empirical science

On this ID the Future, Zombie Science author and biologist Jonathan Wells and host Andrew McDiarmid explore the seductive but misleading appeal to consensus science. This is when someone makes a bandwagon appeal to support a scientific hypothesis rather than offering evidence and arguments—as in, “All serious scientists agree that X is the case.” Wells says history makes hash of the consensus-science appeal because the history of scientific progress is all about a consensus view being overthrown by a newer, more accurate view that for a time was a minority view. Wells also draws a distinction between evidence-based empirical science and ideologically driven science. The example he gives for the latter: scientific materialism. Instead of a search for truth about Read More ›

In today’s ID the Future, we’re pleased to feature a cross-post from our sister site, Mind Matters. Here host Robert J. Marks begins a conversation with trailblazing mathematician and computer scientist Gregory Chaitin. The two discuss Chaitin’s beginnings in computer science, his growing up in the 1960s a stone’s throw from Central Park, his thoughts on historic scientists in his field such as Leonard Euler and Kurt Gödel, and the story of Chaitin’s cold calling the famed German-Austrian logician, mathematician, and philosopher, and how a snowstorm and Gödel’s quirky personality thwarted a meeting. Also touched on: Gödel’s ontological proof for the existence of God and how children can be said to have solved Chaitin’s incompleteness problem.  Image Credit: Kurt Gödel by Read More ›