Philosophy & Ethics

What is Nature’s Worst Design? Francisco Ayala Answers: "The human reproductive system. Twenty percent of pregnancies end in spontaneous abortions and miscarriages in the first two months. In the world, that’s 20 million abortions per year. Twenty million abortions per year? You wouldn’t want to blame God for that." Francisco Ayala is the Donald Bren Professor of Biological Sciences, Ecology,&Evolutionary Biology and a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Irvine. He has also been awarded £1 million by the Templeton Foundation for propagating such ideas. For those who…

Over at Marginal Revolution economist Tyler Cowan has started one of those blog trends, and many other bloggers have followed like a pack of lemmings. So of course I'm going to join in - it's about books. The question is what are the ten books "which have [most] influenced your view of the world." Not your ten favorite books, but those that have most shaped your outlook. I'm sorry that it turns out all of the books are by men. I clearly need to read more. In no particular order: 1. Genius and Chaos, by James Gleick. For better or for worse, these books more than anything else influenced my…

Ignacio Ellacuria wrote,"with Mons. Romero God is past for El Salvador". Mons. Oscar Romero represents the history of another church, less known, not one of the hierarchy, but that of the People of God, made of people before that of priests who have married, in the name of God, the case of the oppressed, fighting and dying to their side. Romero was killed by a shot to the heart on March 24 1980, while celebrating Mass at a small chapel located in a hospital called "La Divina Providencia", one day after a sermon where he had called on Salvadoran soldiers, as Christians, to obey God's…

Here's my submission..... Already posted on other sites Spread the word! IT MEANS EVERYTHING!!Without it, humanity could DIE!You think I JEST! NO, not at all!It is absolutely clear that there are forces at work lobbying powerfully for government to clamp down on free and open web use but it is not driven because of moves to take us to our highest ideals and dynamic growthIt is designed to take us into a state of psychosis, of self destruct!Already I am conversing with scientists who despair, and feel we have gone too far, that the planet cannot be saved from global catastrophe, and humanity…

Readers of this blog know that I am not fond of Krista Tippett, the fuzzy thinking host of National Public Radio’s “Speaking of Faith” (it really ruins my early Sunday mornings). She and New York Times’ columnist Stanley Fish make for entertaining targets when I feel like venting at irrationality disguised as profundity. And now Tippett has done it again. On her show she promoted her new book, Einstein’s God, and if the show is any indication, this new enterprise promises to be a fun fest for people inclined toward pseudo-metaphysics. I will give just a few examples of what I mean, taken both…

I'm sure many of you have heard the old story about a group of blind men trying to describe an elephant.  One guy grabs the elephant's leg and says an elephant must be like a tree.  Another guy grabs the end of its tail and says it's like a woman's ponytail.  Another one catches a breeze from the elephant's flapping ear and says the creature is more like a large fan.  (Okay, obviously I don't remember the details of the story, but you get the picture.)  One of the places I heard this story in detail was in a course on Indian Philosophies, and it was used as a way of…

“The Role of Abathur (the Third Life) in the Mandaean Story of Creation.” Abathur [from Hebrew 'ab father] In the Nazarene or Bardesanian system, the father of the Demiurgus or architect of the visible universe. In the Codex Nazaraeus, written in a Chaldeo-Syrian dialect mixed with the mystery language of the Gnostics, Abathur opens a gate, walks to the dark water (chaos), and looks down into it. The darkness reflects his image, and a son is formed who becomes the Logos or Demiurge, Ptahil or Fetahil. After Ptahil finishes his work he reascends to his father.   Abathur, a…

The Fallacy Of The Average A fallacy is a pattern of logical reasoning which appears on its surface to be a pattern of sound reasoning.  The fallacy of the average is based on the false notion that the effect of a thing averaged out on a large scale is equivalent to an effect of the same thing on a small scale. A drop of rain falling anywhere in the Pacific is self-evidently insignificant as a matter of scale. But what if that single drop of rain falls into the mains supply circuit of a radio? If I have a box of screws and wish to know their average length, I need only take some random…

Neuroscience has a problem. It may appear to be a mere philosophical problem but has practical implications for the broader philosophy of science and the scientific method. One of the big projects is the correlation between states of the brain and states of mind. It isn't the only project but it is an important one. On one side of the equation we have a battery of biological, chemical and physical data regarding neurological activity at the level of the neuron and brain plus possibly other physiological processes. This domain poses few problems in producing data that is acceptable as…

This is a question on the Philosophy of Science examination paper for the BPhil at Oxford, as set last year. "Does the success of a scientific theory justify belief in the entities that the theory posits?" Indeed the paper has a related question: "Must a good scientific explanation of the occurrence of an event refer to some of its causes?" The student manual includes the helpful suggestion that all questions are, of course, liable to interpretation. The Ptolemaic model of our planetary system may have looked a mess but was a fairly accurate predictor of celestial motion given the rudimentary…