August 2011

Apparently.

Ian Binns, a science education researcher at Louisiana StateUniversity, told Science that a law such as Louisiana’s, which misdescribes established scientific theories such as evolution as controversial, “tells our students and teachers that there are problems that there aren’t” and distort their understanding of the nature of science;
NCSE’s Joshua Rosenau added, “Science is not about providing balance to every viewpoint that’s out there.” NCSE is now monitoring controversies over the teaching of climate change as well as controversies over the teaching of evolution, but the scope of the problem is as yet unclear; as Rosenau explained, “Just like with evolution, it’s difficult to know what a given teacher in a given classroom is teaching.” Read More ›

Or, why is Michael Shermer so selectively skeptical? As a software engineer I think in powers of two (and in French on occasion, just like David Berlinski, a secular Jew, with whom I had a wonderful conversation in French at BIOLA when his book, The Devil’s Delusion, was first released). But I digress. Click here for a discussion about the “Who designed the designer?” debate. There is a very simple answer to this question. If time came into existence at the birth of the universe, its cause transcends time. It therefore has no past (a quality of time), and therefore no history. That which has no history has no point of origin, and therefore no designer. But the real question Read More ›

Progress in an Internet Debate!  Who Woulda Thunk it Possible?

Barry asks Ms. Liddle:  “If you were to receive a radio signal from outer space that specified the prime numbers between 1 and 100 would you conclude (provisionally pending the discovery a better theory, of course) that the best theory to account for the data is “the signal was designed and sent by an intelligent agent?”

Ms. Liddle responds:  “Yes. And I’ve explained why.”

The first part of Ms. Liddle’s response is easy to understand.  “Yes.”  The second part, not so much, because she had never conceded this point before, I don’t know where she would have explained previously why she conceded it.  Nevertheless, we have made progress of a sort. 

Ms. Liddle agrees that the best theory to account for the data is “the signal was designed and sent by an intelligent agent?”

The important thing to keep in mind is that when she made her quite correct design inference, Ms. Liddle knew nothing about the provenance of the pattern embedded in the signal.  In other words, the only possible basis upon which Ms. Liddle could have made her design inference was the pattern itself — and nothing else. Read More ›

And it’s all just an accident, remember:

Apart from all the exploded/explosible Darwin nonsense, there’s the social problem.

Anyone who studies design in nature will have heard it a million times, usually from theistic Darwinists: “Identifying design in life forms is risky to faith because once we find out how it really happened, your faith will be diminished. Protect your faith by assuming that God played no direct role.” Yes, but what if

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From “Escaping Gravity’s Clutches: Information Could Escape from Black Holes After All, Study Suggests” (ScienceDaily, Aug. 11, 2011), we learn:

Conventional thinking asserts that black holes swallow everything that gets too close and that nothing can escape, but a new study suggests that information could escape from black holes after all.

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In a recent comment in a thread discussing his/her claim that ID in inferring design of first life must either face an infinite regress or else tries to explain first life by a self-contradiction [first life from prior life and/or from non-living intelligence], design theory objector FG (in ducking out of further discussion) says:

Barry and I have discovered that we are in agreement that his particular ID argument should only be used on things we can directly observe. It should not be used to answer questions about first life, since we can’t directly observe and investigate this first life.

Limiting the use of his argument in this way takes away my specific objection that triggered this thread.

Of course, the above seems to be a probably inadvertent distortion of what BA has been saying in several threads over the past week.

But what is highly significant lies in its immediate and onward implications: namely, that design theory if it is so constrained cannot properly address either origin of life or of body plans, for neither of these are amenable to direct observation. Oddly enough, FG seems unaware that the whole project of origins science is an exploration of the remote, unobserved past — indeed the unobservable past — on traces and patterns we do observe in the present. So, if the above criterion were consistently applied, we would have to surrender all claims to scientific knowledge of the deep past of origins.

In short, the objection is patently, even trivially,  selectively hyperskeptical.

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Eric Anderson writes: “Darwinists regularly admit [the physical systems we see in life] look designed and they have to keep reminding themselves that they aren’t designed.” Elizabeth Liddle writes later in the same thread: “…by intelligence I mean the power and facility to choose between options–this coincides with the Latin etymology of “intelligence,” namely, “to choose between”which is much more precise, but which would in fact include evolutionary processes” And Upright BiPed asks: “Which evolutionary process has the facility to make a choice between alternate options?” And Barry sums up: Ms. Liddle forgot to remind herself that she cannot use teleological language in a literal sense. Sometimes I wonder if the entire Darwinist program is built on nothing but linguistic Read More ›

From “Darkest Known Exoplanet: Alien World Is Blacker Than Coal” (ScienceDaily (Aug. 12, 2011) we learn:

Astronomers have discovered the darkest known exoplanet — a distant, Jupiter-sized gas giant known as TrES-2b. Their measurements show that TrES-2b reflects less than one percent of the sunlight falling on it, making it blacker than coal or any planet or moon in our solar system.

“It’s not clear what is responsible for making this planet so extraordinarily dark,” stated co-author David Spiegel of Princeton University. “However, it’s not completely pitch black. It’s so hot that it emits a faint red glow, much like a burning ember or the coils on an electric stove.”

Cool. No, hot. But seriously, Read More ›