March 2013

Most people are aware that Sir Isaac Newton believed in God. But it may come as a surprise to many readers to learn that he was also an Intelligent Design advocate. What prompted me to write this post was a recent comment by Genomicus that while Newton’s remarks on the Bible were interesting, they were “irrelevant to the hypothesis that life was engineered by some intelligence(s).” Genomicus will be interested to know that Newton explicitly argued that all of the various kinds of living things in Nature were personally designed by God. For those wanting to know more about Newton’s views on God and science, I would heartily recommend an essay by Stephen Snobelen, a professor of the history of Read More ›

Two years ago I asked this question:  How Can We Know One Belief Selected for By Evolution is Superior to Another? I illustrated the conundrum faced by the evolutionary materialist (EM) with this little back and forth: Theist: You say there is no God. EM: Yes. Theist: Yet belief in God among many (if not most) humans persists. EM: I cannot deny that. Theist: How do you explain that? EM: Religious belief is an evolutionary adaption. Theist: But you say religious belief is false. EM: That’s correct. Theist: Let me get this straight. According to you, religious belief has at least two characteristics: (1) it is false; and (2) evolution selected for it. EM [looking a little pale now, because Read More ›

The genetic code was discovered about fifty years ago and it has been a challenge for evolution ever since. As we sawlast time it provides an example of evolution’s metaphysical reasoning. As Wikipedia puts it, “the genetic code used by all known forms of life is nearly universal with few minor variations. This suggests that a single evolutionary history underlies the origin of the genetic code.” That, of course, is false—at least from a scientific perspective. In science we may say hypothesis H predicts observation O, but not the reverse. O does not imply H. It doesn’t even suggest H. It merely doesn’t falsify H. To say anything more requires additional premises and, in this case, that is where the metaphysics comes into Read More ›

In the planetary science journal, Icarus, two scientists argue that the genetic code bears the hallmarks of an intelligent cause. Reports the abstract, It has been repeatedly proposed to expand the scope for SETI, and one of the suggested alternatives to radio is the biological media. Genomic DNA is already used on Earth to store non-biological information. Though smaller in capacity, but stronger in noise immunity is the genetic code. The code is a flexible mapping between codons and amino acids, and this flexibility allows modifying the code artificially. But once fixed, the code might stay unchanged over cosmological timescales; in fact, it is the most durable construct known. Therefore it represents an exceptionally reliable storage for an intelligent signature, if that conforms Read More ›

Tomás de Torquemada (1420 – 1498) was the first Grand Inquisitor of the Spanish Inquisition.  Steven Pinker has appointed himself as the Grand Inquisitor of the Church of Saint Charles the Bearded. As reported in these pages (see here and here), atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel’s book Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False has caused quite a stir.  The New Republic reports that Pinker has taken to cyberspace to stir up the Darwinist mob against Nagel.  Every whiff of heresy against the true faith must be ruthlessly stamped out.  Torquemada had his Auto-da-fé.  Pinker has his Twitter account. Irony alert.  We can be certain that Pinker is horrified by and wholly condemns Torquemada’s Read More ›

The basic idea of irreducible complexity developed by Michael Behe is simple and elegant.  Dr. Behe posits that a biological system such as the iconic bacterial flagellum (UD’s mascot – see the picture at the top of our homepage) is irreducibly complex if each part of the system is indispensable to function.  In other words, if one removes any part of an irreducibly complex system, one winds up not with degraded function but with no function at all. This idea is important to the debate over Neo-Darwinian Evolution (NDE), because NDE is grounded absolutely in the notion that every complex biological system evolved from a simpler precursor in a stepwise fashion in which each step provided a net fitness gain. Read More ›

Michael Denton (author of Evolution: A Theory in Crisis and Nature’s Destiny) has just published a paper in the journal Bio-Complexity, entitled, The Place of Life and Man in Nature: Defending the Anthropocentric Thesis. Reports the abstract, Here I review the claim that the order of nature is uniquely suitable for life as it exists on earth (Terran life), and specifically for liv- ing beings similar to modern humans. I reassess Henderson’s claim from The Fitness of the Environment that the ensemble of core biochemicals that make up Terran life possess a unique synergistic fitness for the assembly of the complex chemical systems char- acteristic of life. I show that Henderson’s analysis is still remarkably consistent with the facts one century after it was Read More ›

One of the most common metaphysical premises in evolutionary theory is the claim that similarity implies common descent. If two species share similar genes then they must share a common ancestor, from which those genes originated. Evolutionists don’t think twice about this metaphysical claim. Among friends it is taken for granted and any challenges from creationists don’t matter to begin with. Why is this claim metaphysical? Because it doesn’t come from science. There is no scientific experiment or observation that tells us that biological similarity implies common descent. And yet, in a sure sign of metaphysics at work, evolutionists are certain of this premise. Similarity must arise as a consequence of common descent. This conclusion can be trumped only by Read More ›

As we continue to stir the mathematics pot, BA 77 has given a link to a video on the significance of Godel’s discovery of incompleteness: [metacafe 8462821] (Pardon possible embed problems, the links work . . . I am doing this under travel related constraints) This one, gives a bit more of details on how Turing sharpened the theorem using the Turing machine, that led to the well known algorithm halting problem: [metacafe 8516356] The issue of the intuitive imagining mind as opposed to an algorithmic machine, is discussed. Worth pondering. At the same time, we must always bear in mind the famous Euler result: ei*pi + 1 = 0  This speaks to astonishing unity in Mathematics, for in one Read More ›

A thing that evolutionists wrongly consider a serious problem for the creation/ID worldview is the “multiple acts of creation” or – in ID terms – “multiple insertions of information” in time. Here I will argue to show that this is a false problem, or – better said – is a problem that in no way can undermine the creation/ID explanation. This issue is also related to the question when in the cosmos the information is injected by its Designer: is it fully frontloaded from the beginning or is fractionated in time? My assumption is however that we take for granted that the Designer of the universe is God. I dealt with this issue here. Moreover I consider sound the so-called Read More ›

“I disagree that Darwin’s theory is as “solid as any explanation in science.” Disagree? I regard the claim as preposterous. Quantum electrodynamics is accurate to thirteen or so decimal places; so, too, general relativity. A leaf trembling in the wrong way would suffice to shatter either theory. What can Darwinian theory offer in comparison? ” David Berlinski

Nature News reports on a recent paper in Biophysics Journal, describing stunningly designed “antibacterial ‘nanopillars’ on cicada wings” that “pull bacterial membranes apart.” Reports Nature News, The veined wing of the clanger cicada kills bacteria solely through its physical structure — one of the first natural surfaces found to do so. An international team of biophysicists has now come up with a detailed model of how this defence works on the nanoscale. The results are published in the latest issue of the Biophysical Journal1. The clanger cicada (Psaltoda claripennis) is a locust-like insect whose wings are covered by a vast hexagonal array of ‘nanopillars’ — blunted spikes on a similar size scale to bacteria (see video, bottom). When a bacterium settles on the wing Read More ›