The sleep of reason: Do atheists improve the stock?

Religions, 2020

Traditional religions posit a nonmaterial, spiritual aspect of life. Science rejects that possibility and given the contemporary intellectual hegemony enjoyed by science, that has greatly deflated support for religious perspectives. This paper introduces the countervailing position, that the extraordinary claims associated with the scientific vision have always been a stretch-beginning with a reliance on DNA for exceptional behaviors. That stretch is now unfolding in a broad failure as huge efforts to identify the DNA (or genetic) origins for disease and behavioral tendencies (in the realms of personal genomics and behavioral genetics, respectively) have been an "absolutely beyond belief" failure. This paper will discuss this unfolding heritability crisis, and then indirectly further it with consideration of challenges posed by some unusual behaviors including taboo and accepted paradoxes. A basic point herein is that objectively challenging science's bedrock position of materialism-which has been an immense obstacle in the path of finding meaningful support for religious perspectives-is not difficult. A final point touched on here is that science's physics-only based model of evolution never made sense as a possible vehicle for dualistic or transcendent phenomena, and thus the unfolding failure of genetics further deserves the attention of those investigating religious perspectives.

Religious Studies Review, 2009

This anthology lays the groundwork for developing a comprehensive evolutionary cosmology derived from Whiteheadian process philosophy-one that provides the basis for an alternative to the "neo-Darwinist" orthodoxy in biological research. According to Cobb, the neo-Darwinist paradigm is marred by its materialism and reductionist methods that result in a distortion of the complex and relational nature of the organic world. Cobb defends a return to Darwin and to more inclusive modes of comprehending the organic world, which would help to "clear the slate . . . restrictive" neo-Darwinian interpretations of it. A process evolutionary cosmology maintains that organisms have a degree of agency in directing evolutionary processes, largely consistent with J. M. Baldwin's theory of "organic selection," in which the behaviors, the mentalities, and the selective activities of organisms are said to play a role in directing the morphological evolution of their species. One weakness of the book, however, is that it points only to well-worn examples terms of the Baldwin effect. While Cobb enlists renowned geneticist F. Ayala to provide insightful commentary on the status of current biological research, Cobb responds to Ayala's proposal in Darwin's Gift (2007) for a continued separation of biological science and theology. Cobb argues for a "new integration between science and religious belief" made possible by the acknowledgment that the subjectivity and purposes of organisms play a role in evolution.

Adnan Oktar (Harun Yahya) (People with intelligence are) those who remember Allah, standing, sitting and lying on their sides, and reflect on the creation of the heavens and the Earth: "Our Lord, You have not created this for nothing. Glory be to You! So safeguard us from the punishment of the Fire." (Surah Al'Imran, 191) Allah (God), Ruler of all the Worlds, advises His faithful servants to reflect upon the things He created. One of the main reasons for this is that there is evidence of the existence of Allah and His sublime creation in the Earth and sky and all that He has created, and seeing this evidence draws the believer even closer to Allah. One who believes in Almighty Allah will see His might and greatness in the bud of a flower, in a single cell he examines under the microscope, in a magnificent tree spreading its branches to the sky, in fruit packaged inside its outer rind, in animals or in a single seed. Therefore, reflection upon the beauty he encounters will strengthen the faith of anyone who believes in His existence. Because Allah, Lord of the Worlds, has created all things, and His might pervades everywhere on Earth. Yet many people do not reflect on the entities they see, the details they examine or the information they learn—or rather, they avoid doing so. The reason is generally their unwillingness to see the existence of Allah! Some of these people are geneticists and scientists; some discovered DNA and were awarded Nobel Prizes as a result, others discovered the orbits of the planets and performed countless calculations and studies regarding them. Still others plumbed the innards of the atom and identified subatomic particles invisible to the naked eye. Others are botanists who know that a single grain of pollen may travel many kilometers to fertilize other plants of the same species. Others are aware that each of the cells in the human brain represents a gigantic miracle. The perfection in their own bodies, in animals, in plants and in all the entities surrounding them is constantly brought before their eyes.

Biology & Philosophy, 2005

2009

Rather astonishing is our confirmatory evidence for neurologist J. Z. Young’s conclusion that we are [Mankind is] the only species which constructs models for survival outside the brain and outside the genetic system. This confirmatory evidence takes the form of a unifying description of three biological model-building processes: (I) chemico-genetic; (II) chemico-neural; and (III) the extra-corporeal, this last being unique to Mankind. The unifying connection is that each of these “Three Worlds” — an allusion to one of philosopher Karl Popper’s notions — is “conducted” via a single sixstage model-building process containing two major (and a third, less major) corrective feedback loops.

Oxford University Press eBooks, 2012

2020

Comparative cognition is the interdisciplinary study of nonhuman animal cognition. It has been criticized for systematically underattributing sophisticated cognition to nonhuman animals, a problem that I refer to as the underattribution bias. In this paper, I show that philosophical treatments of this bias at the experimental level have emphasized one feature of the experimental-statistical methodology (the preferential guarding against false positives over false negatives) at the expense of neglecting another feature (the default, or null, hypothesis). In order to eliminate this bias, I propose a reformulation of the standard statistical framework in comparative cognition. My proposal identifies and removes a problematic reliance on the value of parsimony in the calibration of the null hypothesis, replacing it with relevant empirical and theoretical information. In so doing, I illustrate how epistemic and non-epistemic values can covertly enter scientific methodology through featur...

Critical Quarterly, 2000

2014

A SCIENTIFIC DISSENT FROM DARWINISM " We are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life. Careful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory should be encouraged. "