I personally believe that humans do not have free will, though I would like to hear more arguments against this. My question is, if psychological studies have shown that believing in the absence of free will makes people more aggressive, selfish and antisocial, is it ethical or moral to censure scientific 'evidence' for free will from public knowledge?

Is it true that before 2006 Pluto was a planet, and now it no longer is? Or was Pluto never a planet by IAU's post-2006 definition, and still is a planet by the pre-2006 definition? You can't change what something is just by changing a definition right?

Why does giving authority to a sense of aesthetics sometimes lead to finding the wrong answer to a scientific question?

When proponents of Intelligent Design insist that it is inconceivable for a particular biological structure to have simply evolved, their opponents sometimes respond "evolution is cleverer than you are." This is a pithy response, and no doubt there is truth to it; but can the ID-proponent really be reasonably expected to accept this?

Do immoral methods in science always produce false results? I've heard this kind of claim made in relation to psychological experiments in which subjects are initially lied to. It doesn't seem intuitive. Why do people say this?

Scientific skepticism seems to be on the rise in the past few decades (postmodernism, the climate change debate, controversy surrounding genetics & cognitive sciences, creationism, alternative medicine, etc). Some say scientific discoveries are relative; others say they are false; others say they are a conspiracy by special interest groups to sway public opinion, or keep people in the dark. This has raised a question I think we need to answer, as a society, if we are to draw the line between science, pseudoscience and charlatanism, and to move forwards into the future: what good reasons are there for trusting in scientists and their theories? What makes trusting what a scientist says about his or her specialty, or trusting a scientific journal or article or experiment on some specific theme, when we know little about it from experience, any different from trusting a member of the clergy or a holy text? All this, of course, from the point of view of a person who is neither a scientist nor knows...

Is religion merely a primitive form of science?

Is science really as neutral and objective as scientists claim? Let me for arguments sake use the example of "ghosts". When a person lives in a country with wide-spread belief in the supernatural they are more likely to interpret a strange event as having a supernatural component. We can say that they are not analysing the event in an objective way, but are interpreting it from the biased mindset that "the supernatural exists". A scientist looking at the same event would not have such cultural assumptions; but he is interpreting the event on the basis of what he already knows about science (ex, That cognitive processes have a biological basis, that immaterial beings violate the laws of physics as they are currently understood, etc.) Now we know from history that many scientific theories which had the support of the entire scientific community turn out to inconsistent with empirical observation in some way and require modification or to be discarded entirely. Similarly, some theories which were once...

This is a response to an answer given by Miriam Solomon (http://www.askphilosophers.org/question/3533). In her response Miriam claims that "...in the 16th century, it was against the laws of nature to claim that Earth moves around the sun." Surely this is missing the point. It was not against the laws of nature but against the contemporary "theories" (*approximations* of the laws of nature) in science. Therefore it was not the laws that were wrong (as she claims), but the theories. Furthermore, to develop upon the original question; the existence of ghosts contradicts currently-held theories of science but also the very conception of ghosts is *self-contradictory*. (For example; If ghosts are capable of physically interacting with their environment they are subject to the action-reaction law of classical mechanics. But if they are capable of travelling through solid objects they do not exert force upon their environment and are not subject to said law: a contradiction.) From this perspective isn't asking ...

Do the laws of science disprove the existence of ghosts? The universe adheres to strict physical laws and constants; as Stephen Hawking notes; these laws MUST be adhered to 100% of the time, or they wouldn't be laws. In science, a theory can be supported by thousands of separate pieces of separate empirical evidence but it only takes ONE piece of empirical evidence which contradicts a theory for that theory to be disproven; in which case the theory must be discarded or modified. The existence of ghosts is evidence which would contradict thousands of theories in science; in physics, biology and chemistry (Newton's laws of motion, Einstein's equivalence of mass and energy, etc. etc.) The immutability of the laws of science are verified by the products of man's understanding and manipulation of these laws; technology, transportation, medicine, etc. etc. These things form the bedrock of modern civilization. I know that in science it is said that nothing can be "disproven"; for example, we can't completely...