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Rob’s out in an interview with Greg Gutfield, so it’s just Peter and James this week. Even so we’ve got a packed podcast-full of wonders and terrors. First up is Niall Ferguson to discuss his brand new book, Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe. He and the hosts explore our fascination with disaster. (Be sure to catch his interview with Peter on Uncommon Knowledge as well!) Then they’re joined by Stephen Meyer, who has a new book of his own: Return of the God Hypothesis: Three Scientific Discoveries That Reveal The Mind Behind The Universe. (We’ve got UK episode for that as well!) Also, Peter is shocked to learn Biden’s economy is sputtering and James sets the record straight-on what, you ask? Listen to find out.
Music from this week’s episode: God Only Knows by the Beach Boys.
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I think there should never be debates about the covid vaccines here on Ricochet with no one mentioning the existence of the treatments. Let’s don’t act like they’re not part of the discussion, please!
See comment #28
If you click on the number – it’ll give you a link to the comment:
https://ricochet.com/podcast/ricochet-podcast/doom-and-boom/#comment-5445653
Her face needs a vaccination.
As a young man I once met in France Mormon missionaries from America. I knew little about their religion and so was surprised to learn that they believe that God is a physical being. Questioning led to a curt response: “Well, of course God has to obey the laws of the universe!” My thought, no doubt regarded as unfair in Mormon theology, was immediately: “This is pantheistic paganism!” C.S. Lewis remarks that pantheism is the natural inclination of the (fallen) human mind…Theism posits non-contingent being, which to the human mind is inconceivable, and so we wind up falling back either on recursiveness or on a vague sort of “causation-less” reality that assumes that things are the way they are simply because that’s the way they are…
I don’t think a limited approach to science’s scope limits beliefs, other than a limited belief in the questions science can answer. Again, one might see it as the “How” versus the “Who” or the “Why.” I think believing in “Science” starts to become a form of nature, Gaia-worshiping pantheism if people are not very careful. And people are seldom very careful. There are things science can determine. There are things that science is limited from determining.
Someone on Twitter recently, after Neil DeGrasse Tyson bestowed some wisdom on us, pointed out that in many cases you can replace the word “science” with the word “the Bible”, or “God”, and not change the meaning of the statement.
I believe the specific example from Mr. DGT was something along the lines of “The thing about Science is that its true, whether you believe in it or not”.
Of course, there are no theories in science that have an unqualified guarantee to be true (regardless of whether they are believed or not). It is in the nature of science that theories are held in a tentative way that is always subject to further evidence. With every major paradigm shift within science, some idea that was the “consensus” before is dropped in favor of something else that fits the evidence better.
If NdGT really did say “The thing about Science is that its true, whether you believe in it or not”, then that would indicate that he doesn’t understand very well what science (or “Science”??) is. He has confused the current set of scientific theories with reality itself, as if there is never any difference. Everyone familiar with the attempts of science to model reality understands that our models are not reality itself.
Most of my career has been involved with scientific research. It was while at a collaborating research facility, that I first saw the following bit of humble wisdom.
Would you take crime scene investigation (CSI) seriously? CSI methods were actually inspired by the stories about the fictional character Sherlock Holmes. Now that method of reasoning figures prominently, not only in criminal investigation but in every field where we can study the effects of past events to try to infer…
“What must have happened in the past that would account for the evidence we see being as it is now?”
That reasoning from observable effects back to the necessary and sufficient causes is sometimes called abductive reasoning. It is also referred to as reasoning to the best explanation. Of all the things that might have happened before, what cause best fits these effects?
It is an essential part of scientific reasoning about past events.
For example, the kind of information we see stored in DNA is not like seeing a planet move across a distant sun. It includes coded information that stores a recipe for constructing the very rare sequence of a functional protein according to a particular coding convention, i.e. the genetic code of that organism.
There are no coherent ideas about how mindless matter would make functional proteins without stored recipes or adopt a coding convention and use it to store recipes for future proteins that must be implemented by a decoding translation machine (a ribosome).
It is like trying to imagine mindless matter creating a meaningfully encoded DVD before there is a DVD player for that encoding, or creating the DVD player before there are any DVDs.
A system that processes meaningful, functional, coded information according to an adopted convention requires intention to implement an imagined system by choice. All of that requires an intelligent mind as its cause.
p.s. About
In the story of Robinson Crusoe on a deserted island, when he first found someone else’s footprint in the sand, he was “terrified to the last degree”. (People can also hate the thought of something “being so“.) But since the footprint did not match his own foot and it could not be adequately explained by other causes, he was compelled to conclude that he was not alone.
Atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel has written:
Nevertheless, credit where credit is due, despite that feeling on the matter, in his book, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False, Nagel writes with appreciation for skeptic David Berlinski and ID proponents such as Michael Behe and Stephen Meyer.
and
The evidence matters more than our preferences.