July 2013

Our colleague Elizabeth Liddle has described the process of human design as trial and error, tinkering and iteration. Like Dawkins, she has argued nature (like human designers) is able to construct biological designs via trial and error, tinkering and iteration. However, when nature is properly compared and contrasted with the way humans go about creating designs, it is apparent Dawkins’ claim of a blind watchmaker is false. I refer to Elizabeth’s description because she articulated some aspects of the blind watchmaker hypothesis better than Dawkins, but in so doing actually helped highlight why Dawkins’ blind watchmaker is refuted by the evidence. [this is a follow up post to Selection falsely called a mechanism when it should be called an outcome] Read More ›

It was not news this week when evolutionist Andreas Wagnerexplained that “we know very little about how they [evolutionary innovations] originate.” The origin of evolutionary innovations is largely unexplained and that gap is well known. No one would deny this. Even Wagner’s own press release begins with the same admission: “Exactly how new traits emerge is a question that has long puzzled evolutionary biologists.” But this admission, while uncontroversial, is not well advertised. It is not typically found in textbooks or popular books. Evolutionists do not often discuss this shortcoming in their class lectures or public talks.  For this shortcoming is rather embarrassing. In order to be taken seriously evolution must be able to explain how life’s various and incredible innovations arose, and Read More ›

We live in a post-modern [actually, ultra-modern . . . in Joe Carter’s sense of “modernity on volume level ELEVEN, not merely  ten” . . . ] world, or so we are commonly told. In that world, it is a commonplace to hear that “Aristotelian logic” exhibits a black- and- white thinking fallacy (strawman: any shade of pink, gold or green  etc. will do as NOT-WHITE . . . ). It is equally commonplace to see that truth and rationality are reduced in the minds of such to mere opinion, to be decided in the end by the nihilistic principle might and manipulation make ‘right.’ Which is in itself a big red warning flag. In such a situation, those who Read More ›

When Charles Darwin presented his theory of evolution in 1859 it received instant approval.  Darwin’s tome was the perfect creation narrative for a culture and a clergy that viewed the creator as more eminent than immanent. Like Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover, the creator was exalted as transcendent, and so safely sequestered away from the details of this world which he should be neither aware of nor responsible for. A decade earlier John Millais discovered all of this the hard way when Charles Dickens, as just one example, scathingly criticized the young prodigy’s Christ in the House of His Parents (shown to the left) for its portrayal of the subject as a “hideous, wry-necked, blubbering, red-headed boy, in a bed-gown.” Another critic Read More ›

In comment 30 to this post Elizabeth Liddle writes: I can think of lots of ways of testing specific design hypotheses, but they all involve a hypothesis involving a postulated designer. And IDists insist that this is irrelevant – that “Design detection” should only involve the observed pattern, not any hypothesis about the designer. This is ludicrous, frankly. Let’s explore one of Lizzie’s prior forays into design detection, and we’ll leave it up to the onlookers to decide which side is “ludicrous.” In a prior post I posed the following question to Dr. Liddle: If you were to receive a radio signal from outer space that specified the prime numbers between 1 and 100 would you conclude (provisionally pending the Read More ›

We have a jury system not because jurors are are necessarily wiser, more educated, or innately smarter than the alternatives (judges, kings, standing tribunals, viziers, etc.).  By and large they almost certainly are not.  We have juries because they are safer for those of us without power (the 99%, to use a phrase that has become all too hackneyed in such a short time) than the alternatives. The Zimmerman case is a classic example.  The prosecution was not based on the evidence against Zimmerman.  It was based on the politics of race.  The State Attorney should never have brought the case.  She had no hope of proving beyond a reasonable doubt that Zimmerman committed murder, but she was afraid to do the right thing.  The jury Read More ›