2010

Will Provine is scheduled to do two debates at Grace Community Church. The first debate will be March 12th, and the second March 13th.

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DEBATE 002: “Flight in birds and bats: Is evolution or creation the best guide?”

(Provine vs. McIntosh)

Birds and bats have very specialized characteristics that make the phenomena of flight possible. What is the ultimate source of those physical characteristics? Is naturalistic evolution the best guide for understanding flight, or does flight indicate the design of a Creator?

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Evolution, say evolutionists, is both fact and theory. It is a fact in the sense that we know it occurred. It is a theory in the sense that we don’t know how it occurred. The theory part seems obvious enough. The biological evidence reveals many problems for evolution and so we don’t know how it could have occurred. But if we don’t know how it occurred, how is it that we know that it did occur?  Read more

It is amazing what evolutionists say when confronted with their own words. Perhaps the most consistent claim of evolutionists is that evolution is a fact. For centuries evolutionary thinkers have been making high truth claims, and the evolution-is-fact claim is now standard in the literature. But when confronted with this claim in light of the facts of biology which contradict their idea, evolutionists retort that you don’t understand the concept of a “fact.” But what is there not to understand? Evolutionists say their idea is a fact as much as is gravity. It is beyond a shadow of a doubt, and it would be perverse to doubt it.  Read more

There are two kinds of evolutionists: Those who deny the massive convergence in biology, and those who deny the implications of the massive convergence in biology. Let me explain. The similarities between species are one of the favorite evidences of evolutionist’s. They argue these similarities, sometimes striking, reveal the underlying evolutionary pathways. There’s only one problem: Striking similarities also show up in patterns that cannot be ascribed to common descent. In fact, such convergences are abundant in biology. But you would hardly know it from talking to evolutionists who say the species form a neat common descent pattern. Yes, they do fit a neat common descent pattern with the data are pre filtered according to the neat common descent pattern. Read More ›

Winston Ewert, George Montañez, William A. Dembski, Robert J. Marks II, “Efficient Per Query Information Extraction from a Hamming Oracle,” Proceedings of the the 42nd Meeting of the Southeastern Symposium on System Theory, IEEE, University of Texas at Tyler, March 7-9, 2010, pp.290-297. Abstract: Abstract—Computer search often uses an oracle to determine the value of a proposed problem solution. Information is extracted from the oracle using repeated queries. Crafting a search algorithm to most efficiently extract this information is the job of the programmer. In many instances this is done using the programmer’s experience and knowledge of the problem being solved. For the Hamming oracle, we have the ability to assess the performance of various search algorithms using the currency Read More ›

Richard Dawkins on Australian TV waxes lyrical on science and religion, morality, the cross of Christ and the afterlife.

SCIENCE AND RELIGION

RICHARD DAWKINS: The implication you make is that there’s something about religion which is personal and upon which evidence doesn’t have any bearing. Now, as I scientist I care passionately about the truth. I think that the existence of a supreme being – a supernatural supreme being – is a scientific issue. Either there is a God or there isn’t. Either there are gods or there are no gods. That is a scientific issue. Yes, it’s a supremely important scientific question. If the universe was created by an intelligence, then we are looking at an entirely different kind of scientific theory than if the universe came into existence by natural means. If God or gods had something to do with the creation of life, then we’re looking at a totally different kind of biology.

So I think you can’t just say religion and science have nothing to do with each other. Science can get on and you let people have their own religious – of course you let people believe whatever they like. But you cannot say that science and religion are completely separate because religion makes scientific claims. It certainly makes scientific claims about miracles, and you cannot reconcile an authentic approach to science with a belief in miracles or, I suspect, with a belief in supernatural creation. At least the very least you should say is that this is a scientific question. Read More ›

Religious doctrinaire PZ Myers claims there is no religion in evolution. That was after he said he believed god wouldn’t make this world, and before he ridiculed a journalist for believing in miracles. But after seeing Paul Nelson and Ronald Numbers discuss the issue, Myers reveals he is deeply in denial:  Read more

According to this story from Fox News a huge battle about changes in public school curriculum is looming in the Lone Star State and will have major ramifications for textbooks around the U.S. Fox reporter Brent Baier will be airing a report on the 6pm news tonight on Fox as well. The story includes a video with Shannon Bream interviewing a panel of parents on the issue as well. The first parent (I believe her name is Hannah) got it exactly right when she referred to evolution as an hypothesis and that children should learn that scientists work to prove or disprove an hypothesis. It’ll be interesting to see the reaction of the Darwinists to this story.

Evolution, the theory that natural processes created all life, is mandated by the religious belief that God would not have created our world. Ironically, a belief about God underwrites a theory that, as Richard Dawkins put it, “made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.” But historians have seen this before. Alan Charles Kors, for example, found that eighteenth century French atheism had come from the church and its culture. Kors wrote:  Read more

I realized after my previous post about Academic Freedom legislation that I did not mention why it is that I care about the ability for teachers to “teach the controversy”.

I have been told by several research leaders that any attempt to change curriculum, or do anything with public schools, is a Bad Idea™. I understand where they are coming from. But let me tell you my personal story, and why it leads me to think that biological science itself needs the controversy to be taught.
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One endless discussion that always happens with the proposal of academic freedom bills in state legislatures is that the Darwin camp always says that they are about introducing religion into science classrooms. Even if the bill says, “this does not permit anyone to introduce religion into the classrooms,” the pro-Darwin crowd somehow misses this clause, or thinks that judges interpret bills based on the “secret agenda” of those proposing them, rather than the actual language of the bill. I think a better way of settling this, is to formally define what constitutes legitimate scientific discussion in a science class. I think that there is, at least for biology, a perfectly reasonable reposity of standard information – Pubmed. Pubmed is run Read More ›

In the early seventeenth century a courageous and brilliant scientist, Galileo Galileo, confirmed heliocentrism, the idea first proposed a century earlier by Nicolaus Copernicus that the sun was at the center of the universe. Heliocentrism challenged geocentrism, the religiously motivated idea that a stationary earth was at the center of the universe. Galileo explained why heliocentrism was true and not surprisingly the church strongly opposed and persecuted the scientist. Ultimately, however, the truth could not be denied and church was forced to, once again, reluctantly give in to the objective truths of science.  Read more

I see where Discovery Institute has put up a podcast with me, on “Is the Brain Just an Illusion? This must be one of the ones I did in Seattle in 2007, when they asked me to come and explain the book. What I always ask is, “If the brain or the mind are an illusion, whose illusion are they?” This question is modelled on the Jewish zen: “If the mind is an illusion, whose arthritis is this?” On this episode of ID The Future, Anika Smith interviews science writer Denyse O’Leary about her book, The Spiritual Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Case for the Existence of the Soul. In the book O’Leary and her co-author Mario Beaurogard, neuroscientist and Associate Professor Read More ›

Bernard d’Abrera is a world-class lepidopterist who writes books that are largely about butterflies but also provide him a springboard for critiquing the sham that is Darwinism and also for promoting intelligent design. Below is a post that appeared here at UncommonDescent in 2005 on the first book that he was kind enough to send me (please read the review of that book linked to my designinference website). Just recently I received his latest, Butterflies of the Afrotropical Regions, Part III. As with all his books, the typesetting and photography (all his own) are superb. The really fun part for me, however, is the introductory material, where he goes after Darwin, Dawkins, the Smithsonian, and other assorted villains. This newest Read More ›

Several factors are combining to increase belief (of the “faith” variety, not the “demonstrated fact” variety) in the multiverse among materialists. Two of these factors are relevant to ID at the biological and cosmological levels. At the biological level materialists are beginning to understand that the probability that life arose by random material processes is so low (estimated in this article written by materialists to be 10 raised to -1018) that infinite universes are required for it to have occurred, the implication being that we just happen to live in the ever-so-lucky universe where it all came together. At the cosmological level, the probability that the fine tuning of the universe necessary for the existence of life arose by sheer coincidence is Read More ›