Author: Benjamin Studebaker

Nye vs. Ham: The Broken Evolution/Creation Debate

Yesterday, on encouragement from my little brother, who is an aspirant aeronautical engineer and a huge Bill Nye fan, I watched the debate between Bill Nye (of Bill Nye the Science Guy) and Ken Ham, who is president of the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky. I also ran across this piece on Buzzfeed, in which Ham supporters ask lots of questions that, based on what I’m reading on my Facebook, don’t seem especially reasonable to Nye’s guys. Instead of contributing to the internet flame war, I’d like to try to use what philosophical skills I have to highlight what precisely the difference is between the two positions, because the gulf is incredibly vast, more vast than I believe most of the participants on either side of this debate commonly understand.

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A Critique of Habermas

Today I’d like to put on my democratic theory hat and offer a critique of Jürgen Habermas‘ theory of deliberative democracy. Habermas gives his answer to the question of what kind of government we ought to have by appealing not to any specific goal or end that he thinks government ought to have, but by instead offering standards by which we can judge a procedure through which one would determine one’s society’s ends. I argue that Habermas relies too much on moral intuitionism to substantiate these standards and consequently provides insufficient reason why we should choose to determine our form of government by appeal to procedure rather than by appeal to result.

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Extraterrestrials and Katy Perry

According to a recent story in GQ, Katy Perry (American pop star extraordinaire) believes in aliens. It would appear that her song “ET” for “extraterrestrial” speaks to a genuine article belief in foreign life forms. In our culture, belief in intelligent alien life is often treated like belief in religion–you either have it or you do not, and in either case there isn’t much evidence one can muster for either side. But I’d like to have a little fun and ponder this question. What is the most reasonable position for a person to have on the existence of aliens giving existent non-conspiratorial evidence?

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Niall Ferguson is Wrong about World War I

I ran across a piece in The Guardian in which Niall Ferguson, a British historian, made the increasingly popular argument that it was in the British national interest to avoid participating in World War I, that the decision to do so was a mistake. This argument, which I am seeing made all over the place in the popular press (as 2014 is the 100-year anniversary of the 1914 start of the war), is deeply misguided. I contend that it was an absolute strategic necessity that Britain enter the war to prevent Germany from defeating France. Here’s why.

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