{"id":285,"date":"2011-03-17T20:26:00","date_gmt":"2011-03-17T20:26:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/2011\/03\/17\/peter-atkins-vs-mary-midgley-on-whether-science-has-all-the-answers\/"},"modified":"2011-03-17T20:26:00","modified_gmt":"2011-03-17T20:26:00","slug":"peter-atkins-vs-mary-midgley-on-whether-science-has-all-the-answers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/2011\/03\/17\/peter-atkins-vs-mary-midgley-on-whether-science-has-all-the-answers\/","title":{"rendered":"Peter Atkins vs Mary Midgley on whether science has all the answers"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Peter Atkins vs Mary Midgley on whether science has all the answers. Available <a href=\"http:\/\/news.bbc.co.uk\/today\/hi\/today\/newsid_9427000\/9427512.stm\">here<\/a> for a short while.<\/p>\n<p>Funnily enough I had exactly this debate with Atkins a couple of weeks ago in Oxford over about 2hrs (part of THINK week). Dawkins sat right in front of me and chipped in too. I believe there will be some sort of recording available shortly&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, Atkins is not the sharpest philosophical pencil in the box, I think (though he&#8217;s obviously good at chemistry). Strong on assertion but remarkably weak on argument. But Mary Midgley is unfortunately not great either.<\/p>\n<p>Midgeley&#8217;s is a depressingly weedy and waffly defence of philosophy. Her slide from why there&#8217;s something rather than nothing to the obscure &#8220;meaning of life&#8221; question plays right into Atkins&#8217;s hands.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Peter Atkins vs Mary Midgley on whether science has all the answers. Available here for a short while. Funnily enough I had exactly this debate with Atkins a couple of weeks ago in Oxford over about 2hrs (part of THINK week). Dawkins sat right in front of me and chipped in too. I believe there [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-285","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/285","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=285"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/285\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=285"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=285"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=285"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}