Does Scandinavia show that we do not need God to be good?
| December 10, 2017 | Posted by News under Atheism, Culture, Ethics, Intelligent Design, Philosophy, Religion |
Ken Francis, journalist and author of The Little Book of God, Mind, Cosmos and Truth, reviews C. R. Hallpike’s Do We Need God To Be Good at New English Review: … Dr. Hallpike continues in his book: We can therefore agree with Hitchens that there is no reason to expect any special differences here between the conduct […]
How can God be infinite if actual infinites cannot exist?
| December 10, 2017 | Intelligent Design, Mathematics, Philosophy, Religion, theism |
From Evan Minton at Cerebral Faith: In defense of the Kalam Cosmological Argument, apologists such as William Lane Craig, Frank Turek, and myself will argue for the second premise (i.e that the universe had a beginning to its existence) by arguing that an actually infinite number of things are impossible. If an actually infinite number […]
CR and the question of knowledge, with his championed “constructor theory” in play
CR is a frequent objector here at UD, and it seems again necessary to headline a corrective response given some of his remarks in the thread on UB’s discussion of information systems in cells: ____________________ KF, 62: >>CR: constructor theory formalizes the view that, in science, justification isn’t possible or even desirable and brings emergent […]
Dispatches from modern witchcraft in the world of Urban Cool
| December 10, 2017 | Intelligent Design, Philosophy, Religion, Science |
From CBS: NEW PALTZ, N.Y. (CBSNewYork) — At a time when participation in traditional religions is declining among Americans, the practice of witchcraft is said to be on the rise. CBS2’s Ali Bauman went inside the secret world of modern-day witches to explore why so many say they’re falling under its spell. “I am the […]
Rob Sheldon: How to tell if angels’ existence is scientific…
| December 10, 2017 | Intelligent Design, Philosophy, Religion, Science |
Recently, we posted a link to Ken Francis’s item at New English Review, which addresses, in part, the question of whether angels exist: The atheist philosopher, David Hume, said if rational people have a choice to believe more than one explanation of an event, they should choose to believe that explanation which is most probable. […]
Human brain cells live long but acquire thousands of mutations along the way
| December 9, 2017 | Posted by News under Cell biology, Human evolution, Intelligent Design, Mind |
From Ruth Williams at The Scientist: Two studies in Science today (December 7)—one that focuses on prenatal development in humans, the other on infancy to old age—provide insights into the extent of DNA sequence errors that the average human brain cell accumulates over a lifetime. Together, they reveal that mutations become more common as fetuses […]
At FiveThirtyEight: “The easiest way to undermine good science is to demand that it be made ‘sound.’”
| December 9, 2017 | Posted by News under Culture, Intelligent Design, Mind, Peer review |
From at Christie Anschwanden FiveThirtyEight: These are the arguments underlying an “open science” reform movement that was created, in part, as a response to a “reproducibility crisis” that has struck some fields of science.1 But they’re also used as talking points by politicians who are working to make it more difficult for the EPA and […]
Researchers ask: Do viruses share genes across the kingdoms of life?
| December 9, 2017 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Evolution, horizontal gene transfer |
Horizontal gene transfer on skates. Wow, re evolution. From ScienceDaily: A new study finds that viruses share some genes exclusively with cells that are not their hosts. The study, reported in the journal Frontiers in Microbiology, adds to the evidence that viruses swap genes with a variety of cellular organisms and are agents of diversity, […]
Philip Cunningham: Darwinism vs biological form
| December 8, 2017 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Evolution, Intelligent Design |
Notes: How Do Organisms Achieve Their Basic Form? That is to ask, how does a single fertilized egg become a elephant, a tiger, a human, or any of the numerous other kinds of animals or plants we see around us? “The earliest events leading from the first division of the egg cell to the […]
Boy can see without primary visual cortex of brain
| December 8, 2017 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, Mind, Naturalism |
From Alice Klein at NewScientist: An Australian boy missing the visual processing centre of his brain has baffled doctors by seeming to have near-normal sight. … However, BI has remarkably well-preserved vision, says Iñaki-Carril Mundiñano at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. “You wouldn’t think he is blind,” he says. “He navigates his way around without […]
What would Enrico (“if aliens exist, where are they?”) Fermi think of string theory?
| December 8, 2017 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Culture, Intelligent Design, Physics |
From David N.Schwartz, author of The Last Man Who Knew Everything: The Life and Times of Enrico Fermi, Father of the Nuclear Age, at NPR: Fermi’s contributions to physics were so broad ranging, his interests so wide, that he made a mark in virtually every area of the field. I find it irresistible to speculate what […]
Dutch origins of life centre will not make NASA’s mistake, will avoid theology
| December 8, 2017 | Posted by News under Culture, Intelligent Design, Origin Of Life, Religion, Science |
Suzan Mazur, author of Public Evolution Summit, writes at HuffPost that the principals of the Dutch Origins Center have pledged that with respect to involvement in theology, “We will not make the mistake NASA made.” … Several days later in Amsterdam, Origins Center coordinator Jan-Willem Mantel confirmed that theology is not part of the Dutch initiative. […]
Do we have sufficient in hand to decide what knowledge is not?
In the still active Knowledge thread, Mung asks at 224: “Do we have a sufficient number of examples yet to decide what knowledge is not?” This is sufficiently important to headline the response made at 225: KF: >>[W]e have both criteria anchored in experience and insight to define knowledge in a weaker and by extension […]
But maybe there was a universe before the Big Bang…
| December 7, 2017 | Posted by News under Big Bang, Cosmology, Intelligent Design |
From ScienceDaily: Although for five decades, the Big Bang theory has been the best known and most accepted explanation for the beginning and evolution of the Universe, it is hardly a consensus among scientists. Brazilian physicist Juliano Cesar Silva Neves part of a group of researchers who dare to imagine a different origin. In a […]
Study: We would be cool with finding aliens
| December 7, 2017 | Posted by News under Culture, Extraterrestrial life, Intelligent Design |
From Stephanie Pappas at LiveScience: A new study, one of very few of its kind, finds that people typically respond quite positively to the notion of life on other planets. The study investigated the possibility of finding microbial extraterrestrials, not intelligent E.T.s, so people’s responses might be a little different if they were told an […]
530-million-year-old Fossil Has Look of World’s Oldest Eye
| December 7, 2017 | Posted by PaV under Evolution |
A compound eye from the Cambrian Period showed up in a fossil. Here’s what the PR has to say: Professor Euan Clarkson, of the University of Edinburgh’s School of GeoSciences, said: “This exceptional fossil shows us how early animals saw the world around them hundreds of millions of years ago. Remarkably, it also reveals that […]
Would the discovery of ET change ethics?
| December 7, 2017 | Posted by News under Culture, Ethics, Extraterrestrial life, Intelligent Design, Mind |
From philosopher Tim Mulgan at Aeon: In academic philosophy today, an interest in extraterrestrial life is regarded with some suspicion. This is a historical anomaly. In Ancient Greece, Epicureans argued that every possible form of life must recur infinitely many times in an infinite universe. In the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, as modern astronomy […]
A tale from the decline of science journalism: Facts don’t matter
| December 7, 2017 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design |
From Alex Berezow at ACSH: — Recently, the website Undark, whose publisher is science writer Deborah Blum, published an op-ed by an environmental activist who told lies and half-truths about the safety of glyphosate. This was particularly striking because the website’s editorial team and advisory board have several high-profile names in science journalism, and the site’s […]
Free Speech Activist Lindsay Shepherd Does Not Teach At The Same WLU That I Attended 1967-1971
| December 7, 2017 | Posted by News under academic freedom, Culture, Off Topic |
The difference religion makes is not what you might expect. My response to “How a ‘pronoun’ class got a young Canadian academic censured ” by Harley J. Sim at MercatorNet: Readers may wish to supplement Harley Sims’s informative article with Mark Steyn’s commentary on the tape Shepherd dared to make (http://bit.ly/2j4yOnk) and the tape/transcript itself (http://bit.ly/2mMPvok). On […]
Left-wing mag slams Darwinism
| December 6, 2017 | Posted by News under Culture, Darwinism, Evolution, Intelligent Design |
From Kelly Wilkins at left-wing mag Counterpunch, an interesting take on Darwinism: One of the ways the media has shaped the public’s attitude concerning the distribution of wealth and power in our society, has been by the dissemination of a familiar but menacing ideology, an ideology which teaches that human success and failure is determined […]
