1 The big questions - God and Stephen Hawking: Whose Design Is It Anyway? by John Lennox

   1 The big questions - God and Stephen Hawking: Whose Design Is It Anyway? by John Lennox #filosofoasuainsaputa #pericolodeltuono #grecicontroebrei #diotappabuchi

1 The big questionsRead more at location 101

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Since his books deal with the origin of the universe, it was inevitable that he should consider the matter of the existence of a Divine Creator. However, A Brief History of Time left this matter tantalizingly open, by ending with the much-quoted statement that if physicists were to find a “Theory of Everything” (that is, a theory that unified the four fundamental forces of nature: the strong and weak nuclear forces, electromagnetism and gravity), we would “know the Mind of God”.Read more at location 114

Note: IL FINALE DI UN BEST SELLERS Edit

The Big Bang, he argues, was the inevitable consequence of these laws: “because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing”.Read more at location 122

Note: L ULTIMA TESI DI SH Edit

“Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.”Read more at location 125

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“How can we understand the world in which we find ourselves? How does the universe behave? What is the nature of reality? Where did all this come from? Did the universe need a Creator?”Read more at location 134

Note: LE GRANDI DOMANDE Edit

An inadequate view of philosophyRead more at location 139

Note: FILOSOFIA Edit

Hawking dismisses philosophy. Referring to his list of questions, he writes: “Traditionally these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead.Read more at location 140

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As a result scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge.”Read more at location 142

Note: SCOENTISMO Edit

The very first thing I notice is that Hawking’s statement about philosophy is itself a philosophical statement. It is manifestly not a statement of science: it is a metaphysical statement about science. Therefore, his statement that philosophy is dead contradicts itself. It is a classic example of logical incoherence.Read more at location 147

Note: SH FILOSOFO A SUA INSAPUTA Edit

Hawking’s attitude to philosophy contrasts markedly with that of Albert EinsteinRead more at location 149

Note: CONTRO EINSTEIN Edit

I fully agree with you about the significance and educational value of methodology as well as history and philosophy of science.Read more at location 151

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scientism – the view that science is the only way to truth. It is a conviction characteristic of that movement in secular thought known as the “New Atheism”,Read more at location 157

Note: FILOSOFIA SCIENTISTA Edit

Nobel Laureate Sir Peter Medawar pointed out this dangerRead more at location 162

Note: OPINIONE DI UN NOBEL Edit

Medawar goes on to say: “The existence of a limit to science is, however, made clear by its inability to answer childlike elementary questions having to do with first and last things – questions such as: ‘How did everything begin?’ ‘What are we all here for?’ ‘What is the point of living?’”Read more at location 168

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Francis Collins is equally clear on the limitations of science: “Science is powerless to answer questions such as ‘Why did the universe come into being?’ ‘What is the meaning of human existence?’ ‘What happens after we die?’”Read more at location 172

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For instance, there is widespread acknowledgment that it is very difficult to get a base for morality in science.Read more at location 177

Note: SCIENTISMO E MORALE Edit

Einstein proceeded to point out that science cannot form a base for morality: “every attempt to reduce ethics to scientific formulae must fail”.Read more at location 181

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Richard Feynman, also a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, shared Einstein’s view: “Even the greatest forces and abilities don’t seem to carry any clear instructions on how to use them.Read more at location 183

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Elsewhere he states that “ethical values lie outside the scientific realm”.Read more at location 187

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insofar as he is interpreting and applying science to ultimate questions like the existence of God, Hawking is doing metaphysics.Read more at location 190

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An inadequate view of GodRead more at location 209

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“Ignorance of nature’s ways led people in ancient times to invent gods to lord it over every aspect of human life.”Read more at location 212

Note: PER SH DIO È UN TAPPABUCHI Edit

God, or the gods, is a placeholder for human ignoranceRead more at location 217

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but Hawking now claims that physics has no longer any room for God,Read more at location 220

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it thunders, if we suppose that it is a god roaring – as some of the ancients did – we would scarcely be in a mood to investigateRead more at location 224

Note: IL PERICOLO DEL TUONO Edit

So we certainly need to remove deification of the forces of nature in order to be free to study nature. This was a revolutionary step in thinking, taken, as Hawking points out, by early Greek natural philosophers like Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes of Milesia over 2,500 years ago.Read more at location 226

Note: CONFONDERE DIO CON LA DEIFICAZIONE Edit

He added derisively: “If cows and horses or lions had hands and could draw, then horses would draw the forms of gods like horses, cows like cows, making their bodies similarRead more at location 239

Note: ANTROPOMORFISMO Edit

the Hebrew leader Moses had warned against worshipping “other gods, bowing down to them or to the sun or the moon or the stars of the sky”. Later, the prophet Jeremiah, writing in about 600 BC, similarly denounced the absurdity of deifying nature and worshipping the sun, moon and stars.Read more at location 250

Note: MOSÈ DENUNCIA LA DEIFICAZIONE Edit

It is to imagine that getting rid of gods either necessitates, or is the same as, getting rid of God.Read more at location 253

Note: L ERRORE DI SH: CONFUSIONE TRA POLITEISMO E MONOTEISMO Edit

What had saved them from that superstition was their belief in the One True God, Creator of heaven and earth.Read more at location 257

Note: EBREI Edit

That is, the idolatrous and polytheistic universe described by Homer and Hesiod was not the original world-picture of humankind.Read more at location 259

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polytheism arguably constitutes a perversion of an original belief in the One Creator God. It was this perversion that needed to be corrected, by recovering belief in the Creator and not by jettisoning it.Read more at location 263

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Werner Jaeger writes: If we compare this Greek hypostasis of the world-creative Eros with that of the Logos in the Hebrew account of creation, we may observe a deep-lying difference in the outlook of the two peoples.Read more at location 266

Note: EBREI VS GRECI Edit

he confuses God with the gods. And that inevitably leads him to a completely inadequate view of God, as a God of the GapsRead more at location 279

Note: POLITEISMO E DIO TAPPABUCHI Edit

a view of God that is not to be found in any major monotheistic religion, where God is not a God of the Gaps but the author of the whole show.

HL ITALIANO Are Disagreements Honest? Tyler Cowen Robin Hanson

Are Disagreements Honest? Tyler Cowen Robin Hanson

• ABSTRACT We review literatures on agreeing to disagree and on the rationality of differing priors, in order to evaluate the honesty of typical disagreements. A robust result is that honest truth-seeking agents with common priors should not knowingly disagree. Typical disagreement seems explainable by a combination of random belief influences and by priors that tell each person that he reasons better than others. When criticizing others, however, people seem to uphold rationality standards that disapprove of such self-favoring priors. This suggests that typical disagreements are dishonest. We conclude by briefly considering how one might try to become more honest when disagreeing.
• I. Introduction
• MATERIE. politics, morality, religion, and relative abilities.
• OBIETTIVITÀ. they often consider their disagreements to be about what is objectively true, rather than about how they each feel or use words.
• people often consider their disagreements to be honest...Yet according to well-known theory, such honest disagreement is impossible.
• Robert Aumann (1976) first developed general results about the irrationality of “agreeing to disagree.”He showed that if two or more Bayesians would believe the same thing given the same information (i.e., have “common priors”), and if they are mutually aware of each other's opinions (i.e., have “common knowledge”), then those individuals cannot knowingly disagree. Merely knowing someone else’s opinion provides a powerful summary of everything that person knows, powerful enough to eliminate any differences of opinion due to differing information.
• One of Aumann’s assumptions, however, does make a big difference. This is the assumption of common priors... While some people do take the extreme position that that priors must be common to be rational, others take the opposite extreme position, that any possible prior is rational.
• TESI. We will tentatively conclude that typical disagreements are best explained by postulating that people have self-favoring priors, even though they disapprove of such priors, and that self-deception usually prevents them from seeing this fact.
• II. The Phenomena of Disagreement
• Disagreements do not typically embarrass us.
• and high-IQ individuals seem no less likely to disagree than others. Not only are disagreements not embarrassing, more social shame often falls on those who agree too easily, and so lack “the courage of their convictions.”
• Psychologists suggest that human disagreements typically depend heavily on each person believing that he or she is better than others
• People are usually more eager to speak than they are to listen,
• For example, most people, especially men, estimate themselves to be more able than others
• Gilovich (1991, p.77) cites a survey of university professors, which found that 94% thought they were better at their jobs than their average colleagues.
• III. The Basic Theory of Agreeing to Disagree
• Imagine that John hears a noise, looks out his window and sees a car speeding away. Mary also hears the same noise, looks out a nearby window, and sees the same car.... John and Mary’s immediate impressions about the car will differ, due both to differences in what they saw and how they interpreted their sense impressions. John’s first impression is that the car was an old tan Ford, and he tells Mary this. Mary’s first impression is that the car was a newer brown Chevy, but she updates her beliefs upon hearing from John. Upon hearing Mary’s opinion, John also updates his beliefs. They then continue back and forth, trading their opinions about the likelihood of various possible car features... If Mary sees John as an honest truth-seeker who would believe the same things as Mary given the same information... then Mary should treat John’s differing opinion as indicating things that he knows but she does not. Mary should realize that they are both capable of mistaken first impressions. If her goal is to predict the truth, she has no good reason to give her own observation greater weight, simply because it was hers. Of course, if Mary has 20/20 eyesight, while John is nearsighted, then Mary might reasonably give more weight to her own observation. But then John should give her observation greater weight as well.
• If John and Mary repeatedly exchange their opinions with each other, their opinions should eventually stop changing, at which point they should become mutually aware (i.e., have “common knowledge”) of their opinions
• A more detailed analysis says not only that people must ultimately agree, but also that the discussion path of their alternating expressed opinions must follow a random walk.
• Yet in ordinary practice, as well as in controlled laboratory experiments (Hanson and Nelson 2004), we know that disagreement is persistent.
• IV. Generalizations of the Basic Theory
• Thus John and Mary need not be absolutely sure that they are both honest, that they heard each other correctly, or that they interpret language the same way.
• The beliefs of real people usually depend not only on their information about the problem at hand, but also on their mental context, john should pay attention to Mary's opinion not only because it may embody information that John does not have, but also because it is the product of a different mental context, and John should want to average over as many mental contexts as he can.
• V. Comparing Theory and Phenomena
• The stylized facts of human disagreement are in conflict with the above theory of disagreement.
• The theory above implicitly assumed that people say what they believe.
• people usually have the strong impression that they are not lying, and it hard to see how people could be so mistaken about this.... People sometimes accuse their opponents of insincerity, but rarely accept this same label as a self-description.
• RAZIONALITÀ COME ONESTÀ. Bayesians can easily disagree due to differing priors, regardless of whether or not they have differing information, mental contexts, or anything else. Does this allow typical human disagreement to be rational?.. we would also have to decide if these prior differences are rational. And this last topic turns out to be very controversial.
• To evaluate the honesty of disagreement, we do not need to know what sorts of differing priors are actually rational, but only what sorts of differences people think are rational.
• VI. Proposed Rationality Constraints On Priors
• In general, Bayesian agents can have beliefs not only about the world, but also about the beliefs of other agents, about other agent’s beliefs about other agents, and so on.
• common knowledge among Bayesians. Thus when priors differ, all agents know those differences, know that they all know them, and so on. So while agents with differing priors can agree to disagree, they must anticipate such disagreements.
• But how different can rational priors be? One extreme position is that no differences are rational (Harsanyi 1983, Aumann 1998). The most common argument given for this common prior position is that differences in beliefs should depend only on differences in information.
• Another extreme position is that a prior is much like a utility function: an ex post reconstruction of what happens, rather than a real entity subject to independent scrutiny.
• one prior is no more rational than another than one utility function is more rational than another.
• A consequence of this is that if there are no constraints on which priors are rational, there are almost no constraints on which beliefs are rational. People who think that some beliefs are irrational are thus forced to impose constraints on what priors are rational.
• it is common to require Bayesians to change their beliefs by conditioning when they learn (or forget) information.
• Finally, some theorists use considerations of the causal origins of priors to argue that certain prior differences are irrational.
• In summary, prior-based disagreements should be fully anticipated, and there are many possible positions on the question of when differing priors are rational. Some say no differences are rational, while others say all differences are rational.
• VII. Commonly Upheld Rationality Standards
• Most people have not directly declared a position on the subject of what kinds of prior differences are rational.
• people who feel free to criticize consistently complain when they notice someone making a sequence of statements that is inconsistent or incoherent. They also complain when they notice that someone’s opinion does not change in response to relevant information.
• Perhaps even more frequently, people criticize others when their opinions appear to have self-serving biases.
• Though critics acknowledge that self-favoring belief is a natural tendency, such critics do not seem to endorse those beliefs as accurate or reliable.
• These common criticisms suggest that most people implicitly uphold rationality standards that disapprove of self-favoring priors,
• VIII. Truth-Seeking and Self-Deception
• Non-truth-seeking and self-deception offer two complementary explanations for this difference in behavior. First, believing in yourself can be more functional that believing in logical contradictions. Second, while it is hard to deny that you have stated a logical contradiction, once the contradiction is pointed out, it is much easier to deny that a disagreement is due to your having a self-favoring prior.
• Scientists with unreasonably optimistic beliefs about their research projects may work harder and thus better advance scientific knowledge (Everett 2001; Kitcher 1990).
• Self-favoring priors can thus be “rational”in the sense of helping one to achieve familiar goals, even if they are not “rational”in the sense of helping one to achieve the best possible estimate of the true situation (Caplan 2000).
• Evolutionary arguments have even been offered for why we might have evolved to be biased and self-deceived.
• This story is also commonly told in literature. For example, the concluding dream in Fyodor Dostoevsky's (1994 [1866]) Crime and Punishment seems to describe disagreement as the original sin, from which arises all other sins. In contrast, the description of the Houyhnhnms in Jonathan swift (1962 [1726]) Gulliver’s Travels can be considered a critique showing how creatures (intelligent horses in this case) that agree too much lose their “humanity.”
• VIII. How Few Meta-Rationals?
• We can call someone a truth-seeker if, given his information and level of effort on a topic, he chooses his beliefs to be as close as possible to the truth. A non-truth seeker will, in contrast, also put substantial weight on other goals when choosing his beliefs.
• Let us also call someone meta-rational if he is an honest truth-seeker who chooses his opinions as if he understands the basic theory of disagreement... and abides by the rationality standards that most people uphold, which seem to preclude self-favoring priors.
• TESI. Our working hypothesis for explaining the ubiquity of persistent disagreement is that people are not usually meta-rational.
• How many meta-rational people can there be?
• If meta-rational people were common, and able to distinguish one another, then we should see many pairs of people who have almost no dishonest disagreements with each other.
• Yet it seems that meta-rational people should be discernable via their conversation style.
• two meta-rational people should be able to discern one another via a long enough conversation. And once they discern one another, two meta-rational people should no longer have dishonest disagreements.
• unless meta-rationals simply cannot distinguish each other, only a tiny non-descript percentage of the population, or of academics, can be meta-rational. Either few people have truth-seeking rational cores, and those that do cannot be readily distinguished, or most people have such cores but they are in control infrequently and unpredictably.
• IX. Personal Policy Implications
• Let us assume, however, that you, the reader, are trying to be one of those rare meta-rational souls in the world,
• One approach would be to try to never assume that you are more meta-rational than anyone else.
• Alternatively, you could adopt a "middle" opinion. There are, however, many ways to define middle, and people can disagree about which middle is best
• psychologists have found numerous correlates of self-deception. Self-deception is harder regarding one’s overt behaviors, there is less self-deception in a galvanic skin response (as used in lie detector tests) than in speech, the right brain hemisphere tends to be more honest, evaluations of actions are less honest after those actions are chosen than before (Trivers 2000), self-deceivers have more self-esteem and less psychopathology, especially less depression (Paulhus 1986), and older children are better than younger ones at hiding their self-deception from others (Feldman & Custrini 1988). Each correlate implies a corresponding sign of self-deception. Other commonly suggested signs of self-deception include idiocy, self-interest, emotional arousal, informality of analysis, an inability
• While we have identified some considerations to keep in mind, were one trying to be one of those rare meta-rational souls, we have no general recipe for how to proceed. Perhaps recognizing the difficulty of this problem can at least make us a bit more wary of our own judgments when we disagree.
• X. Conclusion
• We have therefore hypothesized that most disagreement is due to most people not being meta-rational, i.e., honest truth-seekers who understand disagreement theory and abide by the rationality standards that most people uphold. We have suggested that this is at root due to people fundamentally not being truth-seeking. This in turn suggests that most disagreement is dishonest.

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Does Technology Drive the Growth of Government? di Tyler Cowen

Does Technology Drive the Growth of Government? di Tyler Cowen

• The puzzle, courtesy of the great Tullock: I start with what Gordon Tullock (1994) has called the paradox of government growth. Before the late nineteenth century, government was a very small percentage of gross domestic product in most Western countries, typically no more than five percent. In most cases this state of affairs had persisted for well over a century, often for many centuries. The twentieth century, however, saw the growth of governments, across the Western world, to forty or fifty percent of gross domestic product... I'd like to address the key  question of why limited government and free markets have so fallen out of favor.
• Inadequacies of public choice theories of government growth: Public choice analysis has generated many theories of why government grows and why that growth is inevitable. Special interest groups, voter ignorance, and the pressures of war all are cited in this context. Those theories, however, at best explain the twentieth century, rather than the historical pattern more generally. Until the late nineteenth century, governments were not growing very rapidly. The standard public choice accounts do not contain enough institutional differentiation to account for no government growth in one period and rapid government growth in another period.
• Inadequacies of ideological theories of government growth: According to this claim, the philosophy of classical liberalism declined in the mid- to late nineteenth century. This may be attributed to the rise of socialist doctrine, internal contradictions in the classical liberal position, the rise of democracy, or perhaps the rise of a professional intellectual class. While the ideology hypothesis has merit, it is unlikely to provide a final answer to the Tullock paradox. To some extent ideology stems from broader social conditions. Ideologies changed, in part, because intellectuals perceived a benefit to promoting ideas of larger government, rather than promoting classical liberalism.
• Inadequacies of ratchet theories of government growth: The ratchet effect becomes much stronger in the twentieth century than before. Furthermore most forms of governmental growth probably would have occurred in the absence of war. The example of Sweden is instructive. Sweden avoided both World Wars, and had a relatively mild depression in the 1930s, but has one of the largest governments, relative to the size of its economy, in the developed world. The war hypothesis also does not explain all of the chronology of observed growth. Many Western countries were well on a path towards larger government before the First World War. And the 1970s were a significant period for government growth in many nations, despite the prosperity and relative calm of the 1960s.
• Inadequacies of franchise extension theories of government growth: The hypothesis of franchise extension, however, again leaves much unexplained. First, non-democratic regimes, such as Franco's Spain, illustrate similar patterns of government growth as do the democracies. Second, much of the Western world was fully democratized by the 1920s. Most governmental growth comes well after that date, and some of it, such as Bismarck's Germany, comes well before that time. Third, and most fundamentally, white male property owners today do not favor extremely small government, though they do tend to be more economically conservative than female voters.
• acknowledging the ultimate power of public opinion: No matter how incomplete it may be, there clearly must be something to the voter hypothesis. That is, there must be some demand for big government. If all or most voters, circa 2009, wanted their government to be five percent of gross domestic product, some candidate would run on that platform and win. Change might prove difficult to accomplish, but we would at least observe politicians staking out that position as a rhetorical high  ground. In today's world we do not observe this. Voter preferences for intervention are therefore a necessary condition for sustained large government. Democratic government cannot grow large, and stay large, against the express wishes of a substantial majority of the population.
• turns to the many technological changes...  [N]o one of these technological advances serves as the cause of governmental growth. Taken as a group, however, these factors made very large government possible for the first time. To see this, perform a very simple thought experiment. Assume that we had no cars, no trucks, no planes, no telephones, no TV or radio, and no rail network. Of course we would all be much poorer. But how large could government be? Government might take on more characteristics of a petty tyrant, but we would not expect to find the modern administrative state, commanding forty to fifty percent of gross domestic product in the developed nations, and reaching into the lives of every individual daily..... Think also about the timing of these innovations. The lag between technology and governmental growth is not a very long one. The technologies discussed above all had slightly different rates of arrival and dissemination, but came clustered in the same general period. With the exception of the railroads and the telegraph (both coming into widespread use in the mid-nineteenth century), none predated the late nineteenth century, exactly the time when governmental growth gets underway in most parts of the West. The widespread dissemination of these technologies often comes in the 1920s and 1930s, exactly when  many Western governments grew most rapidly, leading sometimes to totalitarian extremes. The relatively short time lag suggests that strong pressures for government growth already were in place. Once significant governmental growth became technologically possible, that growth came quickly.
• People always had a latent demand for big government; then technology finally made it possible to satisfy them
• si pensa in termini di mondo ideale. qual è il mondo ideale? quello del tiranno benigno.

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Introduction - God and Stephen Hawking: Whose Design Is It Anyway? by John Lennox

Introduction - God and Stephen Hawking: Whose Design Is It Anyway? by John Lennox - #ilveroconflitto #ildiodeicolti

IntroductionRead more at location 52

Note: INTRO@@@@@@@@@ Edit

Take, for example, the first author on our list, Francis Collins, the Director of the National Institute of Health in the USA, and former Head of the Human Genome Project. His predecessor as head of that project was Jim Watson, winner (with Francis Crick) of the Nobel Prize for discovering the double-helix structure of DNA. Collins is a Christian, Watson an atheist. They are both top-level scientists, which shows us that what divides them is not their science but their world-view. There is a real conflict, but it is not science versus religion. It is theism versus atheism, and there are scientists on both sides.Read more at location 66

Note: ATEISMO VS TEISMO NN SCIENZA VS RELIGIONE Edit

does science point towards God, away from God, or is it neutral on the issue?Read more at location 71

Note: FOCUS Edit

This remarkable surge of interest in God defies the so-called secularization hypothesis,Read more at location 72

Note: SECOLARIZZAZIONE Edit

According to distinguished journalists John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge of The Economist, “God is Back”1 – and not only for the uneducated. “In much of the world it is exactly the sort of upwardly-mobile, educated middle classes that Marx and Weber presumed would shed such superstitions who are driving the explosion of faith.”Read more at location 75

Note: IL DIO DEI COLTI Edit

Were Galileo, Kepler, Newton and Maxwell, to name a few, really all wrong on the God question?