Where's that Razor When You Need It?

By -
I was browsing some books at a bookshop the other day and came across one arguing how the discovery of a world governed by scientific laws refuted the proposition that there was a supernatural deity involved in any way. This struck me as funny because, basically to a man, the people discovering those laws, from about 1600 until well into the 19th century, saw the laws they were finding as testimony to the glory of God (and, as such, evidence for His existence).

There is a problem for materialist here, of course -- why should the universe be a place that supports creatures like us and is governed by laws we are capable of grasping? One of the latest materialist attempts to explain this posits that a multitude of universes of all different characters exist, and we just happen to be in a law-governed, life-supporting instance. So let me see: In place of explaining these things by means of a single, unobservable entity, we are going to explain them by billions and billions of unobservable entities!

Calling Occam, calling Occam!

Comments

  1. Bob Murphy10:14 AM

    It's hard to put a label on you, Callahan! Just when the atheist an-caps are rooting for you scurrilous attacks on LRC, you go and write something like this...

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous12:21 AM

    Yeah, Gene real great job. I think you should submit this to LRC.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose
Read more