Defending the Universe

Defending the One Percent

I magine a society with perfect economic equality. Perhaps out of sheer coincidence, the supply and demand for different types of labor happen to produce an equilibrium in which everyone earns exactly the same income. As a result, no one worries about the gap between the rich and poor, and no one debates to what extent public policy should make income redistribution a priority. Because people e...

Defending the Dynamical Hypothesis

Defending Diversity

Why do some observations lead to broad generalizations whereas other observations do not have as much influence on people's beliefs? One principle of evaluating evidence is the diversity principle, which states that more diverse evidence should lead to stronger inferences than a narrow sample of evidence. For example, if you see someone repeatedly acting aggressively while giving lectures, you ...

The Qur’an and Mysticism On The Universe of Two Sides

The universe has an exterior known as the material world and an interior called the “hereafter.” So are the Qur’an and mankind. In other words, the universe, mankind and the Qur’an have hierarchical stages. The universe and mankind comprise the physical world, but the Qur’an constitutes the Divine Law. Since the origin of all three is one single source, one can say the former matches t...

Defending Abduction

Charles S. Peirce argued that, besides deduction and induction, there is a third mode of inference which he called "hypothesis" or "abduction". He characterized abduction as reasoning "from effect to cause", and as "the operation of adopting an explanatory hypothesis". Peirce's ideas about abduction, which are related also to historically earlier accounts of heuristic reasoning (the method of a...