February 2012

Over at the First Things blog Stephen Barr said that there is no way to compute the probabilities of evolution. I disagreed and pointed him to Dembski’s and Marks’ work at the Evolutionary Informatics Lab. Barr responded by citing a 2003 article by Wesley Elsberry and said the critique of Dembski’s work was, if valid, “very damaging.” I responded by pointing out that the Dembski/Marks article to which I had linked was from 2009 and therefore it was not possible for Elsberry to have critiqued it in 2003. Here’s where things got interesting. Instead of allowing my response through, the FT moderator deleted it. When I learned this I posted the following protest: “My responses to SMB and David Nickol were deleted. Read More ›

I have a question for our materialist friends. Let’s imagine a group of chimpanzees. Say one of the male chimps approaches one of the female chimps and makes chimp signals that he wants to have sexual relations with her, but for whatever reason she’s not interested and refuses. Is it morally wrong for the male chimp to force the female chimp to have sex with him against her will? If you answer “no it is not morally wrong,” imagine further a group of humans. On the materialist view, a human is just a jumped up hairless ape. Is it morally wrong for a human male to force a human female to have sex with him against her will? If you Read More ›

Our engineering department often gets feasibility-study contracts. The client has an idea, but wants to know if he should pursue further investment and research into a proposed solution to an engineering problem. Our team goes to work. We use all our resources and experience to evaluate the suggested engineering solution. Our team recommends three possible avenues of approach: 1) Based on our analysis, the probability that it could work is so small that no further investment of effort or resources should be made. 2) Based on our analysis, there is a reasonable chance that this engineering solution could work, but we’ll need to build prototypes and test them. In addition, our analysis suggests that further design modifications should be made Read More ›