Ivan Neo

The humanist meaning of life with A C Grayling 🔍

Is the faith prior to the importance or is the importance prior to the faith?

When it comes to genetics, I am a layperson, but this looks fascinating. The authors are overlaying genetic information on the evolutionary tree.

An explanation for why theistic evolution is highly improbable. While all natural worlds will be expected to evolve, only an infinitesimal proportion of designed worlds will look evolved. Thus, finding the world to look evolved is decisive evidence that humanity was not intended.

After several amusing attempts to get chatGPT to create an infographic for my Counterargument from Design, I made this one manually in PowerPoint. What do you think?
#atheism #evolution

Tomorrow, I'll be talking about aspirational identity, virtue ethics, and what I think these ideas can do to bring meaning to our lives and grow the humanist community. I'm very excited for this event because I expect to learn so much from the attendees.
#humanism #atheism

I strongly doubt that my imagination is this precise, but... (1,4)

Better yet, if God wanted to design humans, why are there apes?

Evolution requires there be apes, design doesn't.

In the 70s, my comprehensive school's religious studies class was teaching possible naturalistic explanations for the plagues of Egypt. Possibly in a bid to make the Bible seem more believable?

They're not concerned about Big Astrology?

A baseball game is not some metric over jersey color and grass. If it were, we would be compelled to say that the US Army is baseball to some degree. The difference is in the details, in the abstractions being employed to govern the behavior and comprehension of the agents.

This is one of the reasons I do not like IIT. IIT vaguely resembles a physical theory, but it's not explanatory. We should be looking at function, not pretending metrics *are* consciousness...

While the United States has many of the same features of a conscious person, it arguably has no nationwide neural processing, so no abstractions of its own. It cannot recognize anything except through its citizens' brains...

My radical claim (OK, *one* of my radical claims) is that you will have difficulty understanding philosophy until you think of neural networks as abstraction machines. If, instead, you think of brains merely as complex hunks of matter, materialism will seem baffling... #philmind #philsci #consci

The difference between a swamp and a brain is in its abstracting function. And while the United States has many of the same features of a conscious person, it arguably has no nationwide neural processing. It cannot recognize anything except through its citizens' brains.

What I find frustrating about these sorts of articles is that the problem is resolved by abstraction in neural networks. Matter doesn't magically become conscious. To be conscious of something is to recognize it, and that's what neural nets do...

If we can't think for ourselves, if we're unwilling to question authority, then we're just putty in the hands of those in power. But if the citizens are educated and form their own opinions, then those in power work for us.

- Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World

By leveraging the extraordinarily small prior for evolution on design, we no longer even care about God's goodness or intent to design perfect beings. We can just say we do not know what an all-powerful being would do, but they have infinitely more options that do not look evolved.

IF God uses evolution (roll 6 or less), and IF God wants to avoid "design flaws", THEN we should have expected a 1. But this is the weak side of the inference, IMO. The strong side are all the numbers from 7 to a trillion that we do not see. P(evolution|design) ≃ 0...

Give each theory equal priors: P(D6) = 50%. If the die is rolled and a 3 comes up, we should be extremely confident that the selected die is D6. But the "bad design" argument sounds like the claim that, if theism is true, we should have rolled a 1.

Dice analogy: if natural evolution is a D6 then design is like a trillion-sided die. Suppose that a 1 on the D6 represents the peculiar case where humans evolve without their "design flaws" (e.g., appendix, narrow birth canal, etc.)...

Yes, "bad design" is confirmation of naturalism and evolution, which is cool, but the phrase "bad design" seems to implicitly make assumptions about what God would do. IMO, the stronger inference against design comes from all the alternative design options God has that do not look evolved...

Thanks for assembling this. I agree about the anthropic principle, or, as Sober puts it, the observer selection bias. After the bias is factored out, fine-tuning becomes a weak argument for naturalism.

If the world were not purely physical, it is ridiculously improbable that it would look this way. If the world is a dream, why does it act like it isn't a dream? If reductionism is not true, why are macro laws consistent with micro laws?

It's staring us in the face.

This is not an argument from methodology. Hypothetically, we could have found ourselves in the Dune universe, or Harry Potter's universe, or inside a video game. In such worlds, there might be some physical rules in the background, but the world is inexplicable without the supernatural...

In Probability and Purpose, I argue that we can effectively rule out design by an all-powerful creator because, all things being equal, we should expect something very different from evolution. But the same anti-supernatural argument applies to idealism and dualism... #physicalism #PhilSky

Trump’s religious liberty commission might be the end of religious freedom for all • Kansas Reflector If religious freedom is something you value, you need to add the newly formed Religious Liberty Commission to your list of things to follow,

If you're not a Christian Nationalist (whether you're Christian, some other religion, or Atheist) this should make your skin crawl.
Trump’s religious liberty commission might be the end of religious freedom for all kansasreflector.com/2025/07/09/t...

On September 3rd at 7pm, I'll be hosting a presentation and networking event on the topic of secular identity and humanist virtue ethics. The event is free, and I hope to bring together some of the Chicago area atheist/freethinker groups.

I think Many Worlds is by far our best interpretation of quantum mechanics. But even from Sean Carroll, I was not expecting a 95% degree of confidence.

a quote from Fish Stark, Executive Director of AHA, over a blue background of the White House. the quote reads: "This is another dark day for our democracy. The Johnson Amendment, though weakened over the years by lax enforcement, is the small but mighty dam standing in the way of a torrent of dark money influencing our elections. Now that the Trump administration has opened the door to pastors and houses of worship explicitly backing candidates for office, all bets are off. As humanists, we fight to defend the separation of church and state, not just to protect nonreligious Americans, but to safeguard our democracy itself. The decimation of the Johnson Amendment sets us on a dangerous trajectory away from the promise of secular government and equal treatment for all."

BREAKING: The I.R.S. is now allowing churches and pastors to endorse political candidates. There will be little to stop billionaires from funneling money through churches to buy our elections.

Americans deserve a government that works for all of us - not just the religious right.