Bit of both. Neuroskeptic offers:

In the spirit of the 9 Circles of Scientific Hell, and inspired by the evidence showing that scientific peer reviewers agree only slightly more often than they would by chance, here’s a handy tool for randomly generating your review.

How’s this one:

4. Cite Me, Me, Me!: The problem with this paper is that it doesn’t reference the right previous work… yours. Unless the authors change it to cite everything you’ve written in the past 10 years, they can get lost. If they do, the paper will be immediately accepted – to reject it would harm your citation count.

Some readers may wish to try it on their work in progress or on this week’s grocery flyer.

Hat tip: Stephanie West Allen at Brains on Purpose

More peer review stories: Read More ›

And perhaps deserves, like his patron, to be called a theist. This series of 2011 Christian Darwinist events, hosted by Rev. Michael Dowd, landed in my mailbox. The press release for the 2011 events informs, The six-part series on EvolutionaryChristianity.com will explore what it means to be Christian in a myth-busting age of scientific discovery. Guests will include prominent, and often controversial, Christians, such as: Professor Ken Miller, co-author of the most widely-used biology textbook in America, and lead witness in the Dover ‘intelligent design’ trial. Karl Giberson, vice president of the BioLogos Foundation, an organization that helps conservative Christians integrate their faith with contemporary science. Brian McLaren, a pastor named by Time magazine as one of America’s 25 most Read More ›

Satan trapped in the ice at the centre of Earth, Wiki Commons I wonder if, some time, we could give out a flat earth award for people who heedlessly state that “In the Middle Ages, people thought the Earth was flat.” Maybe we could call it the Eratosthenes Award, after the 3rd century BCE Greek who estimated the circumference of Earth: He knew the approximate distance between Syene [Aswan] and Alexandria, as measured by camel-powered trade caravans. He then measured the angle of the shadow in Alexandria on the solstice. By taking the angle of the shadow (7̊12′) and dividing it into the 360 degrees of a circle (360 divided by 7.2 yields 50), Eratosthenes could then multiply the distance Read More ›

We have all heard of the NCSE, but the National Science Teachers Association [of the US], NSTA, has proposed a new definition of the nature of science, in a declaration signed off by its Board of Directors, as long ago as July, 2000.  Excerpting: All those involved with science teaching and learning should have a common, accurate view of the nature of science. Science is characterized by the systematic gathering of information through various forms of direct and indirect observations and the testing of this information by methods including, but not limited to, experimentation. The principal product of science is knowledge in the form of naturalistic concepts and the laws and theories related to those concepts . . . . Read More ›

Imagine that you have been falsely accused of a crime. The police department has identified you as the prime suspect and they are busy gathering as much evidence against you as possible. They have constructed a theory of your motivations and actions, and as they gather the evidence they interpret it according to their theory. Their process of working from a preconceived notion of your guilt leads the police investigators to explain even ambiguous or contradictory evidence in ways that support their theory. And so it is the theory that is informing the evidence, rather than the evidence informing the theory. As crazy as it sounds, this approach is standard for evolutionists and here are three recent examples dealing with Read More ›

Cosmologist Paul Davies suggested, in a recent essay (“Is Anybody Out There?” Wall Street Journal (April 10, 2010), another way of finding space aliens: Another physical object with enormous longevity is DNA. Our bodies contain some genes that have remained little changed in 100 million years. An alien expedition to Earth might have used biotechnology to assist with mineral processing, agriculture or environmental projects. If they modified the genomes of some terrestrial organisms for this purpose, or created their own micro-organisms from scratch, the legacy of this tampering might endure to this day, hidden in the biological record. Which leads to an even more radical proposal. Life on Earth stores genetic information in DNA. A lot of DNA seems to Read More ›

Martin Down has written an interesting piece in the Church of England newsletter, Martin Down – The Evolution Sceptics He concludes; “The fact is that the scientific evidence that we have is full of holes, or mysteries. At one time people believed in the God of the Gaps and then retreated from that position because the gaps seemed to be getting smaller and smaller and threatened to close up altogether. But that is not the case today: the gaps are getting bigger and bigger; the chances of the world that we live in happening by accident are vanishingly small. The chances of a strand of DNA assembling itself by accident are infinitesimal, too small to be worth considering. The world Read More ›

Benedict Carey reports,

One of psychology’s most respected journals has agreed to publish a paper presenting what its author describes as strong evidence for extrasensory perception, the ability to sense future events.The decision may delight believers in so-called paranormal events, but it is already mortifying scientists. Advance copies of the paper, to be published this year in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, have circulated widely among psychological researchers in recent weeks and have generated a mixture of amusement and scorn.

– “Journal’s Paper on ESP Expected to Prompt Outrage”, New York Times (January 5, 2011)

We hear, of course, the familiar “craziness, pure craziness. I can’t believe a major journal is …”

ESP may be the victim of a sort of materialism in science that has long since functioned more as a stopper on science than a filter. Briefly, there have been many honest studies that confirm the existence of some sort of entanglement, as Mario Beauregard and I discuss in some detail in The Spiritual Brain.

ESP is a psi phenomenon, the apparent ability of some humans and perhaps animals, to consistently score above chance in controlled studies of mental influences on events. It is seen in such phenomena as extrasensory perception and psychokinesis, and is a low-level effect, to be sure, but efforts to disconfirm it have failed.

It isn’t popular.

These disturbing phenomena seem to deny all our usual scientific ideas. Unfortunately the statistical evidence, at least for telepathy, is overwhelming. It is very difficult to rearrange one’s ideas so as to fit these new facts in.—Artificial intelligence pioneer A. M. Turing, quoted in A. M. Turing, excerpt from “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Mind 59, no. 236 (1950), reprinted in Hofstadter and Dennett, Mind’s I, p. 66.

And it seems nothing much has changed since Turing’s (1912-1954) day.

Carey mentions an argument against study of the psi effect which was once offered against Newton’s laws of gravity: No mechanism is proposed. That’s not a very good argument when there is persistent evidence for a small effect. We still don’t have a definitive mechanism for gravity, but Newton’s laws proved outstandingly useful in subsequent decades and were accepted on that basis, mechanism or no.

Lets hope that study wins out over furore and posturing.

See also: Read More ›

A friend asks a bunch of us if we are as incredulous of Darwinist attempts to explain away the Cambrian explosion as he is. Well, I always say, try me on some of the latest nonsense, and he did. It is conveniently here, in relation to the Dengying fossils in southern China (541 to 551 million years ago):

The first instance of biomineralization – i.e. the biologic use of minerals – was around 2 billion years ago when certain bacteria precipitated grains of magnetite to apparently help orient themselves in the Earth’s magnetic field. However, the first animal skeletons didn’t appear until right before the Cambrian explosion, at the end of the Ediacaran Period.These early shell-bearing creatures help to resolve Charles Darwin’s concern over the sudden appearance of so many new animal species during the Cambrian explosion. The fossil record gives the impression of a “Creation” event, but in reality, animals had evolved prior to the explosion. They just didn’t leave much for paleontologists to find until they developed the skeleton-making trait.

Reminded me of something:

The first time anyone wondered about thefts from the liquor store was on March 22, when a couple of guys appeared to be loitering with intent. However, the first theft of cash and cases of liquor didn’t occur until June 29, at the end of the subsequent accounting period.This reported theft helps to resolve management’s concern over the sudden disappearance of so much cash and so many cases during the night of June 29. The inventory record gives the impression of a major theft, but in reality, lots of cash and cases had gone missing prior to the reported heist. They just didn’t leave much for investigators to find because they weren’t logged into inventory in the first place.

Hardline Darwinists obviously fear the Cambrian explosion the way crooks fear an honest investigator. You can play their claim game yourself: Read More ›

It’s amazing what one can learn about the heroes of materialist science from their friends. In “Leftist Artists and Their Totalitarian Friends” ( c2c Journal: Canada’s Journal of Ideas , January 4, 2011) commentator Michael Coren quotes friends of the early twentieth century Darwin popularizer, sci-fi novelist H. G. Wells: In describing his fellow socialist and some-time friend, George Bernard Shaw wrote of Wells, “Multiply the total by ten; square the result. Raise it again to the millionth power and square it again; and you will still fall short of the truth about Wells – yet the worse he behaved the more he was indulged; and the more he was indulged the worse he behaved.” [ … ] At heart, Read More ›

As many UD readers know, I am a former materialist and militant atheist. At one time in the past I could have given Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens both a run for their money, with equal or surpassing passion and devotion, but with much more knowledge about basic science. As the evidence mounted that design was an inescapable conclusion — both in the cosmos and in living systems — I was forced by reason to abandon my most cherished beliefs, those being that I am a meaningless product of materialistic processes and random events. (Where is Dawkins on this topic, concerning philosophical child abuse?) Obviously, this conclusion turned my entire world upside down, and mandated a complete personal reorientation, which Read More ›

Mary Grabar, writing on the “Cultural illiteracy of Christopher Hitchens” (July 1, 2007), noted, Reading Milton led me back to the Bible. The late Walker Percy allowed for the idea of evolution. But he, like the proponents of intelligent design that I met at a Christian Faculty Forum at The University of Georgia, read the Bible not literally, like an instruction manual, but allowed for the possibility of a metaphorical meaning that went beyond their understanding. Shakespeare revealed the evil of atheism through characters like Iago. Flannery O’Connor demonstrated how her characters’ estimations of their own goodness provided the opening for Satanic influences. Dostoyevsky exposed the evils of pride and self-devised “justice.” Anyone recall the conference? Of course, since then Read More ›

Yesterday there was an article published online by CNN highlighting the finding by the British journal, BMJ, that Dr. Andrew Wakefield’s sensational study linking autism to childhood vaccinations was a “complete fraud”. Today there’s word that the latest issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology contains an article on ESP. We’re told the article was “peer reviewed”. But it has been “described as ‘pure craziness’ and ‘an embarrassment for the entire field’ by scientists who allege it has serious flaws and that ESP is a myth.” While it appears that Wakefield falsified medical histories of children (and apparently to aid and abet some trial lawyers who paid him nearly $675,000 so that they could go after Big Pharma), Read More ›

In the thread to my last post the following question was asked: “How are creationism and Darwinism commensurable.” In other words, what key traits do the two share, if any?

Here is my answer: With both creationism and Darwinism, the faith commitment is primary and the evidence is secondary.

Before exploring my answer further, let us define terms. Read More ›