Tuesday, February 18, 2014
Just for Laughs #288
Challenge yourself and see if you can keep this theological.
I'll be waiting inside where it's warm.
Monday, February 17, 2014
Fan Photo from Constance Noring
The iPhone photo that earned Ms Constance Noring, of Halamander, Wyoming, a seven thousand dollar check and a box of Tesla Wintergreen Experimints.
Sunday, February 16, 2014
Saturday, February 15, 2014
Friday, February 14, 2014
History Channel on Nikola Tesla
When I see the word history I always think of His story as I'm sure a lot of you do. It's evident that God uses people from all walks of life to accomplish His will and purposes. I am reminded of an atheist who, after recovering from a near fatal incident, told me in the hospital that he thanked science for his recovery and healing. That is like thanking Sherlock Holmes for solving all the crimes in the detective novels he appears in and forgetting Mr. A. Conan Doyle, the author of the entire series. God is the Author and Finisher, the Cause and Completer, The Alpha and Omega, The Beginning and the End, The A and Z and all the letters in between of our faith -- and the jot and tittles of history itself. Enjoy the film. It's well worth the 45 minutes.
Thursday, February 13, 2014
Who's Russian to Buy This?
Book Description
October 28, 1943 was the date of one of the most significant scientific experiments in history - the so-called “Philadelphia Experiment.” The goal was to make ships invisible to radar, but the result exceeded all expectations. Placed in a powerful electromagnetic field, the U.S. Navy destroyer “Eldridge” disappeared not only from the screens, but also from our reality. The ship materialized once again hundreds of miles from Philadelphia at the military base of Norfolk, Virginia with a crazed crew on board.
All records of the tragedy have been kept secret, but there was a rumor linking the experiment with the great inventor Nikola Tesla, who supposedly made all the necessary calculations and drawings and provided generators that were used for the teleportation of the “Eldridge.”
Tesla had not lived to witness the disaster, and shortly after his death the FBI confiscated his entire archive. More rumors circulated which indicated that the scientist's death was no accident and that he had been warned of the danger in arguing with Einstein, ordered to desist from experiments on human beings and, finally, forced to silence...
This sensational book - the first in the domestic literature investigating the most inexplicable mysteries of the twentieth century - is an attempt to understand the true role of Nikola Tesla in this history of truths and lies of one of the most enigmatic and dark dramas of the past century.
All records of the tragedy have been kept secret, but there was a rumor linking the experiment with the great inventor Nikola Tesla, who supposedly made all the necessary calculations and drawings and provided generators that were used for the teleportation of the “Eldridge.”
Tesla had not lived to witness the disaster, and shortly after his death the FBI confiscated his entire archive. More rumors circulated which indicated that the scientist's death was no accident and that he had been warned of the danger in arguing with Einstein, ordered to desist from experiments on human beings and, finally, forced to silence...
This sensational book - the first in the domestic literature investigating the most inexplicable mysteries of the twentieth century - is an attempt to understand the true role of Nikola Tesla in this history of truths and lies of one of the most enigmatic and dark dramas of the past century.
Book Details
- Edition: First
- Pages: 253
- Publisher: Yauza-Eksmo Press
- Date Published: July 4, 2009
- Language: Russian
- Binding: Hardcover
- ISBN-13: 9785699348565
- Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.2 x 0.75 inches
- Date Added: December 15, 2009
The above book and copy are from the Tesla Universe Web Site. Who knows? Maybe someone will translate the book into English. Did you know that Einstein and Tesla seriously discussed time-travel?
...just sayin'.
Fan Photo from Claire Annette Reed
Wednesday, February 12, 2014
Missing
If you have any information please contact
the Calvinistic Cartoons Bureau of Investigation.
Tuesday, February 11, 2014
Monday, February 10, 2014
Sunday, February 9, 2014
Inside Scoop!
Saturday, February 8, 2014
Random Word Writing Challenge #52
Do what you must...Do what you can
Don't gather dust...Start with a plan
Friday, February 7, 2014
Thursday, February 6, 2014
For Your Consideration
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Is Scientism Self-Refuting
Dear Dr. Craig,
How would you reply to this argument that scientism is not self-refuting:
"Scientism has been always been successful in the past; any supernaturalistic explanations used by our progenitors have been replaced by naturalistic explanations. Never has a supernaturalistic explanation superseded a naturalistic one. Since the predictions of scientism have always been later confirmed directly by the evidence, this amounts to a good inductive argument for scientism. So Craig is wrong that scientism cannot be scientifically proven because scientism's own success and adoption by scientists serves as evidence for its truth."
Basically, the person I quoted is a friend of mine who treats scientism itself as a scientific theory and argues that it is inductively warranted and evidenced. Hence, he alleges that it is not self-refuting. He also thinks that this strategy can be extended to evidentialism (I found this out when I tried explaining Reformed Epistemology to him). He rejects your other argument against scientism that science cannot account for mathematical truths (because he is an empiricist about mathematics and logic), morality (he is a nihilist), and aesthetics (he is a nihilist about that too). The most disturbing thing is that I have seen other self-styled empiricists on the Internet run similar arguments to these. How should I respond these types of assertions?
Thank you,
Neel
United States
Neel, your friend is confusing scientism (an epistemological thesis) with naturalism (an ontological thesis). Scientism is the view that we should believe only what can be proven scientifically. In other words, science is the sole source of knowledge and the sole arbiter of truth. Naturalism is the view that physical events have only physical causes. In other words, miracles do not happen; there are no supernatural causes.
These theses are obviously different. A person could accept other sources of knowledge besides science, such as rational intuition, and still be a naturalist. Similarly, one could hold to an epistemology of scientism and yet be a non-naturalist. For example, the late W. V. O. Quine, who held that physical science is our only basic source of knowledge, freely admitted, “If I saw indirect explanatory benefit in positing sensibilia, possibilia, spirits, a Creator, I would joyfully accord them scientific status too, on a par with such avowedly scientific posits as quarks and black holes.”i Thus, scientism does not imply naturalism, nor does naturalism imply scientism.
So leaving aside for the moment the question of naturalism, what problems are there with scientism? There are two which are especially significant. First, scientism is too restrictive a theory of knowledge. It would, if adopted, compel us to abandon wide swaths of what most of us take to be fields of human knowledge. Your friend admits this with regard to moral and aesthetic truths. On his view there is nothing good or evil, right or wrong, beautiful or ugly. But is it plausible to think that there are no aesthetic or moral truths? On your friend’s view there’s nothing wrong with torturing a little girl to death. Why should we accept such a conclusion simply because of a epistemological restriction? Isn’t this a signal that we need rather to broaden the scope of our theory so as to encompass other types of knowledge? Your friend says he will treat logical and mathematical truths as merely empirical truths. Good luck! Truths like “If p implies q, and p, then q” or “2 + 2 = 4” are to all appearances necessary truths, not merely empirical generalizations. And what about science itself? Science is permeated with assumptions that cannot be scientifically proven, so that an epistemology of scientism would destroy science itself. For example, the principle of induction cannot be scientifically justified. Just because A has always been succeeded by B in the past provides no warrant for inferring that the next A will be followed by B. For we could be at the beginning of a chaotic series of As and Bs whose initial segment is ordered ABABAB. So trying to provide “a good inductive argument for scientism” is hopeless, since it must presuppose the validity of inductive reasoning.
Secondly, scientism is self-refuting. Scientism tells us that we should not believe any proposition that cannot be scientifically proven. But what about that very proposition itself? It cannot itself be scientifically proven. Therefore we should not believe it. Scientism thus defeats itself. Your friend’s proffered argument for scientism is not an argument for scientism but for naturalism. He’s arguing that the assumption that there are only natural causes operative in the world has achieved extraordinary success in contrast to the assumption that there are supernatural causes as well. That has no relevance to the epistemological question before us. It is at best an argument against miracles. Actually, it’s much weaker than that: it is at best an argument for methodologicalnaturalism, that is to say, the view that in doing natural science we should assume that all physical events have only natural causes. The methodological naturalist needn’t be a metaphysical naturalist, that is to say, he needn’t deny that miracles occur or that supernatural entities exist. He contends merely that they are not the concern of science. Science just is the search for natural causes or explanations of phenomena. This methodological thesis is one which a great many, if not most, Christian scientists agree with. So your friend’s argument really doesn’t amount to much.
As Michael Rea has shown in his incisive book World without Design (Clarendon Press, 2002), the only defensible form of epistemological naturalism (a.k.a. scientism) is that it is a methodological decision to follow a research program which takes the physical sciences to be the only basic source of knowledge. As such it cannot be justified. It just represents the naturalist’s personal decision to adopt a certain research program. Anyone else can with equal right adopt a different research program which may accept additional sources of knowledge in addition to the physical sciences.
One final note about your friend’s argument for naturalism: of course, no supernaturalistic explanation has ever superseded a naturalistic one! That’s guaranteed by science’s assumption of methodological naturalism. It prohibits supernatural explanations from even being included in the pool of live explanatory options. Thus it’s impossible for a supernaturalistic explanation to supersede a naturalistic one! Only for theorists who are willing to challenge the assumption of methodological naturalism, like creation scientists or advocates of Intelligent Design, is there the possibility that a naturalistic explanation might give way to a supernaturalistic explanation. They argue that it should in the case of biological complexity. But because they are working with a conception of science outside the mainstream (namely, they reject methodological naturalism), it’s highly unlikely that their view will ever become the paradigmatic view of science, no matter what the evidence.
I note as well that in nearly two thousand years no naturalistic explanation has managed to supersede the resurrection of Jesus, a supernaturalistic explanation if there ever was one, of the facts concerning the fate of Jesus of Nazareth.
Read more: http://www.reasonablefaith.org/is-scientism-self-refuting#ixzz2sVP297IC
Fan Photo from Mitzi Flanita
Dear Mr. Eddings,
I came across this old photo of Fred Astaire. It was in an old trunk my mother kept in her attic. As you can see, she snapped this picture as Fred was leaving Boston and heading back to Hollywood. My late mother met Mr. Astaire at an art auction where he purchased this painting of Nikola Tesla and you, Mr. Eddings. My mother told me that Fred would just sit and Astaire at that painting for hours.
I am puzzled as to how you are featured in this oil painting. You are either much older than you appear or you are a time traveler. Either way, I wanted to send this to you Fed-Ex so you could post it on your blog.
Regards,
Mitzi
Well, Mitzi Flanita, Calvinistic Cartoons is sending you a check for seven thousand dollars for your thoughtfulness. I often wondered what had happened to that painting. I wonder who owns it now?
Wednesday, February 5, 2014
Random Word Writing Challenge #51
You know what to do with the words up above
Be wise as a serpent and harmless as a dove
Tuesday, February 4, 2014
Monday, February 3, 2014
In a Suburb in Serbia
Sunday, February 2, 2014
Saturday, February 1, 2014
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