Naturalism.org

Opening gambit: could you have done otherwise?

The natural vs. the supernatural

Introduction

2010 Free Will Roundup

Leveraging Harris: Making moral progress by denying free will

Sam Harris takes the lead in denying contra-causal free will, repudiating retribution

Abstract and overview

Drawing primarily on the work of Thomas Metzinger, but other philosophers as well, this paper takes a representationalist approach to explaining consciousness: how might the 1^st person, subjective, private phenomenal states that constitute consciousness be entailed by being a physically instantiated representational system?

For a philosophical and scientific naturalist such as myself, the traditional Christian god is ruled out simply because the existence of the supernatural in general is ruled out. If you stick with science as your guide to what’s ultimately real, and critique your assumptions in open philosophical inquiry, there are no good reasons to believe that reality is split between two categorically different realms, the natural and the supernatural. Instead, science reveals that the world is of a piece, what we call the natural world.

You don’t meet many committed and consistent fatalists, those who act on the belief that nothing they do makes a difference. A fatalist would say that if he’s fated to die crossing the street in New York City on a particular day, it obviously makes no difference how careful he is crossing streets that day. But, not being omniscient, he doesn’t know his fate for sure – the exact date, time and manner of his death.

A neuroscientist's views of free will and determinism

In the increasingly heated debate over teaching intelligent design (ID) in public school science classes, a central bone of contention is the nature of science itself. Those pushing ID say that those who rule out the design hypothesis as non-scientific are just wrong about the nature of true science. Writing in the Wichita Eagle, John Calvert, managing director of the Intelligent Design Network, describes the difference between true, objective science, and false, biased science: