[Sometimes debate at UD can be heated, and I commend Mark Frank for his temperance with his critics. If I shut down every unfriendly comment made by either side in the discussions I host, I think there wouldn’t be any discussion!] There is sometimes a fine line between what is believable and what is true. Further there are true statements that might be formally or practically undecidable. I find the existence of God believable. I also believe that in the existence in an Intelligent Designer of life, and that the Intelligent Designer is God. Even though many ID proponents have publicly said they believe the Intelligent Designer is God (myself included) the inference to God is insufficient from the definition Read More ›

One my scoundrel-hero-bankers of Wall Street, Goldman-Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein famously said: “we’re doing God’s work“, responding to criticism that his firm made huge profits from the demise of others and he paid himself fat bonuses. Well, in like manner “we’re doing God’s work” here at UD, benefiting from the demise of Darwinism. Novelists and writers have referred to Jamie Dimon (left) and Blankfein (right) along with other bankers as “Masters of the Universe”. Due to popular demand, I’m starting another off-topic thread in honor of BA77’s contributions to UD. Here is an off topic. Dawkins is under the impression that religious belief is mostly perpetuated through indoctrination. I don’t know about that because of people like Mitsuo Fuchida who Read More ›

Above: Ludwig van Beethoven in 1804. Below: The opening of Beethoven’s Fifth. Among St. Thomas Aquinas’ celebrated five proofs of the existence of God, the Fifth Way holds a special place: it is the only one which explicitly attempts to show that the cosmos is dependent on some Intelligent Being, Who directs all natural objects towards their built-in ends. In this post, I’m going to critically analyze Aquinas’ Fifth Way – or more specifically, Professor Edward Feser’s reconstructed version of this argument by Aquinas. On Feser’s account, the argument proceeds from a set of very simple facts about the natural world, and then demonstrates that the only way to explain these facts is by positing an intelligent being (or beings) Read More ›

To facilitate discussion, we are publishing the abstracts and conclusions/summaries of the 24 papers from the Cornell Conference on the Origin of Biological Information here at Uncommon Descent, with cumulative links to previous papers at the bottom of each page. You can get from anywhere to anywhere in the system. Note: A blow-by-blow account of the difficulties that the authors experienced from Darwin lobby attempts to censor the book by denying it publication with Springer are detailed here. Fortunately, the uproar resulted in an opportunity for readers like yourself to read the book online. That said, the hard cover version is now shipping. An excerpt from “Biological Information and Genetic Theory: Introductory Comments” by John C. Sanford: Given all the Read More ›