Terry Scambray, a Fresno, California–based writer, offers a review of prominent philosopher Thomas Nagel’s Mind & Cosmos, in which he challenges his thesis a bit:

Mind & Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False, Thomas Nagel. Oxford University Press, 2012. 128 pages. $24.95

In Mind & Cosmos, the highly regarded philosopher Thomas Nagel can’t make up his mind about how to explain his own mind and the minds of the rest of us. However, he is sure that the materialist explanation of mind is, well, merely a mental construct or as he writes, it “is almost certainly false.”

In his longest chapter called “Consciousness,” Nagel, a professor of philosophy and law at New York University, recounts how the “mind-body problem” arose out of the 17th century scientific revolution, which necessarily involved reducing things down to their tiniest physical and chemical parts and then discovering what made them tick.

But can such “scientific” reductionism be applied to the mind and consciousness ? Not really because applying quantitative measurements to the unquantifiable is actually a misapplication which results in a degenerative form of science sometimes called, “scientism.” And “scientism” is but another example of the adage: If you are devoted to using a hammer, then everything looks like a nail.

Yes, it remains paradoxical that science has never been able to objectify something essential to its entire enterprise, mind or consciousness, which, as Nagel writes, is that “aspect of mental phenomena that is evident from the first person, inner point of view which tells you how sugar tastes, red looks or how anger feels,” and how to fairly and accurately evaluate a scientific experiment.

Of course, the mind/body conundrum is a perennial issue which thinkers found puzzling even a long time prior to the 17th century. Nonetheless, Nagel (left) yearns for a “unified world picture” which would necessarily have to include the mind and the cosmos, a goal which he oddly refers to as “utopian.”

Perhaps he thinks of this goal as “utopian” because as he concedes, “theories of everything” are restricted because science currently limits itself to material causes whereas the mind is an immaterial, immeasurable, unrestricted free agent.

Despite this limitation, Nagel ambitiously remarks that “the more encompassing a theory is, the more powerful it has to be.” For this reason he hopes that “a major conceptual revolution at least as radical as relativity theory or the original scientific revolution itself” will be discovered which will make the mind and consciousness amenable to scientific inspection. Read more »

Philosopher-photographer Laszlo Bencze commented recently on the film The History of the World in Two Hours:

He writes,

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In terms of computer graphics, it was quite impressive. In terms of explanations of life, it was the usual: The great myth of our times presented uncritically in the vaguest of terms:

Chemicals form on the early Earth which “combine” to cause life. Life “gets” more complicated as time goes on. There is an “explosion” of complexity in the Cambrian. Etc.

When it comes to our hominid “ancestors” we are given the usual pablum. The visual is a group of chimps in a tree. (These are real chimps, not CGI.) The announcer intones that it’s getting crowded in the tree and there’s less food due to the competition. But (thank evolution!) a few of the more “adventurous” chimps decide to climb down out of the tree onto the flat savannah where they “develop” a bipedal gait. The advantageous of a bipedal gait on a savannah landscape are numerous and these lucky bipedal hominids thrive (depicted by CGI bent over chimps walking).

There’s nary a hint that any of these evolutionary steps might be very complicated or difficult to explain. Everything is easy. Evolution gets reified into some sort of vaguely purposeful entity that guides life along, always responding perfectly to environmental catastrophes and opportunities.

Just once I’d like to see one of these shows actually dare to say something like, Read more »

The human brain does not differ in organization from the ape brain, yet is capable of so much more. So clearly, physical organization is where human uniqueness apparently does NOT lie …

Recently, a Reading University research team has used statistical models to suggest that “Ice Age people living in Europe 15,000 years ago might have used forms of some common words including I, you, we, man and bark, that in some cases could still be recognized today.”

Their hypothesis is that some words “would have changed so slowly over long periods of time as to retain traces of their ancestry for up to ten thousand or more years.”

This story, as such, is typical “human evolution” hype, as can be seen clearly from grammatical constructions like “might have” and “would have.” That said, evolutionary biologist Mark Pagel’s team may be on to something. Their starting assumption—that words used frequently in everyday speech are less likely to change over long periods of time—is probably correct, but they are surely taking their conclusions too far.

Here is a line  (1132) from Beowulf, the oldest epic in the English language tradition, composed some time between 700 and 1000 A.D. (first page of a surviving manuscript, above),

won wið winde, winter yþe beleac

and here is a translation into modern English:

lashed by the winds, or winter locked them

I suspect that you will recognize only two words in the original, “wind[e]” and “winter.”

Large comprehension costs may be expected from changing words like “wind” and “winter”—or “water,”and “fire” readily. Indeed, that was the point of a famous folk tale in which a man orders his maidservant to use a new special language when talking to him, and then a fire breaks out, and she dutifully reports: Read more »

From Noel Rude, a specialist in a native American language group, on the Pagel team’s recent statistical study here, suggesting that words from human prehistory might be conserved for ten thousand years or more:

Yes, language evolves—that is, language changes over time, and those changes accumulate to create completely new languages—French from Latin, for example. The origin of language is an entirely different matter. The kind of changes we observe—changes in sound, grammar, and semantics—do not explain how language came to be in the first place. It’s micro- vs. macro-evo all over again.

After Darwin all kinds of theories of language origin were bandied about, all so obviously foolish that in 1866 la Société de Linguistique de Paris banned all such discussion. The ban was pretty much observed until Philip Lieberman published his 1975 On the Origins of Language.

Lieberman argued that until man evolved a bent vocal tract he couldn’t have produced vowel contrasts and therefore he didn’t speak. This was thought profound until somebody pointed out that parrots do quite well with just a beak. Also there are languages, such as Berber and Bella Coola, where a great many words have no vowels at all.

The “cognitive revolution” was begun nevertheless, and now there are zillions of studies linking this or that physiological or neurological attribute with this or that linguistic feature. It is all quite interesting but it doesn’t get to the heart of the matter. I call it bottom up linguistics. Yes, indeed, language is shaped by physiological and neurological abilities and limitations as well as by the nature of the sound stream itself. But we still need a top down linguistics that addresses the problem of logic and meaning.

Not only are consciousness and volition necessary for speech, we now know that there can be no discussion of grammatical relations across languages unless consciousness and volition are understood as universal semantic primitives. And thus universal grammar, once the holy grail of linguistics, is now pooh-poohed. Also at work is the multicultural dictum that the only thing we share is our diversity (i.e., the only thing we share is that we don’t share anything).

So what about Mark Pagel? There is a difference between what he is doing (long range comparison) and reconstructions such as we have for Indo-European, Semitic, Bantu and other groups. Read more »

Gary Marcus (left), professor of psychology at New York University, who has written, among other books, Kluge: The Haphazard Evolution of The Human Mind, points out that there is nothing specific about our brains that explains humans’ unique intelligence—which he regards as a “modest tweak” of evolution. Obviously it isn’t a modest tweak, but philosophical naturalists often seem to feel compelled to say things like that. And journalist Tom Bethell replies. Read more »

galaxies from 13 BYA, near Big Bang time

Attempts to discredit the the Big Bang, in which our universe is thought to have originated, have been impressively feeble in recent decades.

Possibly for philosophical reasons, most consumers of popular science media do not protest the low quality of the evidence and resulting arguments against it. Like the many physicists who have been proponents of “eternal universe” cosmologies, the popular readers dislike a universe that has a beginning because that implies that there might actually be a God. (As opposed to, say, it is legal to believe in God if you feel like it, but there is no evidence. )

Here’s a sample from the news desk of Nature, which gives some idea of the available no-Big Bang fare in the light of recent results from particle physics: Read more »

Stephen Hawking at NASA in the 1980s

Given that many top scientists have disliked the Big Bang (it sounds too much like God at work), it is perhaps no surprise that world famous cosmologist Stephen Hawking took the opportunity to bash the Bang at a a recent public appearance in Pasadena.

Given the number of pop science writers who share his view, media reports should be taken with a groan of salt. A recent NBC News story, for example, reads as if Hawking’s musings were late-breaking news. Hardly.

Everyone has understood the Big Bang’s theological implications ever since it was first advanced in the 1930s. When the confirming COBE numbers were read out at the Goddard Space Flight Center near Washington, D.C. George Smoot, head of the team, responded: “I felt like I was looking God in the face.” [1] As Robert Jastrow (1925–2008), head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, explained, “On both scientific and philosophical grounds, the concept of an eternal Universe seems more acceptable than the concept of a transient Universe that springs into being suddenly, and then fades slowly into darkness.” [2]

The Big Bang is not direct proof of God’s existence, but if God exists and did create the universe, we might expect something like that. And something like the ensuing reaction of world-famous atheists in science as well. They have put a great deal of effort into developing alternative models that would point away from God. The problem is that for sixty years and more, the evidence has favored the Big Bang. Can the Large Hadron Collider particle-smashing experiments break that winning streak? Have they already?

Let’s look at Ron Pyle’s NBC story: Read more »

Georges Lemaitre (1894-1966)

As we saw earlier, atheist cosmologists have hated and tried to discredit the Big Bang as the origin of our universe ever since the generally accepted theory, developed by Georges Lemaître, first began to be discussed among scientists in the early 1930s. Lemaître was a Belgian priest, but that probably wasn’t why they associated the theory with religion. As we have seen, the very idea of a beginning to the universe is more consistent with the existence of God than the eternal “Steady State” universe that committed atheists prefer.

There were problems with the Steady State model from early in the century. In 1929, American astronomer Edwin Hubble (1889–1953) discovered that the galaxies are moving away from each other. In an eternal universe, should they not long since have disappeared from view? Fred Hoyle’s team defended Steady State theory as follows: Suppose hydrogen atoms, the simplest ones, pop into existence by spontaneous generation. Thus the universe is expanding just a tiny bit at a time, from everywhere at once, a rate of change not likely to be remarked in human history. However, evidence tended to support the Big Bang. [1]

Stephen Hawking has been arguing against the Big Bang at recent public appearances, and has himself proposed various alternatives. (He has also made his atheist leanings quite clear in recent years.) He tinkered with the idea of a design-free universe in A Brief History of Time (1996), in which he suggests,

So long as the universe had a beginning, we would suppose it had a creator (the cosmological argument). But if the universe is really completely self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither beginning nor end: it would simply be. What place, then, for a creator?[2]

To make his cosmology work, he relied on imaginary time rather than real time, explaining, “Maybe what we call imaginary time is really more basic, and what we call real is just an idea that we invent to help us describe what we think the universe is like.” [3] The problem is that one must convert one’s results back to real time to say anything meaningful about the real world. Read more »

universe shortly after the Big Bang

Why do so many who study our universe (cosmologists) hate the Big Bang? Quantum cosmologist Christopher Isham recalls,

Perhaps the best argument in favor of the thesis that the Big Bang supports theism is the obvious unease with which it is greeted by some atheist physicists. At times this has led to scientific ideas, such as continuous creation or an oscillating universe, being advanced with a tenacity which so exceeds their intrinsic worth that one can only suspect the operation of psychological forces lying very much deeper than the usual academic desire of a theorist to support his/her theory. [1]

British astronomer Fred Hoyle (1915–2001) named Georges Lemaître’s new theory the Big Bang—as a joke, not suspecting the name would catch on in a way that, say, “initial singularity universe” wouldn’t have.

Arthur Eddington (1882–1944) said (1933), “I feel almost an indignation that anyone should believe in it—except myself,” because “The beginning seems to present insuperable difficulties unless we agree to look on it as frankly supernatural.” [2]

A team of astrophysicists offered in 1973 that it “involves a certain metaphysical aspect which may be either appealing or revolting.” [3]

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“Over the years, they have tried on several different models of the universe that dodge the need for a beginning while still requiring a big bang. But recent research has shot them full of holes. It now seems certain that the universe did have a beginning.” – New Scientist

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Read more »

Recently, I noted Persecuted: The Global Assault on Christians by Paul Marshall, Lela Gibert, and Nina Shea (here and here). Their Center for Religious Freedom at the Hudson Institute has launched a Web site, offering up-to-date reports on religious persecution of Christians.

The world-wide picture is sobering. Pew Research Center, Newsweek, and The Economist all agree that Christians are the world’s most widely persecuted Christian group.

Marshall and team offer information about three quite different reasons for persecution by different types of regimes (pp. 9–11): Read more »