Piltdown Superman

by Cowboy Bob Sorensen People familiar with softball and baseball probably know about how a catcher will frame a pitch . If it comes close to the strike zone, the catcher can make subtle movements to make it appear like a strike to the umpire, even if it is not there. Credits: Original from FreeImages / Julie Elliott-Abshire , modified with PhotoFunia See what I did there? On one hand, it can be a form of cheating, but on the other, the catcher can make a good pitch look like it missed the strike zone. There is a similarity in this to people and organizations who are self-proclaimed fact checkers. Someone pointed out that the name is a bit misleading, as facts are facts. True, but how facts are presented or framed can inform or deceive people. There are two areas of poor logic involved here. The first is an appeal to authority fallacy , which means that if a certain person, group, site, or organization made a proclamation, it must be true. However, many so-called fact che

by Cowboy Bob Sorensen An occasional plot device in books, movies, and television is when a character uses untoward means to make a point. Perhaps he or she was ignored by the government or an employer about serious problems in software or something that were ignored, so the problem is dramatically demonstrated. In a similar manner, hoax papers have been submitted to peer-reviewed journals — and accepted. Credit: Unsplash / Christin Hume One notable incident was when Alan Sokal submitted an article to a postmodern journal in 1996, causing academic embarrassment. Postmodernism is where truth is relative and absolute truth is rejected. It is also self-refuting, inconsistent, and unlivable. Like atheism, when someone following either philosophy says that something is evil or wrong, that person is appealing to an absolute standard. Ultimately, they are appealing to the truth of God! Secular science has a definite leftist bias . Current sexual preference and science-denying &quo

by Cowboy Bob Sorensen Today is both  Question Evolution Day  and Creation Sunday , a convergence that will not happen again until 2023. This causes excitement for some people, while others are annoyed. Interestingly, the postmodernism that permeates Western society is self-contradictory: people who hate such events need them. I'll 'splain later. There was a time when movies and television had, for the most part, distinct good and evil characters. (In old Western movies, the stereotype portrayed good guys in white hats, bad guys in black hats.) Later, characters were introduced that were more believable because they were flawed — the anti-hero. One Western character was played by Clint Eastwood, referred to as The Man With No Name. He was not "good" by any stretch of the imagination, but he was our focus as someone to favor. Lines between good and evil were blurred, and audiences were occasionally bemused when the bad guy had more relative goodness than the good

by Cowboy Bob Sorensen There are several major paradigms active in the world today that have many adherents and are also in conflict one another. Some try to have a kind of synthesis of views, while others have no interest. There is a unified focus, but I don't reckon that participants are aware of the grand scheme. I don't see a kind of shoot-out at the OK Corral of philosophy, though. There have been several philosophical eras over the years that had odd names as far as I'm concerned. Doesn't modern  mean today?  Not when it comes to labeling. The last three are premodernism, modernism, and postmodernism. (Some are saying that postmodernism is already morphing into something else, but there's no title yet as far as I can tell.) One of the main characteristics of postmodernism is that people believe that there are no absolutes . Forget presenting truth to postmoderns, they've asserted that there are no absolutes (a self-refuting claim) and that truth is re