Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

He said it: Jonah Goldberg on why media promote failed experts

Oft said before but bears repeating: Jonah Goldberg on the media role in the bunkum cult of the expert: There are no more devout members of the cult of expertise than mainstream journalists. They rely on experts for guidance about what is “mainstream” and accurate and what is not. Sometimes that’s fine. Surgeons are extremely reliable sources to explain how a heart attack happens. They’re not as reliable at telling you who will have one, save in a statistical sense, and even less reliable at telling you when a specific person will have one. That’s because prediction is hard. Experts — in politics, economics, climate — are very, very bad at telling people what will happen tomorrow, let alone next Read More ›

New Scientist discovers mindfulness – as if the mind exists

In fact, if New Scientist keeps on this way, they will make life difficult for UD News. They were always such a ready source of crackpot cosmologies and psychologies, and fevered Darwin cult crusades, etc. A break from the more demanding coverage of real science news, often welcomed. Read More ›
dominionism
The "dominionist" slanderous, turnabout false accusation

The real “Dominionists” — and nope, it’s not Canada!

The "dominionist" slanderous, turnabout false accusation

In recent weeks there has been yet another drum-beat talking-point on how Christians in public life are a menace to liberty and democracy.

For, through their faith in the God of the Bible, they are suspected to be morally monstrous followers of a barbaric bronze age god — NOT, and to thus be advancing a Christo-fascist, right-wing, totalitarian, theocracy. (Cf. also here, here.)

And of course, design theory is held to be the creationism- in- a- cheap- tuxedo front for this imagined nefarious Nazi-like agenda inspired by the likes of . . . the late Theologian-Philosopher Francis Schaeffer, who advocated for a new reformation of return to godly, sound reason in light of recognition of the reality of the God who is there, and who is not silent.  (And this echoes the titles of Schaeffer’s three key books: Escape from Reason, The God Who is There, and He is There and is Not Silent. Those who are so quick to trot out distorted talking points need to read and cogently respond to these books, first.)

This is yet another instance of the classic,  “he-hit-back first,” blame the intended victim, turn-speak, turn-about  false accusation — based on the trifecta rhetorical strategy of distraction from issues, willful and even slanderous distortion of people and movements, and demonisation —  so beloved of modern Big-Lie propagandists and their dupes; especially those of the Alinskyite Rules for Radicals school of praxis. Read More ›

“The universe is too big, too old and too cruel”: three silly objections to cosmological fine-tuning (Part Two)

In my previous post, I highlighted three common atheistic objections to to the cosmological fine-tuning argument. In that post, I made no attempt to answer these objections. My aim was simply to show that the objections were weak and inconclusive. Let’s go back to the original three objections: 1. If the universe was designed to support life, then why does it have to be so BIG, and why is it nearly everywhere hostile to life? Why are there so many stars, and why are so few orbited by life-bearing planets? (Let’s call this the size problem.) 2. If the universe was designed to support life, then why does it have to be so OLD, and why was it devoid of Read More ›

Meyer and Nelson on a Failed Explanation for the Origin of the Genetic Code

Ann Gauger has already drawn our attention to the new paper, published just last week, in the journal BIO-Complexity. Authored by Discovery Institute’s Stephen Meyer and Paul Nelson, the paper is concerned with the question of the origin of the genetic code, and seeks to evaluate the efficacy of the so-called Direct RNA Templating (DRT) hypothesis as an explanation for its origin. Click here to continue reading>>>

Gravity in Elfland

In a comment to my last post Dr. Torley notes that many scientists take the laws of nature as brute facts that “are ‘just there’ and cannot be changed.” According to Dr. Torley, “Scientists who take this view of Nature tend to fall into the intellectual trap of regarding the laws of Nature as necessary. In fact, they are nothing of the sort: they are totally contingent.” What does Dr. Torley mean that the laws of nature are “contingent”? To answer this question let us consider what we mean by the phrase “law of nature” (synonyms: “natural law,” “physical law,” and “mechanical necessity”). Wikipedia has a pretty good discussion of what the term means here. The Wiki article makes clear Read More ›

Losing no time staking his share of the Darwin-doubting vote, Ron Paul says, I don’t accept the theory of evolution

Conceivably, he doesn’t realize it but the bar right now is not set at what the candidate believes, but at whether he is willing to stand up to the Darwin lobby’s claim of exclusive rights to public goods and services, and compulsory access to students in school, and none others allowed. Read More ›

Irreducible complexity is all around us

I gave a talk at the beginning of this year to a group of students at Biola University [1].  In the talk I described just how revolutionary ID is compared to the current scientific paradigm of chance and necessity.  But, such a talk is likely to go over students heads if there aren’t concrete examples.  How could I show them everyday instances of intelligent agents creating information?  Then it struck me just how pervasive the notion of irreducible complexity is.  Just about everything we make as humans is a form of irreducible complexity.  All the machinery and technology of our modern lives are very evidently irreducibly complex, especially considering how often we have to repair them…But we can see irreducible Read More ›