Presents a comprehensive history of multiverse theory, reviewing the discoveries that shaped astrophysicists' current consensus view while showing that the multiverse is able to be explained entirely in naturalistic terms.

Argues that many claims by theists are based on their misunderstanding of science. He looks at the specific parameters and shows that plausible reasons can be found for the values they have within the existing standard models of physics and cosmology.

In this fascinating and accessible book, physicist Victor J. Stenger guides the lay reader through the key developments of quantum mechanics and the debate over its apparent paradoxes. In the process, he critically appraises recent metaphysical fads. Dr. Stenger's knack for elucidating scientific ideas and controversies in language that the nonspecialist can comprehend opens up to the widest possible audience a wealth of information on the most important findings of contemporary physics.

Many theists regard the claim that certain fundamental constants of nature are fine-tuned for life as the best scientific argument for the existence of God since Paley’s watch. Even atheist physicists find these so-called “anthropic coincidences” difficult to explain naturally and many think they need to invoke multiple universes and the so-called “anthropic principle” to do so. Certainly if there are many universes, fine-tuning is simple. Our universe is not fine-tuned for life. Life is fine-tuned to our universe. While multiple (...) universes are expected from modern cosmological theories, theists and some scientists object that invoking the unobservable is not science. Of course, God is unobservable too, so the best theists can claim is a standoff. (shrink)

What are the laws of physics? -- The stuff that kicks back -- Point-of-view invariance -- Gauging the laws of physics -- Forces and broken symmetries -- Playing dice -- After the bang -- Out of the void -- The comprehensible cosmos -- Models of reality.

The anthropic coincidences are widely claimed to provide evidence for intelligent creation in the universe. However, neither data northeory support this conclusion. No basis exists for assuming that a random universe would not have some kind of life. Calculations of the properties of universes having different physical constants than ours indicate that long-lived stars are not unusual, and thus most universes should have time for complex systems of some type to evolve. A multi-universe scenario is not ruled out, since no (...) known principle requires that only one universe exist. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Notes.

In 2004, Sam Harris published The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason which became a major bestseller. This marked the first of a series of series of bestsellers that took a harder line against religion than has been the custom among secularists: Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris (2006), The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins (2006), Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon by Daniel C. Dennett (2006), God: The Failed Hypothesis. How Science (...) Shows That God Goes Not Exist by Victor J. Stenger (2007), and God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (2007) by Christoper Hitchens. (shrink)

For years theists have claimed that the constants of physics had to be finely tuned by God to the values that have for life in the universe to be possible. In my column of June, 2009 I showed that many of these claims are based on an improper analysis of the data. Even some of the competent scientists who write on this subject commit the fallacy of holding all the parameters constant and varying just one. When you allow all to (...) vary, you find that changes to one parameter can be easily compensated for by changes to another, leaving the ingredients for life in place. This point is also made nicely in a recent Scientific American cover story by Alejandro Jenkins and Gilad Perez. In this column I will discuss perhaps the most cited example of claimed fine-tuning, the Hoyle resonance. In 1953 the famous astronomer Fred Hoyle calculated that the production of carbon would not occur with sufficient probability unless that probability was boosted by the presence of an excited nuclear state of C12 at a very specific energy. In what appeared to be a remarkable victory for anthropic reasoning, Hoyle proposed that this previously unknown state must exist at about 7.7 MeV. (shrink)

A mathematical model of the natural origin of our universe is presented. The model is based only on well-established physics. No claim is made that this model uniquely represents exactly how the universe came about. But the viability of a single model serves to refute any assertions that the universe cannot have come about by natural means.

The story of a triumphant idea from Democritus to the Higgs boson, one of the most successful scientific hypotheses ever devised is chronicled in this history of atomism. Stenger makes the case that in the final analysis atoms and the void are all that exists.

While belief in gods was almost universal in the ancient world, Thales of Miletus introduced the notion that observed phenomena could be explained in natural terms without invoking imagined spirits. Leucippus and Democritus, and later Epicurus and Lucretius, proposed that everything was composed of particulate atoms in an otherwise empty void. Any gods that existed played no role in the human world. The universe was infinite, eternal, uncreated, and included many worlds besides our own. These ideas conflicted with the other (...) philosophical schools of the time and were suppressed by the Church during the Dark Ages. Atomism reappeared during the Renaissance and became a crucial ingredient in the scientific revolution that followed. The atomic picture of matter has now been solidly confirmed. Furthermore, the notion of an infinite, eternal, and uncreated ‘multiverse’ is strongly suggested by modern cosmology. (shrink)

By the late nineteenth century, science was well established in the public mind as the primary method by which useful knowledge of the material universe is obtained. Surely, it was thought, if science can discover cathode rays and radio waves, then it should easily authenticate a phenomenon that is far more widely experienced: the supernatural power of the human mind. Non-physical, “psychic” energy appeared to be everywhere, as an integral part of human experience. Indeed, psychic forces are seemingly built into (...) the cores, the souls, of each of us. It should be just a matter of securing the evidence with the hard cement of scientific procedure. At least this was the view of many Victorian scientists, and so was begun a program to verify psychic phenomena scientifically, a task that has continued without success until the current day. By the time the fourth decade of the twentieth century was underway, the search for psychic energy had stalled. The huge database of anecdotal human testimony proved too unreliable, too easy to explain away as subjective desire, fakery, or delusion. Whenever serious attempts were made to gather objective data under controlled conditions, plausible explanations such as trickery or simple coincidence were readily found--if not by the investigators, then by their critics. Although these plausibilities were not always conclusively proven, they were never conclusively ruled out. And, as long as ordinary explanations for reports of suggested psychic phenomena.. (shrink)

D’Souza claims that near-death experiences (NDE) suggest that consciousness can outlive the breakdown of the body and cannot be explained as the product of dying brains. These experiences can be found in situations where a subject is not near death and have all the characteristics of hallucinations caused by oxygen deprivation. Despite thousands of cases, no one has every come back from an NDE with information that could not have been in their heads originally.

The claim that certain fundamental constants of nature are fine tuned for life and that this provides strong evidence for supernatural design is perhaps the best scientific argument for the existence of God since Paley’s watch. Even atheist physicists find these so called “anthropic coincidences” difficult to explain and need to invoke the Weak Anthropic Principle and multiple universes to do so. Certainly if there are many universes, fine tuning is simple. Our form of life was fined tuned to our (...) universe by evolution. While multiple universes are expected from modern cosmological theories, theists and some scientists object that invoking the unobservable is not science. Of course, God is unobservable too, so the best theists can claim is a standoff. This is the first in a series of columns based on a book in the works that attempts to show that the apparent fine tuning of fundamental constants can be understood from basic physics without invoking multiple universes. In some cases the explanation is provable. In other cases, it is not provable but plausible. Fine tuning by design is a God of the Gaps argument. The proponent has the burden if proving that no possible natural explanation can be found. Thus a plausible natural explanation is sufficient to defeat the argument. A list of thirty four parameters that seem to be fine tuned has been assembled by Rich Deem on the God and Science website. Several of Deem’s constants, such as the speed of light in a vacuum, c, Newton’s constant of gravity, G, and Planck’s constant, h, are just arbitrary numbers that are determined simply by the unit system you are using. They can be set equal to any number you want, except zero, with no impact on the physics. So no fine tuning can possibly be involved, just as the number p is not fine tuned. I will focus first on the five parameters that have the most significance because, if interpreted correctly, they seem to pretty much rule out almost any conceivable kind of life without fine tuning: · Ratio of electrons to protons · Ratio of electromagnetic force to gravity Expansion rate of the universe · Mass density of the universe · Cosmological constant I will admit that the features a universe would have for slightly different values of these parameters, all other parameters remaining the same, would render unlikely any form of life even remotely like ours, that is, one that is based on a lengthy process, chemical or otherwise, by which complex matter evolved from simpler matter. Let me discuss each in turn, with the last, the most difficult, reserved for a future column.. (shrink)

Taking a Harder Line “The New Atheism” is the name that was attached, often pejoratively, to the series of six bestselling books by five authors that appeared in the period 2004-2008.[i] Since then many have joined the movement, with an upsurge in books, freethinker organizations, and an exponential expansion of the blogosphere spreading the word on atheism to thousands. The message of new atheism is that it is time to take a far less accommodating attitude toward religion, including moderate religion, (...) than had been exhibited in previous years by atheist authors and, in particular, non-believing scientists. Science, in the United States, is locked in a battle with conservative Christians over the teaching of evolution and creationism in the schools. While 87 percent of scientists accept evolution by unguided, purely natural processes, only 32 percent of the public does.[ii] Belief in unguided evolution among mainline Protestants and Catholics is about the same as among the general public, while only 10 percent of Evangelicals and 19 percent of Fundamentalist Protestants acknowledge this view. (shrink)

Seeing Wittgenstein Anew is the first collection to examine Ludwig Wittgenstein’s remarks on the concept of aspect-seeing. These essays show that aspect-seeing was not simply one more topic of investigation in Wittgenstein’s later writings, but, rather, that it was a pervasive and guiding concept in his efforts to turn philosophy’s attention to the actual conditions of our common life in language. Arranged in sections that highlight the pertinence of the aspect-seeing remarks to aesthetic and moral perception, self-knowledge, mind and consciousness, (...) linguistic agreement, philosophical therapy, and “seeing connections,” the sixteen essays, which were specially commissioned for this volume, demonstrate the unity of not only Philosophical Investigations but also Wittgenstein’s later thought as a whole. They open up novel paths across familiar fields of thought: the objectivity of interpretation, the fixity of the past, the acquisition of language, and the nature of human consciousness. Significantly, they exemplify how continuing consideration of the interrelated phenomena and concepts surrounding aspect-seeing might produce a fruitful way of doing philosophy. The volume includes a concordance for the unnumbered remarks in the various editions of Philosophical Investigations, including the latest (4th) edition. (The front matter is posted here. The introduction - "Seeing Aspects in Wittgenstein" - appears below under "Published articles."). (shrink)

Two hundred and twenty-six state employees completed a structured questionnaire that investigated their ethical values and training needs. Top management were more likely to have attitudes against cronyism and giving advantage to others. Individuals higher in the organizational hierarchy, and female employees were more likely to believe that discriminatory practices were an ethical concern. In addition, employees with a larger number of clients outside of the organization were more supportive of the need to maintain strict confidentiality in business dealings. Employees'' (...) awareness and use of the organization''s code of conduct generally proved to be poor predictors of ethical values. Other analyses revealed that a variety of sociodemographic factors, job characteristics and ethical values predicted specific areas of training needs in ethics. (shrink)

This paper provides a philosophical analysis of the Price equation and its role in evolutionary theory. Traditional models in population genetics postulate simplifying assumptions in order to make the models mathematically tractable. On the contrary, the Price equation implies a very specific way of theorizing, starting with assumptions that we think are true and then deriving from them the mathematical rules of the system. I argue that the Price equation is a generalization-sketch, whose main purpose is to provide a unifying (...) framework for researchers, helping them to develop specific models. The Price equation plays this role because, like other scientific principles, shows features as abstractness, unification and invariance. By underwriting this special role for the Price equation some recent disputes about it could be diverted. (shrink)

There has been a longstanding bias in the study of spoken language towards using writing to analyse speech. This approach is problematic in that it assumes language to be derived from an autonomous mental capacity to assemble words into sentences, while failing to acknowledge culture-specific ideas linked to writing. Words and sentences are writing constructs that hardly capture the sound-making actions involved in spoken language. This book brings to light research that has long revealed structures present in all languages but (...) which do not match the writing-induced concepts of traditional linguistic analysis. It demonstrates that language processes are not physiologically autonomous, and that speech structures are structures of spoken language. It then illustrates how speech acts can be studied using instrumental records, and how multisensory experiences in semantic memory couple to these acts, offering a biologically-grounded understanding of how spoken language conveys meaning and why it develops only in humans. (shrink)

This article analyzes the view of evolutionary theory as a theory of forces. The analogy with Newtonian mechanics has been challenged due to the alleged mismatch between drift and the other evolutionary forces. Since genetic drift has no direction several authors tried to protect its status as a force: denying its lack of directionality, extending the notion of force and looking for a force in physics which also lacks of direction. I analyse these approaches, and although this strategy finally succeeds, (...) this discussion overlooks the crucial point on the debate between causalists and statisticalists: the causal status of evolutionary theory. (shrink)

Why does symbolic communication in humans develop primarily in an oral medium, and how do theories of language origin explain this? Non-human primates, despite their ability to learn and use symbolic signs, do not develop symbols as in oral language. This partly owes to the lack of a direct cortico-motoneuron control of vocalizations in these species compared to humans. Yet such modality-related factors that can impinge on the rise of symbolic language are interpreted differently in two types of evolutionary storylines. (...) 1) Some theories posit that symbolic language originated in a gestural modality, as in “sign languages”. However, this overlooks work on emerging sign and spoken language showing that gestures and speech shape signs differently. 2) In modality-dependent theories, some emphasize the role of iconic sounds, though these lack the efficiency of arbitrary symbols. Other theorists suggest that ontogenesis serves to identify human-specific mechanisms underlying an evolutionary shift from pitch varying to orally-modulated vocalizations (babble). This shift creates numerous oral features that can support efficient symbolic associations. We illustrate this principle using a sound-picture association task with 40 learners who hear words in an unfamiliar language (Mandarin) with and without a filtering of oral features. Symbolic associations arise more rapidly and accurately for sounds containing oral features compared to sounds bearing only pitch features, an effect also reported in experiments with infants. The results imply that, beyond a competence to learn and use symbols, the rise of symbolic language rests on the types of signs that a modality of expression affords. (shrink)

This paper analyses the structure of evolutionary theory as a quasi-Newtonian theory and the need to establish a Zero-Cause Law. Several authors have postulated that the special character of drift is because it is the default behaviour or Zero-Cause Law of evolutionary systems, where change and not stasis is the normal state of them. For these authors, drift would be a Zero-Cause Law, the default behaviour and therefore a constituent assumption impossible to change without changing the system. I defend that (...) drift's causal and explanatory power prevents it from being considered as a Zero-Cause Law. Instead, I propose that the default behaviour of evolutionary systems is what I call the Principle of Stasis, which posits that an evolutionary system where there is no selection, drift, mutation, migration, etc., and therefore no difference-maker, will not undergo any change (it will remain in stasis). (shrink)

El deseo y oraciones de Juan XXIII pidiendo que el Vaticano II fuera un Pentecostés para la Iglesia, fue ampliamente escuchado por el Señor. El Vaticano II fue una auténtica irrupción del Espíritu sobre la Iglesia, un acontecimiento salvífico, un kairós. Hay un “antes” un “después” del Vaticano II.

Due to its high degree of complexity and its historical nature, evolutionary biology has been traditionally portrayed as a messy science. According to the supporters of such a view, evolutionary biology would be unable to formulate laws and robust theories, instead just delivering coherent narratives and local models. In this article, our aim is to challenge this view by showing how the Price equation can work as the core of a general theoretical framework for evolutionary phenomena. To support this claim, (...) we outline some unnoticed structural similarities between physical theories and evolutionary biology. More specifically, we shall argue that the Price equation, in the same way as fundamental formalisms in physics, can serve as a heuristic principle to formulate and systematise different theories and models in evolutionary biology. (shrink)

I INTRODUCTION: RESPECT, EQUALITY AND THE AUTONOMY OF MORALITY We often invoke a notion of respect to express our sense of human equality. ...

The Price equation is currently considered one of the fundamental equations —or even the fundamental equation— of evolution. In this article, we explore the role of this equation within cultural evolutionary theory. More specifically, we use it to account for the explanatory power and the theoretical structure of a certain generalised version of dual-inheritance theory. First, we argue that, in spite of not having a definite empirical content, the Price equation offers a suitable formalisation of the processes of cultural evolution, (...) and provides a powerful heuristic device for discovering the actual causes of cultural change and accumulation. Second, we argue that, as a consequence of this, a certain version of the Price equation is the fundamental law of cultural evolutionary theory. In order to support this claim, we sketch the ideal structure of dual-inheritance theory and we stress the unificatory role that the Price equation plays in it. (shrink)

This is the introduction to Seeing Wittgenstein Anew, eds. William Day & Victor J. Krebs (Cambridge UP, 2010), a collection of essays on Ludwig Wittgenstein's remarks on aspect-seeing. Section 1: Why Seeing Aspects Now?; Section 2: The Importance of Seeing Aspects; Section 3: The Essays. (The front matter to Seeing Wittgenstein Anew appears above under "Books.").

“¿Principio de caridad o hybris?” La intuición de Wittgenstein, de que el significado lingüístico se constituye dentro de la trama de vida pareciera hacer posible un acercamiento entre la tradición hermenéutica continental y la filosofía analítica del lenguaje. En el presente artículo se sostiene que esta intuición debe ir acompañada de una revisión de la concepción del sujeto implícita en el “principio de caridad” de Donald Davidson. Sin esa reconcepción, el principio de caridad se convierte en una forma encubierta de (...) imperialismo conceptual incompatible con el espíritu de la hermenéutica continental. Se concluye el artículo con algunas observaciones sobre el relativismo a la luz de las consideraciones anteriores. (shrink)

This thought-provoking book, first published in 1991, examines sexual politics in a world which is being radically changed by the challenges of feminism. Seidler explores how men have responded to feminism, and the contradictory feelings men have towards dominant forms of masculinity. Seidler’s stimulating and original analysis of social and political theory connects personally to everyday issues in people’s lives. It reflects the growing importance of sexual and personal politics within contemporary politics and culture, and demonstrates clearly the challenge that (...) feminism brings to our inherited forms of morality, politics and sexuality. (shrink)

All editors and translators of Propertius seem convinced that the Roman poet has endowed the horse Arion with the power of speech. I present a few sample translations of the two lines.

Over-flexibility in the definition of Friston blankets obscures a key distinction between observational and interventional inference. The latter requires cognizers form not just a causal representation of the world but also of their own boundary and relationship with it, in order to diagnose the consequences of their actions. We suggest this locates the blanket in the eye of the beholder.