Book review – Page 2 – William M. Briggs

Inference To An Explanation: Shapiro’s <em>The Miracle Myth</em> Reviewed — Part III

Inference To An Explanation: Shapiro’s The Miracle Myth Reviewed — Part III

Read Part I, II. Did Jesus walk on water? Eyewitnesses reported he did. The event was so well remarked that people wrote of it at a time when most events…

Inference To The Best Explanation: Shapiro’s <em>The Miracle Myth</em> Reviewed — Part II

Book review Philosophy Statistics

Inference To The Best Explanation: Shapiro’s The Miracle Myth Reviewed — Part II

Read Part I. A researcher puts you into a room. On the table is a blue ball. Somebody put it there. It could have been Alice, Bob, or Charlie. Given…

Book review Philosophy

Why Not Only Us? Men Speak, Animals Make Noise

A review of the book Why Only Us: Language and Evolution by Robert Berwick and Noam Chomsky. Everybody knows, or used to know, that only men speak. Animals make noise,…

Book review Philosophy

The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and its Scientific Pretensions by David Berlinski

A modified version of this article ran 14 April 2008. There are a recent number of books seeking to either demonstrate, scientifically, that God does not exist, or to show…

Book review Philosophy

Reasoning To Belief: Feser’s The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism — Part I

This series originally began 5 August 2012. The links to the remainder are below. Read Part I, Part II, Part III, Part Interlude, Part IV, Part V, Part VI. Part…

Book review Philosophy Statistics

Why I’m Unconvinced By Penrose’s Entropy/Anthropic Argument

There are a number of "constants" used in physics, such as the speed of light, the Planck constant, elementary charge and so forth. Some of these constants are bare, meaning…

Book review Philosophy Statistics

The Great Day Is Here! Uncertainty Meets The World

The Great Day---the Day yearned for by all humanity, or at least weakly anticipated by you, Dear Reader---has arrived! Let the trumpet sound and celebration begin! The release of Uncertainty:…

Book review Philosophy

The Only Metric That Matters

I've been reading reviews of the the peevish Jerry Coyne's new book Faith Versus Fact (I don't have any money to give him to buy an actual copy). Recommended is…

hudbwu on On The Probability Of GodJuly 1, 2025
I don't think omnibenevolence is part of the definition of God. Not only because, as you stated, there is nothing…
hudbwu on England’s Mandatory Suicide & WomenJuly 1, 2025
> It is a characteristic of the breed—on average: we speak in generalities here—that in any argument women do not…
Briggs on How Can You Tell If You Have ESP?June 30, 2025
Spetzer, All good points. I go into many of them later in the chapter.
spetzer86 on How Can You Tell If You Have ESP?June 30, 2025
If the receiver and sender independently wrote down the guess / card with no verbal communication, it might be better.…
JH on Class 56: The Best Model!June 29, 2025
How can you make predictions in the big data era without using a model? Trust your gut.