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Review: Darwin’s Doubt
An acquaintance suggested I do a review of Darwin’s Doubt, by Stephen C. Meyer. My approach here will seem odd to folk who are opposed to creationism Intelligent Design being taught in high schools, as their approach is usually to attack the biology-related claims in the book. And it’s fair to say that there’s a lot…
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Evidence For ‘Religion Causes People to do Evil’
I’ve been thinking about religion being the cause of people doing evil a little more recently, and I’ve been trying to think of what would make a more compelling argument. Don’t get me wrong, I’m extremely anti-religion, but I’m also anti-crappy-argument. (Although some people I’ve discussed this with online have taken my latter stance to mean…
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What’s Up With Methodological Naturalism?
If you listen to creationists like Stephen C Meyer, and other members of the Discovery Institute, you’ll eventually hear them go on at great length about “methodological naturalism”, and that it’s a cornerstone dogma of science, and that it’s bad and wrong and an unfair arbitrary standard that even scientific theories aren’t held to. This…
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Data Underdetermines Our Hypotheses.
One of the big ideas to come out of Philosophy of Science is that of Underdetermination. The folk-science view of things is that if you have a collection of facts, then those facts (all neatly tied together) will point at a conclusion. It may be objected that this is an extremely viewpoint, and that’s also…
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Book Reviews
I’ve decided to undertake some book reviews. My plan is evaluate the argumentation in the books. This means that I’ll largely be just taking their factual claims as a given (regardless of who ridiculous they are), to see if the conclusion of the book follows from the chapters that came before. In other words, I’ll…
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An Open Letter to Mark Mercer and Saint Mary’s University
Dr. Mercer, I recently read your article in the UBC’s Ubyssey, and I have to admit: it raised some serious questions for me. I’ve spent some time thinking on them, so I hope that you’re not immediately dismissive. These questions pertain to your being a Doctor of Philosophy in Philosophy, and yet you fail to act…
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Giving Back
Sometimes you read something so poorly written that it leaves you wondering ‘how the hell did this get published?’ But then you notice that it was in a business magazine, and all is explained. A recent example of this kind of drivel is “Give Back? Yes, It’s Time For The 99% To Give Back To…
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Religion is the Cause of Terrible Behaviour
A fairly common theme in many atheist blogs is that religion is a causal factor in the various atrocities committed by people who are religious. JT Eberhard makes that point at the bottom of this post when he says (sarcastically): But Islam can’t be the cause of this barbaric behavior because the Koran has some…
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Taking Advantage of Seeking a Better Life
There’s no limit to the number of ‘self-help’ gurus out there, who lay claim to all sorts of nonsense. At best, these people are deeply misguided about what it is they are doing. At worst, they are intentionally running scams and swindling people out of money. I want to focus on a particular example: Psychology…
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The Death Penalty, The Economic Argument
This is the fourth (and final) part of a series, dealing with topics are normally informed by a religious point-of-view, but have somehow managed to leak into some secular world-views. They’ll be collected together under the arrogantly-titled ‘Conceits’ tag. I’ve dealt with The Deterrence Effect in Part 1 and Part 2 of this sub-series, and I also…
