At Philosophy Now, Christopher Norris offers more evidence that Stephen Hawking should either take courses in philosophy or refrain from commenting on its supposed uselessness: Stephen Hawking recently fluttered the academic dovecotes by writing in his new book The Grand Design – and repeating to an eager company of interviewers and journalists – that philosophy as practised nowadays is a waste of time and philosophers a waste of space. More precisely, he wrote that philosophy is ‘dead’ since it hasn’t kept up with the latest developments in science, especially theoretical physics. [ … ]Predictably enough the journalists went off to find themselves media-friendly philosophers – not hard to do nowadays – who would argue the contrary case in a suitably Read More ›

Elsevier has just published Granville Sewell’s “A Second Look at the Second Law” (Applied Mathematics Letters, June 2011): ABSTRACT: It is commonly argued that the spectacular increase in order which has occurred on Earth does not violate the second law of thermodynamics because the Earth is an open system, and anything can happen in an open system as long as the entropy increases outside the system compensate the entropy decreases inside the system. However, if we define ‘‘X-entropy’’ to be the entropy associated with any diffusing component X (for example, X might be heat), and, since entropy measures disorder, ‘‘X-order’’ to be the negative of X-entropy, a closer look at the equations for entropy change shows that they not only Read More ›

From Tina Hesman Saey, “Helpful Mutations Didn’t Sweep Through Early Humans”, Wired Science (February 18, 2011) we learn Humans probably didn’t get swept up in evolution.Scientists have favored a model of evolution in which beneficial gene mutations quickly and dramatically sweep through a population due to the evolutionary advantages they confer. Such mutations would become nearly universal in a population. But this selective sweep model may not be accurate for humans, a new study indicates. Human evolution likely followed a more subtle and complicated path, say population geneticists Molly Przeworski of the University of Chicago and Guy Sella of Hebrew University of Jerusalem and colleagues. [ … ] Good evidence does exist for some mutations that did undergo selective sweeps Read More ›

Further to Templeton Foundation’s attempts to make nice with Darwinists and where it gets them, Jerry “the inimitable” Coyne comments further on his anti-Templeton, no-accommodation-between-science-and-religion opinions stated there – strongly endorsing same opinions. He asks a darn good question too, “[W]hat the bloody hell does “progress in spirituality” mean?” Ah, a question I can answer. The classical spiritual direction literature on this subject is formidable, but one might usefully start with John of the Cross. However, where Templeton is concerned, the phrase probably means more grant applicants offering increasingly scrooier projects. By the way, Coyne’s combox is quite the little hatefest, I see. If you ever wondered whether new atheists like each other, have a brief look. It’s harmful to Read More ›

Online here: This point is crucial: If there is not a smooth, gradually rising, easily found evolutionary pathway leading to a biological system within a reasonable time, Darwinian processes won’t work. In this book we’ll examine just how demanding a requirement that is. (pg. 7) No wonder that guy Behe had to be sidelined and disinvited.

This from the Onion to start your day: Anthropologists Trace Human Origins Back To One Large Goat ‘Wait, That Can’t Be Right,’ Scientists Say FEBRUARY 17, 2011 | ISSUE 47•07 As their colleagues huddled together and whispered behind them, researchers from Australia and Japan explained how one 6-foot-tall goat with a hominid skeletal structure spawned numerous goat-human hybrids over a period of 1.8 million years. In a series of PowerPoint slides, they then showed that our ancestors used their prehensile upper lips to perform basic agricultural tasks and stomped out crude pottery with their cloven feet, theories that team members stopped reading aloud to the assembled audience almost immediately after reaching the words “cloven feet.” “Okay, so I’m reading this Read More ›

In the March edition of Scientific American, Gary Stix will explain The Neuroscience of True GritWhen tragedy strikes, most of us ultimately rebound surprisingly well. Where does such resilience come from? Scientific American New Issue Alert here. Prediction: Reading this will tell us a laudable amount of neuroscience and a little about true grit. The latter is difficult to quantify because it is, if you like, a psychological wave function. What caused the Romanian rebellion against Ceaucescu to spread from street to street, after decades of the iron rod? What caused the Montgomery bus boycott, after decades of passive acceptance of segregation? What causes an abuse victim to finally have “had enough” and start fighting back? Multiple causes, to be Read More ›

(crossfiled to Shut up, you losers, and just pay) About the latest “origin of religion” book, Damon Linker writes, The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny, and the Meaning of Life by Jesse Bering W.W. Norton & Company, 252 pp., $26.95 Who will save science from the scientists? I often ponder that question when I peruse the writings of evolutionary psychologists—and did so once again as I read Jesse Bering’s new book, which is at once marvelously informative and endlessly infuriating. [ … ] The first thing to be said about this account is that it is an example of evolutionary psychology at its very worst: shifting abruptly between experimental data about modern civilized human beings and groundless speculation Read More ›

If your boss has been called into a meeting, have a look at this: DARWIN, DESIGN & THOMAS AQUINAS The Mythical Conflict Between Thomism & Intelligent Design by Logan Paul Gage Excerpt: In a typical discussion of Darwinian evolution, Christian philosophy, and intelligent design, one is likely to hear that St. Thomas had no problem with secondary causes operating in nature and that St. Augustine knew that the Bible is “not a science textbook.” Both of these assertions are true, as far as they go. But unfortunately, such platitudes only obscure deeper sources of tension between Darwinism and Thomistic thought. Here I would like to explore three intimately related sources of tension: the problem of essences, the problem of transformism, Read More ›

Here is a pdf of that famous article.

Some years back, ID critic Dave Thomas used to tout the power of genetic algorithms for their ability of solve the Steiner Problem, which basically tries to minimize distance of paths that connect nodes on a two-dimensional surface (last I looked, he’s still making this line of criticism — see here). In fact, none of his criticisms hit the mark — the information problem that he claims to resolve in evolutionary terms merely pushes the design problem deeper, as the peer-reviewed research at the Evolutionary Informatics Lab makes clear (go to the publications page there). Now here’s an interesting twist: Colonies of ants, when they make tracks from one colony to another minimize path-length and thereby also solve the Steiner Problem (see Read More ›

“’Thinking caps’ are pseudoscience masquerading as neuroscience” (Guardian, 2011 Feb 16), neuroscientist Chris Chambers and colleagues charge, and they feed a growing academic obsession with sound bites and impact: Anyone who has followed recent media reports that electrical brain stimulation “sparks bright ideas” or “unshackles the genius within” could be forgiven for believing that we stand on the frontier of a brave new world. As James Gallagher of the BBC put it, “Are we entering the era of the thinking cap – a device to supercharge our brains?” The answer, we would suggest, is a categorical no. Such speculations begin and end in the colourful realm of science fiction. But we are also in danger of entering the era of Read More ›

My good friend Frank Turek is organizing a conference for training apologetics instructors this August. The dates have just been nailed down and I’ll be speaking there on, what else, ID. Frank’s best known book, co-authored with Norm Geisler, is I DON’T HAVE ENOUGH FAITH TO BE AN ATHEIST. It’s an insightful and fun book. ID is clearly a factor here in undermining faith in atheism. For conference details, go here.

The recently released Religion Versus Science: Where Both Sides Go Wrong in the Great Evolution Debate, by Buddhist University of Wyoming geology prof Ron Frost offers, In Religion Versus Science Frost posits that the big mistake creationists make is to attack the evolutionary facts rather than the materialistic way that these facts are used to describe evolution. His goal in this remarkable book is to present a view of evolution that will be compatible with both the scientific evidence for evolution and the core teachings of the world’s major religions.After studying and practicing Buddhism for over twenty-five years, Frost became very aware that aspects of his mind occurred from outside his ego. He realized that acceptance of a transcendent aspect Read More ›

In part 1 of this series, I laid out what I see as some key differences between Thomism and ID. In this post I want to focus on why Thomists should nevertheless support ID – even while granting some or all of the most common criticisms Thomists have of ID.

In order to do that, though, I’m going to have to be a little hair-splitting – particularly, I want to explain just what I mean by “support ID”. I think there’s a few ways this “support” can manifest – some easier to achieve than others, and some harder.

Read More ›