Logic and philosophy
evolvingthoughts | December 11, 2006This site, a faith-based Catholic (I think) news site, has an Op-Ed by an erstwhile science teacher on Dennett's Breaking the Spell. It's not pretty to see someone trying to take down a professional philosopher philosophically, when they are not educated in the field
Basically, Dr David Roemer tries to redefine terms that have a long history in philosophy and science in line with the talking points of the Intelligent Design crowd. He says of materialism, which Dennett correctly defines as explanation of phenomena without recourse to the immaterial, such as "soul", that it is in opposition to…
evolvingthoughts | December 8, 2006
Those who know me, or try to proselytise me with petitions or for political party support, know that I am a moral vacuum. At least, that's what I say when they try ("Sorry, I'm a moral vacuum". It gets great reactions). I like to talk about facts and practices, but not to prescribe or proscribe. I have my own moral code, but you won't get me trying to convince you of it.
But sometimes moral claims are too strong to ignore. A couple of these popped up lately on the Science Blogs, and I thought I'd shirk my duty by linking to the morally better informed and formed.
One is, of course, the…
evolvingthoughts | November 23, 2006Nicholas of Cusa wrote a book back in the 15th century called De Docta Ignorantia, often translated as "On learned ignorance". It has nothing whatsoever to do with this post. Well, it sort of does.
Nicholas, a Cardinal, held that human reason was limited, and could not reach knowledge of things beyond the world. In short, he was an agnostic. Wait, I hear you saying - a Cardinal of the Catholic Church who thought that nothing could be known of God? Well yes, as Cusa held that "knowledge" of God was had solely by faith.
The world, as we are so often reminded, divides into two kinds of people.…
evolvingthoughts | November 14, 2006
So, in an obvious case of Scibling Rivalry, Jason Rosenhouse has taken me to task about my comments on Dawkins and agnosticism. Indeed, I have been fisked. Obviously one can decide about whether God exists or not, and agnostics are just inadequate atheists...
Let's set the scene with some philosophical definitions. A scientific question is one that evidence can tell for or against. All else is a philosophical question, or as it is popularly known, navel gazing. What is at issue here is whether or not evidence can tell for or against the notion that God exists. Atheists (and theists) say…
evolvingthoughts | November 11, 2006
Adapted sort of with permission from The Crackpot Index by John Baez, with contributions from the talk.origins howlers.
A simple method for rating potentially revolutionary contributions to biology.
1. A -5 point starting credit.
2. 1 point for every statement that is widely agreed on to be false.
3. 2 points for every statement that is clearly vacuous.
4. 3 points for every statement that is logically inconsistent.
5. 5 points for each such statement that is adhered to despite careful correction.
6. 5 points for using a thought experiment that contradicts…
evolvingthoughts | October 26, 2006OK, so someone sent me a copy of The God Delusion and I have to say, I'm not impressed. Let's get this straight, it's not a work of science, but of philosophy. Dawkins is making a rhetorical case, not a logical or scientific one, that God is a hypothesis that can be tested and found wanting. I'll talk about that later. What I want to deal with now is his claim that agnosticism is a weak and bad philosophical position.
A technical point. Dawkins says that a deist is someone who thinks God is deus absconditus - a creator who once acted and now sits back uninvolved in the world. As far as…
evolvingthoughts | October 25, 2006There's a fair bit of to-and-fro going on with the Sciblings about Richard Dawkins' latest book The God Delusion, which, being at the edge of empire, I haven't yet seen. When I do, I will read it and comment, of course.
But I want to ask a general question - is religion in itself a malign influence on society? For example, any number of Islamic Imams, including the leader of Australia's Muslim community, think that women who don't dress "modestly" (which can mean anything from wearing a long sleeved top to the burka) are to blame for being raped.
And attacks on the moral influence of…
evolvingthoughts | October 2, 2006Repost from the old blog:
One of the problems in having a philosophy related blog is that ideas are hard things to generate on demand, so often you need someone to raise the problems for you to think about. Being naturally (and preternaturally!) lazy, I don't go out looking for problems (of a philosophical nature; the ordinary kind seem to find me like flies find rotting garbage). Hence, this blog is sporadic.
Well, I just tripped over an interesting question raised by Certain Doubts: can we reconcile the Platonic value of truth with an evolutionary view of epistemology? That is, if we think…
evolvingthoughts | September 24, 2006
Razib has a little post on cultural cladism, but I think he gets it quite wrong.
He repeats the usual trope canard that culture isn't like biology in terms of its evolution. I think it is exactly like it, and that the "analogy" between cultural traditions and species is quite exact. All that differs is the frequency of the various kinds of evolution.
For instance, take Razib's example. He says that because Judaism is very unlike Christianity in some respects, and much more strictly like Islam in its monotheism, it should be seen as a sister taxon to Islam and not Christianity, and the…
evolvingthoughts | September 12, 2006LifeSite has this: Pope Preaches Against Chance Evolution: "Man is Not the Chance Result of Evolution".
Yep, it's the old "evolution implies chance and a lack of meaning" trick. Second time we've fallen for that this week. Would you believe...?
For reasons that I can't quite put my finger on, this seems very Controlish. The pope is worried about KAOS. They had a Cone of Silence conversation, which pretty well everyone in the world overheard, and while I'm very pleased that the Catholic Church isn't about to go ID on our asses, we might perhaps think a little bit about this.
In a homily in…
evolvingthoughts | September 9, 2006Where two principles really do meet which cannot be reconciled with one another, then each man declares the other a fool and heretic. [Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, 611]
A question I have wondered about for a long time is this: why do people become creationists? I mean, nobody is born a creationist (or an evolutionist, or a Mayan cosmic-cyclist, etc.). These are views that one acquires as one learns and integrates into society. But we live, notionally, in a society in which science has learned more about the world in 300 years than in the prior million or so. So, why do people become…
evolvingthoughts | September 5, 2006John Allen, at National Catholic Review, has an interesting analysis of the motives behind the recent Evolution Study Day the pope held. Unsurprisingly, the issue is not whether life changed over time, or even whether natural selection works - although he indicates that as Cardinal Ratzinger, Benedict inclined to thinking that "macro-evolution" (speciation and above) was impossible by random variation and natural selection, showing that he knows very little about the actual biology.
No, it's this:
Evolution has become a kind of "first philosophy" for enlightened thinkers, ruling out the…
evolvingthoughts | September 3, 2006I only just saw this today - here's a nice (and more informed) discussion of my use of Aquinas on design. It seems I relied on the term "designedly" a bit too much, when it should be about why the cause of something causes that outcome and not another. I misread by reading Aristotle himself into the medieval period.
I shall now go smack my knuckles.
evolvingthoughts | September 3, 2006The New York Review of Books has an interesting article by Ronald Dworkin entitled "3 Questions for America". The three questions are:
1. Should alternatives to evolution be taught in schools? Dworkin says yes, but only if they are actually scientific. Alternatives derived from and dictated by religious beliefs don't count. He recommends that we (that is, the USAians, but it applies in broader international contexts) need a Contemporary Politics course that discusses how these sorts of issues arise and for what political purposes.
2. The Pledge of Allegiance. Though this is not cast as a…
evolvingthoughts | September 1, 2006Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) was an amazingly prolific and influential philosopher in America, and founded what has come to be known as "pragmatism", which is the idea that the meaning of terms depends on how they "cash out" in practice. He contributed to the development of modern logic, founded the semiotic tradition (he called it "semeiotics) and was the first philosopher to take evolution seriously as a philosophical source.
But he was also overly fond of coining neologisms from Greek and Roman roots, and is very hard to read. Now a group in Helsinki have compiled definitions of his…
evolvingthoughts | August 23, 2006Shelley of Retrospectacle has asked us:
Are you for or against the death penalty, or (if its conditional), in what cases? Furthermore, do you believe that societies that sanction war are hypocritical for opposing the death penalty?
I am absolutely opposed to the death penalty. No government has, in my opinion, a right to cold bloodedly take a citizen's or visitor's life under rule of law. While I believe it also fails to act as a deterrent, and makes permanent any miscarriages of justice (of which there are plenty, ranging from prejudice against stereotypes to outright falsifying of evidence…
evolvingthoughts | August 20, 2006A friend of mine just attempted suicide. When I was in my teens, I attempted suicide several times. It wasn't a cry for help, because nobody ever knew I tried. It was a reaction to the bad situation I found myself in, at a time when my hormones were raging, and when I was mostly alone. The reason I stopped trying is because I saw the look on the face of the train driver in my last attempt, and I realised what it would mean to him and his family, and later it occurred to me, also to mine. So I jumped off the track.
A new film in Australia, 2:37, has been released in which suicide by teens is…
evolvingthoughts | July 17, 2006This is a repost of some old site entries, collated.
I've been wondering of late what it is that is explained when something is called "designed".
The older design theorists had no such trouble - Aquinas, for example, noted that
... things which lack intelligence, such as natural bodies, act for an end, and this is evident from their acting always, or nearly always, in the same way, so as to obtain the best result. Hence it is plain that not fortuitously, but designedly, do they achieve their end. [Summa, 1Q2.iii]
This is a wonder of spare and elegant prose, as always with Aquinas. Modern…
evolvingthoughts | June 20, 2006
Well after reading many papers by various bacteriologists, mycologists, and other non-vertebrates specialists, I have come to the conclusion that there is no single set of conceptions or criteria (that much abused word!) for something being a species in non-sexual organisms, which I am here calling "microbial". Of course, as I noted, microbes can be "sexual" in various ways. They can share genes via cross-species viral infection (transfection or transduction), via gene fragment uptake (transformation), via sharing in a protosexual way (conjugation), and so on, with it being occasional and…
evolvingthoughts | June 19, 2006
When we attempt to apply to organisms that are not obligately sexual (that is, which don't have to have sex to reproduce) concepts that were specified to use with those that are, we have problems. The Recombination Model is one such attempt. Sure, some microbial species exchange genes. Others do it more frequently and more completely. There appears to be a continuum of gene exchange all the way from almost never to almost every time. So why should we expect that gene transfer will provide us with the sort of homogeneity of lineages and quasispecies that it does in obligate sexuals?
In part…