Steve Fuller, who supported the wrong side at the 2005 evolution trial in Dover, Pennsylvania, has now written a book making the entirely discredited argument that intelligent design is "science." Fuller's book ("Dissent over Descent") has been reviewed (actually, savaged) by philosopher Michael Ruse, whose review "A Challenge Standing On…
A committee has been selected in Texas to define the science curriculum for the next decade. The 6 man committee consists of 3 reputable scientists, two co-authors of a new Intelligent Design textbook, and one chemistry professor who is known for his Intelligent Design stance. Fair and balanced, right? Oh,…
Consider these words of George W. Bush, spoken in Rome, in 2001
“I know what I believe. I will continue to articulate what I believe and what I believe — I believe what I believe is right.”
This is not an isolated case. These sorts of fact-free assertions occur all the time. Consider another example, this one a hypothetical. Assume that you overhear some guy claiming that homeopathic medicine [or fill in the blank with your own favorite snake oil treatment] is effective and powerful. Because you suspect that he doesn’t have his facts right or that his reasoning is unreliable or invalid, you speak up and question his statement. He responds by saying something like the following:
I’m certain I am correct. I’m absolutely sure that I’m right. I have no doubts about this.
Despite the many claims of certainty that we hear, we often remain unconvinced, and for good reason. There’s a saying, “Show, don’t tell.” Show me the facts so that I myself can see whether I am certain. Don’t just tell me that you’re certain. Nonetheless, people constantly make claims that are based on inner feels of certainty, quite often wild and unsubstantiated claims about politics and religion, as well as claims about science, history or just about everything else.
People often use such claims that they have a “feeling of certainty” as bootstraps to convince themselves that they are even more certain than they actually are, thereby completely dispensing for the need for meticulous …
Discussions in the comment sections of many posts on this site chaotically tend toward the strange attractor of one generally off-topic issue: Why does Creation/Evolution seem correct to you? It is usually a discussion between Creationists who believe that the scientific conclusions are based on faith, and Naturalists who believe that the Scientific Method is best tool ever invented to extract sense from chaos.
In the beginning, Natural Philosophers (now called Scientists) in the West all believed in the Bible. Bishop Ussher gave the final word on the age of the universe according to the Bible in the early 1600’s, and the Church had all the answers. But then the idea emerged that one can actually test Aristotelian conclusions (purely rational and based on “what everybody knows”) with observations. Copernicus demonstrated with careful observation and applied math around 1600 that only the moon itself orbited the Earth, and all the other planets circled the Sun. The church accepted this, as a philosophical observation, irrelevant to the place of Man in the Universe. Then Galileo made a gadfly of himself by publishing popular books mocking the Pope for publicly continuing in the preaching of Geocentrism when it was clear, with the aid of a telescope, that not only did the planets orbit the sun, but that some of those planets had moons of their own. Many moons, placed where Man couldn’t even see them without modern technology.
Well, it just snowballed from there. Newton, a devout Christian, developed math in …
Duped from Ethics Gradient.
They’ve started advertising the DVD version of that infernal, mendacious, highly offensive, wilfully ignorant and misleading waste of megabytes known as Expelled. Bay of Fundie has scratched the surface of their advertising and revealed some new information.
Now, given that this is the DVD release of Expelled, it makes me wonder what kind of special features they’ll include. Of course no one can know for sure, but I have something of a wish list:
– a complete timeline of all the steps taken & communication entered into to secure the participation of such people as Richard Dawkins and PZ Myers, including a full explanation for the stark deviation from the premise of the original film: it was originally presented to Myers & Dawkins as a documentary named “Crossroads”, detailing the intersection of religion & science, which it clearly did not turn out to be, either by name or nature
– full, uncut, unedited interviews with the above-named
– a full explanation from the film’s producers of PZ Myer’s own expulsion from a screening of Expelled by security staff before he’d entered the theatre, despite the fact that he’d registered to attend under his own name and hadn’t attempted any kind of subterfuge, as was alleged early on by the producers (as well as an explanation of how Richard Dawkins, arguably more recognisable than PZ Myers, was allowed to enter unmolested)
– behind-the-scenes segments showing such things as exactly who comprised the audience in …