Philosophy – 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

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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…

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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,…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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:…

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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…

Tim on Class 49: Relevance & Importance Of Evidence In ModelsMay 8, 2025
What are you playing at, Briggs? Some high-falutin' model equation junk that'll get twisted by politicians in the end anyway?…
Milton Hathaway on AI Cannot Hallucinate Nor LieMay 8, 2025
I have been making heavy use of the more well-known LLMs lately. I use them almost exclusively as "regurgitation engines",…
shawn marshall on Miracle Or Coincidence? What Are The Chances?May 7, 2025
Let us not discredit the demonic.
Cary Cotterman on Miracle Or Coincidence? What Are The Chances?May 7, 2025
Blair: "...lightning came inside and chased her to a back bedroom." Anyone who can outrun lightning, even if it's only…
McChuck on Miracle Or Coincidence? What Are The Chances?May 7, 2025
I knew a fellow win the Army who had been struck by lightning three times. Whenever he heard thunder, he…