Note: This article first appeared in the CFN Newsletter for September - October 2009.

There’s nothing that skeptics enjoy more than a good debunking. Set up a big fat target and let the fun begin: How could anyone believe that nonsense? Or pose an apparently insuperable challenge: prove that you have paranormal powers and we’ll give you a million bucks. Thus far, no takers.

Among those leading the skeptical charge (my apology for omissions) are James Randi, founder of the Randi Educational Foundation; Michael Shermer, head of the Skeptics Society and author of Why People Believe Weird Things; Joe Nickel and others at the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, publishers of Skeptical Inquirer; physicist and science-defender Lawrence Krauss; Massimo Pigliucci, host of Rationally Speaking; neurologist Steven Novella who heads the New England Skeptical Society and hosts Neurologica; and of course America’s favorite exploders of supernatural shibboleths and fashionable nonsense, Penn and Teller on their show Bullshit!. None of these guys are to be trifled with if you have the least propensity for wishful thinking. Their critical gaze has shredded every imaginable quackery, from Bigfoot to birthers, spoon-bending to séances, vaccine scare-mongering to visitations from the dead. If there’s no solid empirical evidence for it or if it’s logically suspect, they’re all over it, and then it’s all over for the wishful thinker. This of course fulfills an important function for the culture: keeping it intellectually honest, or at least less dishonest.

Given all this, it’s striking that the skeptical community pays relatively little attention to one of the weirdest beliefs going: that human beings have contra-causal free will.[1] Read the full story

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The Center for Naturalism in association with naturalism.org has announced a logo and symbol contest. The contest page can be found here. We reproduce the details of the contest below. Read the full story

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(Note: This is the third part in the series on Complexity. Please read Part 1 and Part 2 first.)

At and soon after the moment of the Big Bang, there was little or no complexity. Then why is it that we see so much complexity around us? And why is the complexity increasing all the time? Answers to these questions require some groundwork, particularly if unexplained jargon must be avoided. I lay the groundwork in this and the next few articles in this series. In the context of our ecosphere, it is explained that the reason why its complexity has been increasing all the time is that the Sun has been bombarding it with low-entropy or high-grade energy.

We begin by describing how complexity may possibly be quantified. In the literature, most definitions of complexity are actually definitions of degree of complexity. The degree of complexity may be defined either in terms of information theory, or in terms of thermodynamics. The two are really one and the same thing, but they provide different insights into the evolution of complexity in the cosmos. In the language of information theory, the degree of complexity of a system may be defined roughly as the amount of ‘information’ needed for describing the structure and function of the system. In thermodynamic parlance, degree of complexity has been quantified by Eric Chaisson (2001) in terms of ‘rate of flow of free energy per unit mass.’ For explaining terms like ‘information’ and ‘free energy’, we have to introduce the basics of thermodynamics and information theory. We take up the thermodynamic aspect in this article. Read the full story

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Pierre-Simon de Laplace

The idea that all things can be explained by natural laws is as ancient as philosophy itself. Naturalism and Supernaturalism comprise a divide between the two most fundamental ways of looking at reality. If you don’t believe in Gods or an immaterial soul, then you are a naturalist. There are areas where the lines are blurred, and non-theists may hold on to specific non-naturalistic beliefs, but in general the division between the two ways of looking at reality holds good. The practice of rejecting supernatural claims was found among the Carvaka of ancient India and the materialist philosophers of ancient Greece. This tradition has continued down to the present day and has been analyzed and codified into different forms. The one that is the simplest to understand is the philosophical definition of naturalism. So let’s begin with this.

Philosophical Naturalism is the idea that nature is all there is. Also known as metaphysical naturalism, it is an outright rejection of all supernatural. Even in the presence of a seemingly supernatural situation, metaphysical naturalism will claim that there is a natural explanation underlying it. All human knowledge comes from such a naturalistic understanding. When philosophical naturalism is compromised, knowledge hits a wall.

A good example is Newton and the problem of planetary orbits. After spectacular work in the Principia Mathematica, describing previously undiscovered forces in the universe and a good many laws of physics than were known at that time, Newton reached an impasse. His model of the solar system could not explain why the planets did not spiral down into the sun. After asking naturalistic questions and answering them, providing humanity with some of the greatest inspirations in science, Newton finally proposed a supernaturalistic ‘explanation’. He theorized that God must intervene with the motion of the planets to set things right (notice that this is not really an explanation; saying “God did it” is like saying it happens by magic). Newton, after all that brilliant thinking, could not solve the problem because he evoked the nonexistent supernatural. A 100 years later, Laplace famously solved the problem by asking only naturalistic questions. Read more about this here. Read the full story

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(Editor’s note: This article appeared here first posted by Tom Clark in May, 2005. Images were added by the editor from sources linked to.)

The Objectivist Center and the Ayn Rand Institute, organizations devoted to safeguarding and disseminating Ayn Rand’s legacy of radical libertarianism, did an effective job of letting the world know about her 100^th birthday in February (2005).  Op-eds about Rand’s philosophy appeared in newspapers across the US and abroad, celebrating the sovereignty of the individual and condemning the infringements of big government on personal freedoms.

Running a Google news search using the terms “free will” and “determinism” will pick up a good number of such op-eds, and you can find their sources here and here.  It turns out that Rand’s Objectivism includes among its tenets a strong commitment to free will and rejection of determinism (unless it’s the determinism of self-determination).  Here’s a taste from an op-ed in the Freelance Star of Fredericksburg, by Michael S. Berliner, board member of the Ayn Rand Institute:

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