In Jamaica, this distinguished professor — literally the man who led the Caribbean region’s medical fight against HIV/AIDS from the beginning in 1983 on — has been fired as at Tuesday afternoon by UWI’s Vice Chancellor for giving a politically incorrect expert testimony to The Supreme Court in Belize. This is a sign of how pressure group activism led by radicals of various stripes . . . it hardly matters that they all think they have cornered the market on the correct view on whatever bees are buzzing in their bonnets . . . is undermining the civilisation’s hard won consensus on freedom of inquiry, of expression and of educators and students around the world. Not to mention, just plain Read More ›

“Charles” posted the following in the combox to VJ’s excellent Free Will post: Scientist: OK, Charles, when you’re ready, just click the + key or the – key, whichever you choose. Charles: Copy that. Scientist: Let’s begin. Charles: Copy that. …. Charles: (humming a tune) …. Scientist: Charles, it’s been several minutes now and you’ve not clicked either key. Charles: Golly. Scientist: OK, Charles, we’ll start again. Just click the + key or the – key, when you’re ready, whichever you choose. Charles: Copy that. …. Charles: (drumming fingers) Scientist: Er, ummm … Charles, you’ve still not clicked either key. Charles: Boy, you guys don’t miss a thing. Scientist: Why haven’t you clicked either key? Charles: I didn’t want to. Read More ›

Over at the alternative news Website alternet.org, freelance writer and secular advocate Dan Arel has recently published an article criticizing the Discovery Institute’s coverage of Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Cosmos series. Arel’s article, which bears the sensationalized title, Neil deGrasse Tyson Praises Scientist Who Knew to Check His Religion at the Door; Creationists Go Apoplectic, takes aim at a recent post by David Klinghoffer over at Evolution News and Views, criticizing the “whitewash” by Cosmos, which concealed the religious sources of scientific inspiration for Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell. Leaving aside the polemical remarks directed at Klinghoffer, the gist of Arel’s argument can be summarized in the following excerpts from his article (emphases mine – VJT): Creationists want religion out Read More ›

Imagine equipping everyone in the world with something like a pocket-apologist, an Artificial Intelligence available to present for you customized evidences supporting a theistic worldview and to offer instant scholarly answers to complex questions. Well, it looks like a website is in development to do something like this. It is called “Treesearch” (treesearch.org) and seems like it will be a pretty novel apologetics debate encyclopedia. The content branches out debate points and counter-points (green vs. red) in a way that simulates dialogue, which makes navigation surprisingly intuitive, fast, and even fun. There are plans to create an intelligent design section of the website, but that has not yet been developed. The site already has, however, some material on the cosmological Read More ›

Evolutionist atheist physicist Sean Carroll suggests that infinite past time exists. Basically it is a move to deny God: if time has no beginning, the cosmos has no beginning, then there is no need of a Creator. Moreover infinite time gives more probabilistic resources to evolutionism.   Unfortunately an infinite past time is nonsense. See the following figure:     Scenario A shows the actual situation of the arrow of time, running from left to right, from today to the future. If this arrow is infinite then we would have no last day.   To scenario A we apply a shift according to a leftward vector of infinite length to get scenario B suggested by Carroll. Of course the arrow Read More ›

So, in the  first  part of this discussion, I have tried to show with real data from scientific literature how much of the human genome is conserved, and how that conservation is evaluated and expressed. Then I have argued that we already have good credible evidence for function in a relevant part of the human genome (let’s say about 20%), and that most of that functional part is non coding, and great part of it is non conserved. While some can disagree on the real figures, I think that it is really difficult to reject the whole argument. But, as I have anticipated, there are two more important aspects of the issue that I want to discuss ion detail. I will Read More ›

Alfred Mele is a professor of philosophy at Florida State University and the author of two books on free will: Effective Intentions (2009) and Free: Why Science Hasn’t Disproved Free Will, which is due out in October 2014. In a recent essay on Big Questions Online, Professor Mele defends, as “a definite possibility,” what he calls the ambitious view of free will: the view that when you freely choose between two options (let’s call them A and B), your past history and the laws of Nature do not determine your choice, which means that there is a real chance that you will choose A, and a real chance that you will choose B. On this ambitious view, while there may Read More ›