March 2012

Last time around, last May, the heart of the answer was: . . . if clever but willfully deceptive rhetors — Ms Forrest, B, with all due respect; sadly,  this means you — can get away with strawmannising and dismissing design thinkers as “Creationists in cheap tuxedos,” where it has already been firmly fixed in the public mind by other clever rhetors — Mr Dawkins, CR, with all due respect; sadly, this means you — that Creationists are “ignorant, stupid, insane and/or wicked,” and that such are fighting “a war against science” and want to impose “a right-wing theocracy” (presumably  complete with Inquisitions and burnings at the stake) then we can be distracted from the issues on the merits and Read More ›

Did you think that University of Minnesota professor’s blunder about probability was a one-off? Laplace didn’t rebuke this argument two centuries ago for no good reason—the fallacy has been around forever and evolutionists continue to employ it. The argument’s next appearance is in a forthcoming journal article and the evolutionist doesn’t even try to clean it up. It’s the same old argument that if you toss a coin 500 times there are 2^500, or a one with about 150 zeros after it, different possible sequences of heads and tails. Therefore whatever sequence of heads and tails you end up with had an astronomically tiny—one in 2^500—chance of happening. Such a tiny probability is usually considered to be impossible, and yet it happened. Read More ›

[As I recall, Jason Rosenhouse objected that Bill Dembski’s notion of specification cannot be applied to biology. This essay is written to challenge some of the objections think I’ve heard him raise informally over the years at my ID talks at his school and our discussion at ID and creation conferences. He’s one of the brightest critics of ID that I know, and thus I think objections he might raise should be addressed.] The opponents of ID argue something along the lines: “take a deck of cards, randomly shuffle it, the probability of any given sequence occurring is 1 out of 52 factorial or about 8×10^67 — Improbable things happen all the time, it doesn’t imply intelligent design.” In fact, Read More ›

Fascinating stuff unfolding at Telic Thoughts (an independent ID blog)*: Kornbelt 888 asks Isn’t it about time someone created a junk yard dog style outfit like Eugenie Scott’s racket, except on the other side, to be a continuous hammer on the heads of the Darwinista liars, deceivers, and disinformationists with respect to public schools? I say yes.” To which chunkdz replies, I respond: What possible good could come from that? Kornbelt, you might just as well start a watchdog organization that debunks and exposes the failings of the Taliban. And for all your hard work, the next time they behead some woman in a soccer stadium they will blame your organization for corrupting her. It’s not like you’re dealing with Read More ›