From a Science article by Elizabeth Pain (February 20, 2009): Szilágyi sees his religious faith and his research efforts as two complementary aspects of his life. Within the scientific environment, “I have some options where I can express my faith,” Szilágyi says. He directly referred to God both in the acknowledgements of his master’s and doctoral dissertations and while receiving his awards. He runs a Bible-study group for young adults, and together with a friend he founded a Christian scientific group. But although Szilágyi’s views often lie far outside the scientific mainstream, he expresses those views only off-campus and in his personal time. For him, “the debate over evolution, design, creation, supernatural intelligence, etc., is not a scientific question in Read More ›

ScienceBlogs has just posted what can only be called a rant (go here) against the paper by Robert Marks and me that was the subject of a post here at UD (for the paper, “Life’s Conservation Law,” go here; for the UD post, go here). According to ScienceBlogs, the paper fails (or as they put it, “it’s stupid”) because (1) As a search, evolution is a multidimensional search. Most of our intuitions about search landscapes is based on two or three dimensions. But evolution as a landscape has hundreds or thousands of dimensions; our intuitions don’t work. (2) Evolution is a dynamic landscape – that is, a landscape that changes in response to the progress of the search. Pretty much Read More ›

Evolutionary explanations to resist — For ease of conversation, I here define a “threat” as a macro-evolutionary explanation that inherently threatens the successful communication of the biotic message. (I do not mean threat in any other sense.) Evolutionary explanations are not all equal. Some are more potent at explaining-away data; some are limited in scope; some are weak; and some are unscientific. In other words, some evolutionary explanations are more threatening than others. There is some tension between the three design-goals claimed in Message Theory, so tradeoffs must be made in order to approach an optimal solution. Message Theory claims life’s design should resist a given evolutionary explanation in proportion to the threat it poses. If a given evolutionary explanation Read More ›

 This is Contest Question 2 for the Uncommon Descent Earn free stuff contest: “Iowa Professors Mobilize Against Measure on Teaching Alternatives to Evolution” by Peter Schmidt (February 26, 2009): More than 200 faculty members at 20 Iowa colleges have signed a statement opposing a proposed state law that would give instructors at public colleges and schools a legal right to teach alternatives to evolution. Well, these were the folks who drove out gifted astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez. You must pay for the article, and I do not recommend that. We’ve all pretty much heard it all already. Instead, for a free copy of Gonzalez’s Privileged Planet DVD, go to Uncommon Descent and answer this question: Why does Guillermo Gonzalez’s view that Earth Read More ›

MSNBC commentator Chris Matthews goes after Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN) on Science.

PENCE: Do I believe in evolution? I embrace the view that God created the heavens and the earth, the seas and all that’s in them, and —
MATTHEWS: (interrupting) Right, but you believe in evolution from the beginning.
PENCE: The means, Chris, that He used to do that, I can’t say, but I do believe —
MATTHEWS: (interrupting) You can’t what?
PENCE: — in that fundamental truth.
MATTHEWS: Well — well did you take biology? (screaming) Did you take biology in school? Did you take science, which is all based on evolutionary belief and assumption?
PENCE: Well, I’ve always wanted to —
MATTHEWS: (screaming) If your party is to be credible on science, you’ve gotta accept science. Do you?
PENCE: Yeah, I want to —
MATTHEWS: Accept science?

[youtube KsMGvvUyNDE] Read More ›

This is  Contest Question 1 for Earn Free Stuff: Does the multiverse help science make sense – or simply destroy science? To help you decide, here’s a classic pop science article by Anil Ananthaswamy of New Scientist, fronting the multiverse: Today’s measurements show the universe to be flat, but the uncertainty in those measurements still leaves room for space-time to be slightly curved – either like a saddle (negatively curved) or like a sphere (positively curved). “If we originated from a tunnelling event from an ancestor vacuum, the bet would be that the universe is negatively curved,” says Susskind. “If it turns out to be positively curved, we’d be very confused. That would be a setback for these ideas, no Read More ›

Professor Walter Bradley, Distinguished Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Baylor University, has spoken on every major campus in North America concerning “Scientific Evidence for the Existence of God.”  Here is a shortened version of the talk he gave in March at ORU .  When introduced, reference is made to Bradley’s “The Mystery Of Life’s Origin” which is available online at http://themysteryoflifesorigin.org/ . Because the venue is appropriate, Dr. Bradley talks of his Christian faith.  There are three parts. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GWYHVgg3XI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74LepQDrB4g http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMNW5jon6cc

Recall this post by Bill Dembski, August 31, 2006 where Bill pointed out how A.N. Wilson railed against the ID proponents in Kansas and labeled them Morons.

A.N. Wilson Skewered — it couldn’t happen to a nicer credulous moron!

A. N. Wilson, the epitomy of English snootiness, recently fell for an elaborate prank that he could have avoided if he had drawn a design inference. Note that Eve de Harben doesn’t exist either, and the letters in “her” name are an anagram for “Ever been had?”

Why am I being so hard on Wilson? Here’s what he wrote back in 1999 about the good people of Kansas: “Their simple, idiotic credulity as a populace would have been the envy of Lenin. That is the tragic paradox. The Land of the Free, telly and burgerfed, has become the Land of the Credulous Moron.” (go here and scroll down) What goes around comes around.

–Bill Dembski

But what now, April 2, 2009, Can you love god and agree with Darwin?

The Descent of Man, with its talk of savages, its belief that black people are more primitive than white people, and much nonsense besides, is an offence to the intelligence – and is obviously incompatible with Christianity.

I think the jury is out about whether the theory of Natural selection, as defined by neo-Darwinians is true, and whether serious scientific doubts, as expressed in a new book Why Us by James Lefanu, deserve to be taken seriously. For example, does the discovery of the complex structure of DNA and the growth in knowledge in genetics require a rethink of Darwinian “gradualism”. But these are scientific rather than religious questions.

–A.N. Wilson

Read More ›

Here at UD we’ve heard over and over again that unless we “know” who the Designer is, then we can’t infer design. For example, if we were to argue that we’ve never seen the ancient Native Americans who fashioned arrowheads from stone, yet we are able to infer design in arrowheads nonetheless, the Darwinian side would respond saying, “Yes, but that’s because the Native Americans are humans like ourselves.” PhysOrg.com has an article about the microRNA, miR-7, which has been found to regulate a network which brings about uniformity among humans. The article is interesting in itself, but most interesting is this comment by one of the lead authors, Richard W. Carthew: When something is changed, say the genetic sequence Read More ›

Every now and again it’s good to remind ourselves of just how misguided methodological naturalism is. It is a straitjacket whose donning we wisely decline. Yet many outfitters urge the contrary. Some, like Francis Collins, thinks that it’s de rigueur for science but that it poses no obstacle to religious belief. Barbara Forrest begs to differ: The relationship between methodological naturalism and philosophical [metaphysical] naturalism, although not that of logical entailment, is not such that philosophical naturalism is a mere logical possibility.” In “Methodological Naturalism and Philosophical Naturalism: Clarifying the Connection” Philo, Vol. 3, No. 2, 2000, p. 7. But if Forrest is correct, then methodological naturalism has religious implications (or anti-religious implications, which are the same thing), in which Read More ›

In a comment to a prior post vjtorley responds to Beelzebub (presumably not THE Beelzebub) with a nice cogent summary of the grounds for believing in a personal God. I think it deserves its own post, so here it is:

Beelzebub writes:

Hart presumably considers the non-contingent ground of being to be the Christian God. This in itself seems to be an unwarranted assumption. Why must existence be underwritten by a god at all, much less the specific personal God of the Christians?

vjtorley responds:

I take it that by “god” you mean a personal being of some sort. Very briefly (and please remember this is just a bare-bones outline), the main lines of argument that have been adduced for believing in a personal God are as follows: Read More ›

In “The Secular Inquisition”, Melanie Phillips writes (Spectator, May 4, 2009),

I am an agnostic if traditionally-minded Jew; not a scientist, not a philosopher, not a subscriber to any kind of -ology but a mere journalist who has always gone wherever the evidence has led and, trying not to make too many mistakes, has formed her conclusions and her opinions from that process.

I hold no particular brief for ID, but am intrigued by the ideas it raises and want it to be given a fair crack of the whip to see where the argument will lead. What I have also seen, however, is an attempt to shut down that argument by distorting and misrepresenting ID and defaming and intimidating its proponents.

Well, yes, of course. But if makes perfect sense to me, because I have been covering this controversy extensively for about seven years now.

I can explain it really simply: Read More ›

Apparently, under a new Alberta (a Canadian province) law, evolution classes will be optional. (Evolution classes optional under proposed Alberta law, CBC, April 30, 2009). Frank Bruseker, the head of the Alberta Teachers’ Association, is meeting with Hancock on Monday to raise his concerns. “If parents don’t want that kind of education for their children they have a couple of options,” Bruseker said. “One would be home schooling or private school. So for a public school to start excluding based on religious preference, I think is a mistake.” Bruseker said it would be difficult for teachers to avoid the topic of evolution in science or geography classes. Okay, let’s set the record straight here. This is self-exclusion, not exclusion by Read More ›

Here, Tribune asks “What problem does Collins have with ID,” in response to my post on his new venture BioLogos, “US government genome mapper Francis Collins fronts new BioLogos theory, preferred to “theistic evolution””

Well, first, truth in advertising, I have written three reviews of Collins’s book, The Language of God, two of which were quite favourable, and the third more thoughtful and critical. The first two merely recommend to book as suitable for a student at Christmas, for example, and I would stand by that. If the student comes home raving that he is an atheist because all scientists are, well, Collins thinks otherwise, is famous, and is an easy read.

But while Collins is an outstanding geneticist, I don’t find him a deep thinker in these matters. So I am not sure how fruitful it would be to worry about what bothers him individually about ID, in an age when even an atheist like Bradley Monton thinks ID discussable and another atheist, Thomas Nagel, thinks ID discussable in schools.* Read More ›