Comment 59 by sharkeggs :

We only know that the universe had a beginning.

Not my understanding, we only know that the universe was in existence after the Planck time.

Comment 11 by memeweaver :

They fail to notice that by continually appeasing a minority who will never vote for them, and will never be satisfied by any appeasement (witness the routing of Labor in the Queensland state election, and what the Christian right voters said), they betray their voting base, who now wander off to greener pastures.

Kipling got it right

And that is called paying the Dane-geld;

But we've proved it again and again,

That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld

You never get rid of the Dane.

Comment 35 by Mr DArcy :

Well science has some say about the shape of electrons "real" or not. Now whether or not the instruments are up to it, I couldn't possibly say, but at least this activity has progressed my understanding of electrons.

They used an instrument based on lasers to do the investigation. Now, how do lasers work? What is the theory behind their operation?

Don't get me wrong, I am a realist when it comes to the existence of electrons. However there are problems when it comes to entities which are not directly observable or rely on instrumentation for observations. It is a truism in philosophy of science that all observations are theory laden.

While I have as much affection for the post-modernists as Alan Sokal there is still plenty of mileage in good philosophy.

Quine has raised neuroscience as an explanans for a number of philosophical problems, I would agree with him but I don't think we have a full science of mind as yet. Philosophy of mind is still a useful discipline and if you read someone like V.S. Ramachandran it is something that he takes into account in his work.

There is also a good deal at the foundation of physics too. Are electrons and quarks real? Certainly we have no direct observational evidence for their existence, only indirect evidence. The indirect evidence is that from instruments which are built using theories which themselves implicitly assume the existence of such particles.

There is a famous discussion between Boyle and Hobbes about the air pump, in their day a notoriously unreliable instrument which could only give results when it was "working properly". But as Hobbes pointed out, what does one mean when one claims it is working properly? Surely one is making a circular argument. This of course continue in the work of Duhem and W.V. Orman Quine, namely that all theories are under-determined and that it is impossible to test a theory in isolation since all theories are dependent on auxiliary hypotheses.

One can go further, fields are postulated to avoid "action at a distance" and to preserve the spatio-temporal locality that causality seemingly requires. But one can also question whether fields are real and whether causality is a universal.

Comment 30 by Mr DArcy :

I wouldn't want to deride Derrida, but de desire is strong.

Why not, other philosophers do. John Searle famously said Derrida gave bullshit a bad name.