The Freedom From Religion Foundation, whose highly selective quotation of America’s Founding Fathers was exposed in a previous post of mine, is at it again: they’re threatening to sue over the display of a Star of David on a proposed Holocaust memorial outside the Ohio Statehouse. Readers can view the design here. When I first read about this, in a post by David Klinghoffer over at Evolution News (see here for an earlier one by Bruce Chapman), my reaction was one of incredulity. “Surely they can’t be serious,” I said to myself. But they are. The state of Ohio will be contributing $300,000 for the preparation of the memorial site, in addition to $2,000,000 in private donations, which will cover Read More ›

In desperate attempt to perpetuate the illusion that complex biological novelty can easily emerge in the biosphere, Darwinists have resorted to defining species in a way that allows new “species” to emerge with ease. They argue members of a species become new species when they lose the ability or incentive to interbreed, even when no significant novelty is involved. Here is a true statement: emergence of radically different and new organs would imply no interbreeding but the converse is not true even though it is promoted by Darwinists as if it were true: no interbreeding implies emergence of radically different and new organs For example, see how this university website advertises newly acquired inability as macroevolution: Speciation. Individuals of a Read More ›

Edward Feser reviews John Leslie’s and Robert Lawrence Kuhn’s The Mystery of Existence: Why Is There Anything At All? over at First Things.  Fifty Shades of Nothing  While Kuhn does not settle on a particular position, he does indicate that he thinks that either the existence of things is a brute fact without explanation, or there is something that is self-existent in the sense that its essence entails that its non-existence is inherently impossible. The only remaining question in the latter case would be what else we could say about this self-existent reality (e.g., whether we ought to ascribe to it the standard divine attributes). For the reason given by Gerson, though, I think that if Kuhn is willing to Read More ›

Darwin said that evolution needs huge amount of time, and this is the reason why his evolution couldn’t be seen by us. Differently from Darwin, modern evolutionary scientists have much more technical resources at their disposal. By means of these advanced tools they eventually could give us experimental evidence of evolution in the lab. With the modern technologies, they could even compress millions of years of evolution into a few years of lab work. Since evolution depends on reproduction time, they can grow populations of organisms that have fast reproduction time, e.g. bacteria, fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster), etc.. Evolution is based on random genetic mutations, then they can use chemical and physical means that increase the frequency of mutations. One Read More ›

Here’s a technological advance that should make us all go “Whoa!”: a neuroscientist says it’s now possible to graft one person’s head onto another person’s body, and to connect the transplanted head to the spinal cord of the body it’s grafted onto. The obvious question for dualists is: what would happen to the human soul, if such a hellish operation were ever carried out? Dr. Sergio Canavero, a member of the Turin Advanced Neuromodulation Group, explains that successful head transplants have been carried out on animals since 1970, but they were always paralyzed below the neck, as scientists were never able to connect the spinal cord from the head to that of the body it was transplanted into. Even now, Read More ›

About two weeks ago, I read a scientific report that challenged my perceptions about the relationship between philosophy and science. So much so, that it forced me to doubt some of my erstwhile convictions about the value of logic and prompted me to revise major elements of my global world view. As it turns out, an empirically-based study indicated, within a 1% margin of error, that there are more people in the city of Los Angeles than in the entire state of California. I would never have accepted this counter-intuitive claim had there been no evidence to support it. At this point, my readers might wonder how I could be so pathologically gullible as to accept such an absurd proposition. Read More ›

There were 75-100 phyla, but over time some disappeared. This graph depicts the Cambrian explosion where most phyla appeared and how over time some phyla disappeared. This is graphically the pattern that is central to Darwin’s doubt. It destroys the notion of Darwinian gradualism: http://www.veritas-ucsb.org/library/origins/IMAGES/H.gif Remarkably, as phyla disappeared, new species appeared. This is a curious pattern. Some have labeled this phenomenon “disparity precedes diversity”. NOTES 1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phylum In biological classification: phylum is a taxonomic rank below kingdom and above class. Traditionally, in botany the term division is used instead of “phylum”, although in 1993 the International Botanical Congress accepted the designation “phylum”. …. Phyla can be thought of as grouping organisms based on general specialization of body plan. 2. Read More ›