Awesome. Here.

I’d like to confess two things up-front. First, I know next to nothing about Kabbalah (an ancient Jewish mystical tradition which forms an integral part of the Oral tradition of Judaism). Second, I’m not a big fan of the “day-age” interpretation of Genesis, having been turned off it at the age of twelve, when I learned that birds appeared only 150 million years ago, long after the appearance of land animals (or even mammals, for that matter) – in other words, the reverse of the order in Genesis. But I’d be the first to admit that my own personal interpretation of Genesis 1 and 2 might well be wrong – in fact, I’m quite sure that it is wrong, in Read More ›

Although I accept ID, I actually think there are respectable reasons to reject or at least withhold judgment on ID in biology. I am writing this essay because I expect I’ll refer to it in the future since I will frequently grant that a critic of ID might be quite reasonable in not embracing ID. Unlike some of my ID colleagues, I do not think rejection or non-acceptance of ID is an unrespectable position. It may not be obvious, but several revered “ID proponents” either currently or in the past said they are not convinced ID is true. Foremost would probably be David Berlinski. Next is Michael Denton, and next is Richard Sternberg. I do not know for a fact Read More ›

The stolen concept fallacy is a form of self-refutation. From Wikipedia: Stolen Concept – the act of using a concept while ignoring, contradicting or denying the validity of the concepts on which it logically and genetically depends. In an ongoing, multi-thread sub-debate at The Skeptical Zone, I have been making the case that when materialists argue, they necessarily employ stolen concepts, such as those referred to by the following terms and more: “I”, “we”, “prove”, “evidence”, “reason”, “logic”, “determine”, “conclude”, “error”, “fact”, “objective”, “subjective”, etc. Generally agreed upon by many of those at TSZ (although now I suspect we’ll get a barrage of disagreement via DDS), human beings are material computations of physics, meaning that everything a human does, says, Read More ›

I went through a great deal of trouble to contest the idiosyncratic claim of a critic at TheSkepticalZone who said: if you have 500 flips of a fair coin that all come up heads, given your qualification (“fair coin”), that is outcome is perfectly consistent with fair coins, Comment in The Skeptical Zone This critic (who goes by the handle “Eigenstate”) would probably keep singing the same tune if we were dealing with 500,000,000 fair coins. I said this was wrong, and KeithS disagreed and demanded I make a retraction. See his comments here in SSDD: a 22 sigma event is consistent with the physics of fair coins?. I insisted the expectation value of 50% heads has to be respected, Read More ›

Jeffrey Shallit has commented on his blog about UD’s 500-heads-in-a-row series (see here, here and here).  In his comment Shallit demonstrates that after all these years he remains clueless about even the basic ABCs of design theory. Before we get to Shallit’s Romper Room errors, let me congratulate him on getting at least something right.  He refers to the concept of Kolmogorov complexity and writes: If the string is compressible (as 500 consecutive H’s would be) then one can reject the chance hypothesis with high confidence; if the string is, as far as we can see, incompressible, we cannot. Here Shallit agrees with our own Granville Sewell, who wrote in comment 4 to my “Jerad’s DDS” post: The reason why 500 Read More ›

In the combox to my last post Jerad and Neil join to give us a truly pristine example of Darwinist Derangement Syndrome in action.  Like the person suffering from Tourette’s they just don’t seem to be able to help themselves. Here are the money quotes: Barry:  “The probability of [500 heads in a row] actually happening is so vanishingly small that it can be considered a practical impossibility.  If a person refuses to admit this, it means they are either invincibly stupid or piggishly obstinate or both.  Either way, it makes no sense to argue with them.” Sal to Neil:  “But to be clear, do you think 500 fair coins heads violates the chance hypothesis?” Neil:  “If that happened to me, I Read More ›

Part 1:  Jerad’s DDS (“Darwinist Derangement Syndrome”) Sometimes one just has to stop, gape and stare at the things Darwinists say.   Consider Jerad’s response to Sal’s 500 coin flip post.  He says:  “If I got 500 heads in a row I’d be very surprised and suspicious. I might even get the coin checked. But it could happen.”  Later he says that if asked about 500 heads in a row he would respond:  “I would NOT say it was ‘inconsistent with fair coins.’”  Then this:  “All we are saying is that any particular sequence is equally unlikely and that 500 heads is just one of those particular sequences.”  No Jerad.  You are wrong. Stunningly, glaringly, gobsmackingly wrong, and it beggars belief Read More ›