I have noticed that the usual hostile scrutinisers at some objector sites are back on their Saul Alinsky, dismissive mockery and well-poisoning tactics. (I suppose they have not liked the situation where in recent weeks we have had some useful and reasonably civil exchanges here at UD under living room rules, giving the lie to their drumbeat accusations of censorship. They also probably do not like the balance on the merits after several thousand comments in several recent UD threads.) I have therefore responded to some of the most recent specific remarks here. I strongly suggest, too, that such need to check a good legal dictionary before presuming ignorance on the part of design thinkers, and that they need to Read More ›

David Berlinski has a new post at ENV entitled “The Ineffable Higgs”: Surely its discovery meant something? The Standard Model (SM) of particle physics demanded its existence, after all; and the demand was met. If it took forty years and more than $16 billion to discover the thing, physicists could with satisfaction observe that the public got what it paid for, the first step, of course, in demanding that the public pay for more of what it got. Photographs of Peter Higgs staring tenderly into space, ses yeux perdus, conveyed an impression of appropriate intellectual satisfaction. Click here to continue reading!

Recently we discussed a paperfrom 2008 in which evolutionists claimed to have solved the long-standing question of how the eye evolved. It is a problem that famously once made Darwin shudder but the evolutionists claimed that now, with our advanced scientific knowledge, “the gap in understanding of the molecular evolution of eye components is all but closed.” That was quite a claim and, not surprisingly, there was no such breakthrough. In fact, the “explanation” that the evolutionists provided was simply that the key cellular signal transduction pathway in our eyes came from a very similar pathway in yeast that senses certain types of signaling chemicals known as pheromones. The evolutionists had no explanation for how the yeast pathway arose in the first Read More ›

From time to time on this site we discuss the theodicy — how is it possible to reconcile the existence of a good God with the existence of evil in the world.  It is a difficult problem, and anyone (in either camp) who says it is not plainly hasn’t thought about it enough.  Pain.  Suffering.  Misery.  Like a cruel and irresistible tsunami, the problem of evil threatens to engulf and overwhelm our minds.  Yes, there have been many excellent efforts at theodicy, and they are often helpful, but none is completely satisfactory.  The solution to the problem of evil is one of those things we see “through a glass darkly,” and we are not conceding defeat when we admit our Read More ›

The theory of evolution states that the species arose spontaneously, one from another via a pattern of common descent. This means the species should form an evolutionary tree, where species that share a recent common ancestor, such as two frog species, are highly similar, and species that share a distant common ancestor, such as humans and squids, are very different. But the species do not form such an evolutionary tree pattern. In fact this expectation has been violated so many times it is difficult to keep track. These violations are not rare or occasional anomalies, they are the rule. Entire volumes have been written on them. Many examples are the repeated designs found in what, according to evolution, must be Read More ›

In another post Mung points out this interesting quote to Kantian Naturalist (an atheist):  “That crude matter should have originally formed itself according to mechanical laws, that life should have sprung from the nature of what is lifeless, that matter should have been able to dispose itself into the form of a self-maintaining purposiveness – that [is] contradictory to reason.”  Immanuel Kant   Kantian Naturalist replies:   [Recently] I read “Bio-agency and the problem of action” by J. C. Skewes & C. A. Hooker (Biology and Philosophy 24 (3):283-300, 2009). I won’t get into all the details right now; suffice it to say that the way they set up the problem in what I find to be a deeply compelling fashion. Namely, Read More ›

The American Humanist Association has launched a new website directed at kids. Few websites on the internet are so ripe for parody. The website perpetuates the common myth that there exists a dichotomy between science on the one hand and belief in a Creator on the other. What about those of us, like myself, who enjoy science and have a scientific education, but who also think there are robust intellectual grounds on which to base belief in a Creator? The website makes no attempt to hide the connection between atheism and Darwinism. Of course, Darwinism must stand or fall with the scientific evidence irrespective of the theistic or atheistic beliefs of its adherents — but it does strike me as Read More ›

In my prior post Timaeus responds to nullasalus and asks some profound questions.  What follows is all Timaeus: nullasalus: Let me step back from evolution for a minute, and see if I can make my point in a more indirect way. You are aware, of course, that many TEs have attacked ID and creationism for postulating “god of the gaps” explanations, i.e., allowing science to explain certain phenomena wholly in terms of natural causes, but then, in certain cases, saying, “Science has not come up with a natural-cause explanation for this, so God must have done it.” I am sure you know this drill very well: this sort of argument is a “science-stopper” so it’s bad for science, and it’s bad Read More ›

Some of you may have already seen that Thomas Nagel’s new book, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False, has been subject to a blistering review in the liberal US weekly, The Nation. On the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s excellent Religion & Ethics website, I have commented on this review, Nagel’s thesis, and the attempt by naturalists to present a politically correct face that avoids Nagel’s critique.

As I pointed out in my earlier post, Stephen Barr believes God plays dice with the universe, but he’s OK with that because the dice are loaded.  Barr affirms the standard Darwinian line that life came about through a random undirected process, and at the same time Barr says God directed the process at a deeper level of reality so that a process that appears random to us is in reality directed by God. To be consistent Barr would have to disagree with Stephen Jay Gould.  Gould asserted that if one were to rewind the tape of life and play it over, things would almost certainly turn out very differently.  If Gould was right, the randomness of Darwinism would be Read More ›

Science Daily reports on an interesting new piece of biologically-inspired technology: Drawing heavily upon nature for inspiration, a team of researchers has created a new artificial lens that is nearly identical to the natural lens of the human eye. This innovative lens, which is made up of thousands of nanoscale polymer layers, may one day provide a more natural performance in implantable lenses to replace damaged or diseased human eye lenses, as well as consumer vision products; it also may lead to superior ground and aerial surveillance technology. Click here to read the rest.

At Evolution News & Views, Michael Behe reviews the latest work from Richard Lenski’s long-term experiments with E. coli: Readers of my posts know that I’m a big fan of Professor Richard Lenski, a microbiologist at Michigan State University and member of the National Academy of Sciences. For the past few decades he has been conducting the largest laboratory evolution experiment ever attempted. Growing E. coli in flasks continuously, he has been following evolutionary changes in the bacterium for over 50,000 generations (which is equivalent to roughly a million years for large animals). Although Lenski is decidedly not an intelligent design proponent, his work enables us to see what evolution actually does when it has the resources of a large number of organisms over a substantial Read More ›

Ann Gauger posted an amusing facebook dialogue on the blog of the Biologic Institute: “Sometimes it might be a good idea to actually read what ID proponents write before critiquing it.” Click here to read the rest.

After critiquing Libby Anne’s atheism and faulty epistemology in my previous post, I propose to complete my examination of her philosophy by critiquing her views on ethics, and in particular on human persons and the morality of abortion. Readers will recall that a few days ago, Libby Anne put up a post that subsequently went viral, describing how she had lost faith in the pro-life movement. What I aim to show in this post is that her views on ethics (and in particular, on abortion) are riddled with contradictions, and that her philosophical understanding of the pro-life ethic is very poor. I shall also address the question of how a non-religious person might go about trying to determine what is Read More ›