My thoughts on things of a more philosophical or scientific nature.
Reading Time: 3 minutes They don’t believe that there is an immaterial soul which exercises causal power on material reality. All that you are, therefore, is your body (including your brain). Since the brain, as a physical object, follows the laws of physics and chemistry, then your thoughts/decisions must also follow the laws of physics and chemistry.
Reading Time: < 1 minute In his book, “The Honest Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone—Especially Ourselves,” Dr. Dan Ariely performed a study on people who owned knock-off items.
Reading Time: 3 minutes Is it more logical to say that the universe arose from nothing? Also, advice on how to kiss your wife on your anniversary.
Reading Time: 2 minutes A thought experiment on the beginning of the universe. Open if you like dominoes. (Not the pizza.)
Reading Time: 2 minutes Studies have revealed a habit that we’re all better off ditching sooner rather than later.
Reading Time: 5 minutes “We must distinguish between truth, which is objective and absolute, and certainty, which is subjective.” —Popper
But is there a difference between knowledge and certainty?
Reading Time: 3 minutes “You are no more responsible for the state of your brain in this moment than you are for your height…thoughts simply arise in the mind. But the idea that we as conscious beings are…responsible for the characters of our minds, simply can’t be mapped onto reality.”
Reading Time: < 1 minute It’s been said that when you want something the most, it’s the easiest opportunity for deception, because you’ll see what you want to see. And that’s the rub. Deceiving yourself is the worst of all lies, because it’s the one that you are required to teach to others. It’s cheating yourself out of who you really are. It’s cheating yourself out of ever fixing YOU. As Dr. Dan Ariely noted…
Reading Time: 2 minutes Dr. Michael Ruse has an excellent piece called, “Is Rape Wrong on Andromeda: An Introduction to Extraterrestrial Evolution, Science, and Morality.” He goes through a thought experiment utilizing his own point of view. Let’s say that we start human evolution over again. Rewind it to the beginning and start out anew. Through randomization, a very different creature might evolve with different values and duties. Perhaps they act like bees, and…
Reading Time: < 1 minute “There is no such thing as morally right or wrong. Individual human life is meaningless and without ultimate moral value. We need to face the fact that nihilism is true.” In making sense of atheism, I believe that Christians need to consider carefully the topics of (a) free will and (b) morality. With regard to (b), Alex Rosenberg, the author of “The Atheist’s Guide to Reality,” wrote the opening quote,…
Reading Time: 2 minutes What are the chances that anyone has ever shuffled a pack of cards in the same way twice?
Reading Time: 13 minutes A timeless question that brilliant people have answered. Bonus discussion on actual infinites within spacetime.
Reading Time: 2 minutes Urbanization is associated with increased levels of mental illness, but it’s not yet clear why. It has been suggested that decreased nature experience may help to explain the link between urbanization and mental illness. One mechanism [toward increased mental illness—Luke] might be the impact of nature exposure on rumination, a maladaptive pattern of self-referential thought that is associated with heightened risk for depression and other mental illnesses. Our findings of the effects…
Reading Time: < 1 minute You kick yourself for making that dumb decision! What were you thinking? The team tried a play that just didn’t work—gah! Why’d they blow it? Introspection is important, but there’s a subtle, insidious error that can slither into our thinking—creeping determinism. It’s a phenomenon where, over time, we begin to look back and realize how a decision wasn’t going to work out; how all the dots were connecting into a…
Reading Time: 2 minutes Do you believe in good and evil? Professor Michael Ruse, a noted atheist and philosopher of science, has correctly noted what morality is in a world without God. In “The Darwinian Paradigm,” he noted: “Morality is a biological adaptation no less than are hands and feet and teeth. Considered as a rationally justifiable set of claims about an objective something, ethics is illusory. I appreciate that when somebody says, “Love…
Reading Time: 2 minutes Scientifically, humans are happier when they have shorter menus. This can cause Christians some distress.
Reading Time: 2 minutes What does it mean to love with the heart, soul, and mind? How does the mind relate to the brain? What does science teach us?
Reading Time: 2 minutes “You dummies,” he added. “You can do what you decide to do, but you cannot decide what you will decide to do!” He quickly asked an aide if he’d used a double-double single negative-positive and if his last statement made any sense whatsoever.
Reading Time: < 1 minute There is no truth. You can take that to the bank.
Reading Time: 3 minutes Finally some good news in this world! In a stunning rebuke of all faiths everywhere, but especially of the really stupid ones, like Christianity, Professor Richard Dawkins has delivered a killing blow.
Reading Time: 3 minutes Two researchers, Dr. Nikolaas Tinbergen and Dr. D. Magnus, played a trick on butterflies. After figuring out which marks on female butterfly wings were most eye-catching to their mates, they created their own cardboard butterflies and painted them to look like super-females. Their wing patterns were based on the wings of normal butterflies, but with more exciting marks than would ever be found in nature. And the butterflies fell for…
Reading Time: 4 minutes The outdoors are incredibly important to your mental health. Here’s why.
Reading Time: 4 minutes “Simplifying important but complex messages can be a necessary and valuable approach for increasing the reach of those messages. But when simplification renders the message inaccurate, the mission is harmed.” —Dr. Heather E. Heying While I was on a quick, 24-mile hike with an acquaintance, she commented that I would talk about things which “made no sense.” While they made plenty of sense to me, and I was conveying correct…
Reading Time: 6 minutes “There is a delight in the hardy life of the open. There are no words that can tell the hidden spirit of the wilderness that can reveal its mystery, its melancholy and its charm. The nation behaves well if it treats the natural resources as assets which it must turn over to the next generation increased and not impaired in value. Conservation means development as much as it does protection.”…
Reading Time: 4 minutes Truth and morality tend to be tied together; without truth, there tends to be no morality, at least so far as anyone can elucidate as being objectively codifiable. One benefit of backpacking, at least for me, is that I can listen to a variety of bright folks (well, Dr. Jordan Peterson would probably contend that I’m listening to a variety of people with PhDs, among whom some are bright) talking…