’s Not Dead” (on which, see here for a brilliant and nuanced assessment of how these kinds of films work);

(d) the culmination of the “teach the controversy” strategy.  I found out earlier today that the pedagogy of “teach the controversy” was developed for dealing with conflicting interpretations of literary texts (source here).  It fell to Paul Johnson to appropriate a pedagogical strategy perfectly suited for the humanities — “teach the controversy” — into the sciences. This leads to what strikes me as the right-wing version of Rorty’s collapse of the humanities/sciences distinction. This is the epistemic apocalypse — there is no knowledge, it’s all just “faith”. Which is kind of a bad thing for a culture with a knowledge-driven economy . . .

We’ve been discussing souls and such as if humans are exceptional — not part of a continuum.

For the purposes of this debate, “truth” = “models purported to be actual conditions of reality”.

Science is a method of collecting independently reproducible, empirical data, interpreting the data, categorizing it and developing useful and predictive models from that data – useful in the sense that it predicts future data of the same sort, hereafter referred to as IRdata. One can consider “science” to be, entirely, the collection and development of a kind of IRdatabase, the purpose of which is to take IRdata and develop it into useful IRmodels. Continue reading →

I’m working on a book that includes a chapter on Dr. Dembski, and I’m curious about a couple of assumptions I’m making.

First, has Dembski worked through a specified complexity/CSI calculation for anything other than the 4 subjects Dr. Elsberry identified in this post? That’s the Caputo incident, the flagellum, the WEASEL program and the SETI data. I haven’t seen any other significant instances of him actually working through a case, but I want to make sure I’m not missing anything.

Second, is anyone aware of any incident in which the intelligent design community, particularly the credentialed experts but including any prominent member, has scrutinized and rejected an ID idea? Dembski’s temporary rejection of his own explanatory filter would be an example, had he not walked it back a week or so later. Again, I can’t think of any good examples, but want to make sure I’m not missing anything.

It’s time to start a continuation thread for Split-brain patients and the dire implications for the soul, because the original thread is being affected by a software bug. Only the final page of comments is affected. Continue reading →

Barry’s latest post at UD has the title Biology Students Score Below Religion and Classics Students on Test of Critical Thinking.  Unsurprisingly, it’s Barry who actually flunks the critical thinking test.

(Click graph for a bigger version)

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There are a number of professed atheists in this forum. I was curious as to what sort of moral imperative atheists are beholden to when presumably no one is looking.  Speaking as a theist, I am constantly cognizant that there is a God who considers what I do and is aware of what I do, even though that awareness on my part may not always result in the moral behavior which I aspire to.  But let’s take a fairly mundane example — say theft.  We’re talking about blatant theft in a context where one could plausibly or even likely get away with it.  I affirm to you that as a Christian, or more relevantly possibly, as a theist, I would never do that.  Possibly it has just as much to do with my consideration for the feelings and rights of  some other individual, who has “legal” possession of said items, as it has to do with my awareness of an omniscient creator who is aware of what I’m doing and who would presumably not bless me if I violated his laws.  I mean,  I care about the rights of other people.  And, considering other moral tableaus, those of a sexual nature for example — I would personally never consider going to a prostitute for example, in that I feel empathy for that person, and how they are degrading themselves in the sight of God, and how I would not want to contribute to their degradation, so that my own human lust would never result in me victimizing another human being in that way.  So in summary,  there are all sorts of constraints on my personal behavior that stem directly from my belief in God,  and I am honestly curious about the inner life of professed atheists in such matters.  In other words, do atheists for example, in such junctures of moral decision, only consider whether they can get away with it, i.e escape the detection of human authorities?  I am just honestly curious about the inner life of atheists in such matters.

Philosophy graduate and English teacher (based in Japan) Vincent J Torley is currently a contributor of articles to Barry Arrington’s blog “Uncommon Descent”. Vincent has a tendency to verbosity but his posts sometimes are an enjoyable read as he tends to put a little more effort into their content. Continue reading →

Among creationists with background in population genetics, Dr. Felsenstein is respected and even revered Continue reading →

KairosFocus, he who shall not be real-named (Henceforth KF), habitual censor over at Uncommon Descent, perpetually crows about his long-standing challenge:

provide a 6,000 word feature-length article that justifies the Darwinist tree of life from its OOL roots up through the Cambrian revo — as in Darwin’s Doubt territory — and other major formation of body plans up to and including our own origins, and we will host it here at UD, one of the leading ID blogs in the world. We are perfectly willing to host a parallel post with another site. Only, you must provide thesis and observation based evidence that solidly justifies your conclusions in light of inference to best explanation, the vera causa principle and other basic principles of sound scientific induction. Also, you must actually argue the case in outline, a summing up if you will. You must strive to avoid Lewontin’s a priori evolutionary materialism, and if you would redefine science on such terms you will have to reasonably justify why that is not a question-begging definition, in a way that is historically and philosophically soundly informed. Of course, you may link sources elsewhere, but you must engage the task of providing a coherent, non-question-begging, cogent argument in summary at the level of a feature-length serious magazine article . . . no literature bluffs in short.

[some format lost because I can’t be arsed]

KF is of course free to set the bar for his personal satisfaction at whatever pathetic level of detail he requires, but given that he’s often accused of being a massive hypocrite I’m sure he’ll be happy to provide us with a corresponding ID narrative.

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This post is inspired by a phrase appearing in the latest Discovery Institute essay, in which they worry about the direction being taken by the new “Cosmos” TV series.

Evolution News and Views

The DI quotes Cosmos producer, Seth MacFarlane, as promoting “…the advancement of knowledge over faith.”

This quote seems to come from an interview in Esquire Magazine.

Interview

There really isn’t much to the interview, but the phrase does kind of jump out and beg to be discussed.

At UD, Sal asks:

When I watched the Ken Ham vs. Bill Nye debate, I lamented, “Why Lord do we not have an Isaac Newton of today defending your creation?” In years gone by, Christians were at the forefront of intellectual advancement in science, technology, medicine, literature, art, music, etc. I lamented, “dear Lord, why has this happened? Why do you defend your Word and the testimony of your creation this way? Wouldn’t the world be inclined to believe if you raised up someone like Newton to defend creation in the present day?”