2011

In this episode, “Were Neandertals and Modern Humans Just Ships in the Night?”, Michael Balter (Science 9 May 2011) adds to the legends of the state of the, er, relationship between modern humans and Neanderthals: Read More ›

… the drunk looking for his keys under the lamppost (in connection with mathematics invading biology): There is another old joke, about a drunk searching under a lamp post for his keys. “Did you drop them here?” “No, but this is the only place where there’s enough light to look.” The original context, in Computer Power and Human Reason by Joseph Weizenbaum, was an analogy with science, and his point was the exact opposite of the usual interpretation of the joke. In science, you have to search under the lamp post, or you’ll never find anything. Even if the keys are somewhere along the road in the gutter, you might find a torch under the lamp post. Then you can Read More ›

In “The limits of knowledge: Things we’ll never understand” (New Scientist 09 May 2011), Michael Brooks offers to explain “From the machinery of life to the fate of the cosmos, what can’t science explain?”

We live in an age in which science enjoys remarkable success. We have mapped out a grand scheme of how the physical universe works on scales from quarks to galactic clusters, and of the living world from the molecular machinery of cells to the biosphere. There are gaps, of course, but many of them are narrowing. The scientific endeavour has proved remarkably fruitful, especially when you consider that our brains evolved for survival on the African savannah, not to ponder life, the universe and everything. So, having come this far, is there any stopping us?The answer has to be yes: there are limits to science. There are some things we can never know for sure because of the fundamental constraints of the physical world. Then there are the problems that we will probably never solve because of the way our brains work. And there may be equivalents to Rees’s observation about chimps and quantum mechanics – concepts that will forever lie beyond our ken.

So now we come up against the ultimate failure of materialism. Read More ›

Around 1959, the centenary year of he publication of the Origin, when neo-Darwinian triumphalism was at its height, a very astute philosopher named Marjorie Grene wrote an essay entitled “The Faith of Darwinists.” [Encounter 74 (November 1959), 48.] She observed that all the Darwinian books she had read violated a rule of logic by assuming the truth of what they were claiming to prove. And she was struck by how the theory of evolution can seem so certain to the Darwinian faithful, while being so obviously flawed to a philosopher on the outside like herself Little has changed in the past forty years. In fact, with the collapse of Marx and Freud, the intellectual establishment now clings to Darwinism with Read More ›

In Free to Think: Why Scientific Integrity Matters (2010), Expelled’s Caroline Crocker (p. xv) explains what you are getting for your overpriced science education, Darwin Catechism division – brand new icons of (Darwinian) evolution, and just as shoddy as the old ones:

In the fall of 2008 students taking Animal Biology, Genetics, Ecology ad General Biology at George Mason University, a state school in Virginia, reported fascinating classroom incidents to me that clearly demonstrate this entrenchment. First, the Peppered Moth story, an “icon of evolution” challenged by writer and scientist Jonathan Wells (PhD, Molecular and Cellular Biology, Berkeley” has now been replaced by the evolution of “hypothetical deer mice.” Similarly, the “evolution” of E. Coli, which was a favorite example for evolutionists but has stubbornly remained the same species despite over 100 years of experimentation, has now been replaced by evolution of the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV). Of course, the fact that HIV is a virus and that there is much discussion about whether viruses even qualify as being alive, was not mentioned. Read More ›

Steve Fuller, that sociologist who writes about ID as if getting things right mattered, has a new book coming out: In this challenging and provocative book, Steve Fuller contends that our continuing faith in science in the face of its actual history is best understood as the secular residue of a religiously inspired belief in divine providence. Our faith in science is the promise of a life as it shall be, as science will make it one day. Just as men once put their faith in God’s activity in the world, so we now travel to a land promised by science. In Science, Fuller suggests that the two destinations might be the same one.  [ … ] Science, argues Fuller, Read More ›

In The Language of Science and Faith Karl Giberson and Francis Collins admonish us,

Most working biologists today actually have little interest in Darwin himself, and few have read The Origin of Species. In fact, most scientists do not use the label “Darwinism” any longer. The modern theory of evolution has contributions from many scientists over the last 150 years and has become the core of biology. (P. 21)

Okay, but how about this from the Discovery Institute: “We’d love to take credit for Darwinism, but can’t.”:

A whole conference devoted to Darwin’s chronic illnesses: Read More ›

I don’t often find myself siding with a “Gnu Atheist” against one of their most brilliant critics – especially when the Gnu Atheist in question is none other than Professor Jerry Coyne, and the critic is Eastern Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart, the author of Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies who recently penned a biting online critique of the New Atheists entitled, Believe It or Not (First Things, May 2010). Readers will recall that on several occasions, I have written posts critical of Professor Coyne’s views, but this time I have to say that Coyne is right and Hart is wrong. It’s as simple as that. Hart’s errors, some of which relate to St. Augustine of Hippo (354-430 A.D.), exhibit the same kind of shoddy scholarship found in the writings of theistic evolutionists who cite Augustine in support of their views.

Regular readers of Uncommon Descent will be aware that David Bentley Hart is not a fan of Intelligent Design theory, which he disparaged as “an argument from personal incredulity” in a mostly positive review (First Things, January 2010) of Professor Richard Dawkins’ book The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution. When I read Hart’s review, I was disappointed at his failure to grasp the abductive logic which underlies the case for ID: the inference to intelligent design is only made after alternative explanations have been methodically ruled out. But in Hart’s defense, it might be argued that he was talking about matters outside his field of expertise.

This time, however, David Bentley Hart has been caught with his pants down, making several egregious blunders on matters relating to his own specialty: theology.
Read More ›

That’s the latest, as Kate Kelland (May 5, 2011) reports, in “Scientist seeks to banish evil, boost empathy”:

Baron-Cohen, who is also director of the Autism Research Centre at Cambridge, has just written a book in which he calls for a kind of rebranding of evil to offer a more scientific explanation for why people kill and torture, or have such great difficulty understanding the feelings of others.His proposal is that evil be understood as a lack of empathy — a condition he argues can be measured and monitored and is susceptible to education and treatment. Read More ›

Turns up as Heidelberg man. At MSNBC, Jennifer Viegas reports that (5/4/2011) “Heidelberg Man links humans, Neanderthals:

Study of 400,000-year-old fossil may shed light on what species looked like”:

The determination is based on the remains of a single Heidelberg Man (Homo heidelbergensis) known as “Ceprano,” named after the town near Rome, Italy, where his fossil — a partial cranium — was found.Previously, this 400,000-year-old fossil was thought to represent a new species of human, Homo cepranensis. The latest study, however, identifies Ceprano as being an archaic member of Homo heidelbergensis.

Down one species then.

The finding may shed light on what the species that gave rise to both Neanderthals and Homo sapiens looked like.

Caution, more tangles: Read More ›

Any “God” that can be believed in or not believed in is a trivialized notion of the divine, and certainly not what we’re discussing here. Like life, reality simply is – no matter what beliefs one may hold about its nature, purpose, direction, and so forth – is open for discussion, and differences among those choices are unresolvable. But who can deny that there is such a thing as “Reality as a whole” and that “God” is a legitimate and proper name for this ultimacy? The transparency of this point is surely one reason why, as I share this perspective across North American, it garners the assent of theists, atheists, agnostics, religious nontheists, pantheists, and panentheists alike.

– Michael Dowd, Thank GOD for EVOLUTION! (San Francisco/Tulsa: Council Oak Books, 2007). p. 123.

Hmmm. Read More ›

In “Scientists Think Spirituality Is Congruent With Scientific Discovery, Religion Is Not” Medical News Today (06 May 2011), we
learn,

More than 20 percent of atheist scientists are spiritual, according to new research from Rice University. Though the general public marries spirituality and religion, the study found that spirituality is a separate idea – one that more closely aligns with scientific discovery – for “spiritual atheist” scientists.

[ … ]

For example, these scientists see both science and spirituality as “meaning-making without faith” and as an individual quest for meaning that can never be final. According to the research, they find spirituality congruent with science and separate from religion, because of that quest; where spirituality is open to a scientific journey, religion requires buying into an absolute “absence of empirical evidence.”

This story encapsulates the cleverest riff that materialist atheists have ever constructed to deny the reality of the mind and substitute the notion that apes r’ us: Getting everyone to accept that  “faith is based on buying into an absolute ‘absence of empirical evidence.’” Countless Christian academics play house with materialist atheists, constructing “existential” theories about faith that gut the traditional “show me a sign” demand for evidence.

For years, I laboured as co-author of a book that fruitfully assumed the exact opposite. We found that: Read More ›

… King David was a mythical figure. And don’t know this:

In “The Birth & Death of Biblical Minimalism” (Biblical Archaeology Review, May/Jun 2011), Yosef Garfinkel notes,

In the mid-1980s the principal argument involved the dating of the final writing of the text of the Hebrew Bible. The minimalist school claimed then that it had been written only in the Hellenistic period, nearly 700 years after the time of David and Solomon, and that the Biblical descriptions were therefore purely literary.

[ … ]

For the minimalists, King David was “about as historical as King Arthur.”  The name David had never been found in an ancient inscription.

Hardly had the minimalist argument been developed than it was profoundly undermined by Read More ›

Will Provine, history of biology prof, has won the first-ever awarded David L. Hull Prize for

his “extraordinary contributions to scholarship and service in ways that promote interdisciplinary connections between history, philosophy, social studies and biology, and that foster the careers of younger scholars.” – Krishna Ramanujan, Cornell Chronicle May 4, 2011

Hull was a famous Darwinian evolutionist. In a world where Christian Darwinists struggle to convince Christians to jettison deeply held beliefs in order to embrace Darwin, Provine has done his best to tell the truth. To make clear that 78% of evolutionary biologists, following in Darwin’s footsteps, believe not only that there is no God but that there is no free will. Like himself.  Read More ›