Michael Egnor has a great post at ENV which diserves more attention and comment. A scientist who believes he can detect intelligence based on the behavior of a binary star system calls inferring intelligence from the information content of living things “pseudoscience”. Comments?

In a recent post replying to David Bentley Hart’s latest book, Dr. Torley asks:  Is Intelligent Design bad theology?  I commend the post to readers.  It is a work of tremendous erudition in which Dr. Torley explains that ID is perfectly consistent with the work of the great philosophers of the Christian tradition, especially Thomas Aquinas. I have an even more basic question for Dr. Hart.  Is the Bible bad theology?  The psalmist, for instance, was certainly a proponent of cosmological ID, and he identified the designer as the God of Israel.  Consider: “When I consider Your heavens, the work of Your fingers, the moon and the stars, which You have ordained; what is man that You take thought of him, Read More ›

Wikipedia has a good article on the “Halting Problem.”  It begins: In computability theory, the halting problem can be stated as follows: ‘Given a description of an arbitrary computer program, decide whether the program finishes running or continues to run forever.’ This is equivalent to the problem of deciding, given a program and an input, whether the program will eventually halt when run with that input, or will run forever. Alan Turing proved in 1936 that a general algorithm to solve the halting problem for all possible program-input pairs cannot exist. In response to this UD post a friend who works with computers wrote me and said: Central to [Turing’s] proof is the scenario where the algorithm is given itself Read More ›

“. . . even an infinity of universes would amount, ontologically speaking, to an infinity of unnecessary contingencies, an infinite reiteration of the mystery of existence.” David Bentley Hart (emphasis in the original)

A sample for you of one of the products of unguided, undesigned, blind forces, working together for the survival of genes, with no objective meaning or purpose: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhcZ6b2FSsk Can we get a meme going here? If you’ve got a blog/Facebook/Twitter etc., then post your example!

Industry is constantly searching for technologies to maximize profits and minimize costs. Software industry is no exception (the world software market exceeded $300 billion). Actually some computers can process quadrillions floating-point operations per second (10^15 flops). It would be technically possible to implement on such computers the paradigm of unguided evolution (random variation + selection) for obtaining new programs by randomly modifying old programs. So, why software houses pay legions of human programmers to develop ex-novo applications when an automatic process could do the job? They could save truckloads of money by automatizing, at least in large part if not in toto, the software development work flow. To have an idea, let’s perform two simplified calculations about the speed of Read More ›