This is not intended as a post about President Trump’s recently reported remarks about “s**thole countries,” but about what a Catholic cardinal, Timothy Dolan, said in response to those remarks. The Cardinal tweeted that Martin Luther King Jr., were he alive today, would remind people that “no country is a ‘hole,’ no person unworthy of respect.” In this post, I’d like to explain why I think the Cardinal is perfectly right on the second point and absolutely wrong on the first. I’m also going to try to define a “hole,” and make a tentative list of countries which I think would qualify, at the present time. Readers are welcome to disagree, of course.

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Via a post by Jerry Coyne, I learned of an egregious smear by PZ Myers of Steven Pinker. PZ posted the following on his Facebook page:

He is referring to the following remarks by Pinker.  Watch this clip — the entire clip —  and ask yourself, as I did: How could any honest and rational person view this and then paint Pinker as “a lying right-wing shitweasel”?

What the hell has happened to PZ over the years?  Wasn’t he rational at one point?

why is there so much disagreement in origin subjects when they are claimed to be based on scientific methodology? Who is messing up here in making/rejecting conclusions where othewise science subjects never have such contentions.?

I suggest and conclude that this is because origin subjects are about invisible processes and events. it’s not intellectual failure of one side or the other in presenting or understanding positions.

In fact like religious ideas, or physics, or even atomic levels of biology, like germs etc etc EVERYTHING investigated is not clear to the human eye. germ theory was rejected well into the 19th century because they couldn’t see the germs. physics gain its prestige as more complicated because it was about invisible forces. So proving how these forces existed and worked was lauded as a brilliance above visible discoveries. Continue reading →

NOTE: Some readers have asked me for a transcript of Dr. Lydia McGrew’s webinar. Good news: I have now completed the transcript (see below). Additionally, the points Dr. McGrew raised in her talk can be found here. In her talk, Dr. McGrew was responding to an e-interview given by Dr. Michael Licona, a leading Christian apologist for the Resurrection, who is an Associate Professor of theology at Houston Baptist University, and who is also the author of Why Are There Differences in the Gospels?: What We Can Learn from Ancient Biography (Oxford University Press, 2017). In his book, Dr. Licona defended the historicity of the Gospels but endorsed the view, common among New Testament scholars, that the authors of the Gospels would have considered it perfectly legitimate to deliberately alter historical details of events, relating non-factual claims as if they were factual, because back in those days, writers of biographies were more concerned with Truth than with mere facts. Dr. McGrew is a conservative Christian writer, but not a Biblical inerrantist. Nevertheless, she felt that by acknowledging the existence of what she terms “fictionalizing compositional devices” in the Gospels, Dr. Licona had conceded too much to skeptics such as Bart Ehrman (whom Licona debated on the reliability of the New Testament back in 2016), and that such a concession undermined his whole case for the historicity of the Resurrection. For this reason, Dr. Grew decided to respond to Dr. Licona by presenting the webinar shown below.

Dr. Lydia McGrew’s webinar is titled, “Six Bad Habits of New Testament Scholars and How to Avoid Them.” Her host for the webinar was Jonathan McLatchie, an Intelligent Design proponent who is currently a Ph.D. student in cell biology and a contributor to various apologetics websites, as well as being the founder of the Apologetics Academy. I’m happy to report that Dr. Lydia McGrew’s Webinar is now available on Youtube. I commend it to viewers, and I can promise you it’s a very thought-provoking presentation, whatever your theological perspective may be. Comments are welcome from people of all faiths and none.

For the benefit of those readers who don’t know her, Dr. Lydia McGrew has a Ph.D. in English from Vanderbilt University (1995), but nearly all of her published work has been in analytic philosophy, with specialties in epistemology and probability theory. Her curriculum vitae is here. Dr. McGrew is also a home schooling mother living in the Midwest, who is married to the philosopher, Dr. Timothy McGrew, Chair and Professor of the Department of Philosophy at Western Michigan University (C.V. here).

UPDATE: I’ve now transcribed the whole of Dr. McGrew’s talk, which can be viewed below. I invite readers to peruse it at their leisure. Comments are welcome.

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In which fifthmonarchyman and William J. Murray, undaunted by prior failures, undertake to defend presuppositionalism properly this time.

Consider a heresy which contradicts the Gleischshaltung of Political Correctness: Gender is NOT a social construct, and both Gender and Sex are in fact binary.

How is this possible? Some sceptics suggest that both gender and sex are determined by chromosome status: Males are XY and females are XX. End of story.

The truth is not so simple. From my understanding of Biology: the default setting for embryonic development is female. Female fetuses can become male if two events occur:

1 – The activation of the SRY gene (controlling events such as differentiation of gonads into testes/ovaries)

2 – Testosterone Receptors bind to appropriate levels of Bio-available testosterone in utero.

So far, we have described a Binary situation:

Where can Biochemistry proceed differently? (I do not imply that “pathology” occurs anywhere during this discourse) Continue reading →

Nested hierarchies have been discussed adequately, one should think. So here is an alternative matter.

I would propose that consciousness must be electrical in nature, due to two crucial facts:

1. The information that becomes conscious is some of the information being carried by the action-potentials of the nerve cells. It is not any other kind of information, such as quantum states of molecules, it is simply the information that nerve cells are known to carry via action-potentials.

2. Electric fields are the only physical phenomenon in the brain that have both the ability to extend in space significantly beyond nerve conduction itself and to be able to change and interact exceedingly swiftly, just as we experience conscious changes occurring “instantly.”

There are many other issues involved, of course, however, the fact remains that the physical phenomena underlying consciousness must be able to account for how consciousness appears to have the kind of extension and interactivity that creates consciousness, as electric fields would seem to be able to do. And that physical phenomenon must be tied to the information being carried as nerve impulses, as the electric fields of the nervous system ineluctibly are.

There does not seem to be a realistic option of a different sort of phenomenon that can unify that information encoded in the nerves into a conscious whole, and to do so exceedingly swiftly and surely. Certainly quantum physics offers nothing beyond electric fields interacting that could magically account for consciousness, no matter how much hocus-pocus people try to coax out of quantum phenomena. In the end it can’t be strange loops or the “illusion of consciousness” either, as one has to explain the difference between the consciousness and the unconscious (I would propose that the amount of, and type of, interaction of electric fields is what is crucial).

A great many issues could be discussed, however it seems to me that beginning with the basics is appropriate. There really is only one good candidate for consciousness in the physics of the brain at all, which is the electric fields that are unquestionably a necessary part of nerve conduction in the first place. If consciousness simply is what it is to be like a highly structured and unified (always becoming unified) electric field from the inside, so to speak, then it is the one phenomenon that we know not just abstractly, but as reality itself.