May 2014

Re new statement of faith: wo tenured Bryan College professors that were notified their employment will be terminated on May 17 after they failed to acknowledge the college’s recent “clarification” on the origins of man in their contract renewal are suing the college in Rhea County Chancery Court. The lawsuit, which was filed on Monday, states that when the Bryan College Board of Trustees approved a “clarification” to the school’s statement of faith saying that man descended from Adam and Eve and did not evolve from other species, it was effectively altering the Bryan College statement of faith. The school’s charter expressly forbids an alteration to the college’s statement of faith. Developing.

Hey: A 96-page internal New York Times report, sent to top executives last month by a committee led by the publisher’s son and obtained by BuzzFeed, paints a dark picture of a newsroom struggling more dramatically than is immediately visible to adjust to the digital world, a newsroom that is hampered primarily by its own storied culture. More. Not a solution. But one less pile of rubble.

Within the last few days, this story has come out. I’ll provide a link below; but, for the Darwinists (I won’t call them evolutionary biologists. Why? Because Erasmus Darwin was an evolutionary biologist. Lamarck was an evolutionary biologist, etc. No, they’re followers of C. Darwin, and, hence, Darwinists) who want to maintain that Richard Sternberg and others were not shabbily treated, here it is, the same kind of treatment, and, again, at the hands of ‘dispassionate, objective’ scientists. Here’s an excerpt from the article in the Daily Mail: A globally-renowned climate scientist has been forced to step down from a think-tank after he was subjected to ‘Mc-Carthy’-style pressure from scientists around the world. Professor Lennart Bengtsson, 79, a leading academic Read More ›

In my previous post I discussed Joel Velasco’s claim, in his recent debate with Paul Nelson, that biological designs fall into a nested hierarchy. Velasco is by no means alone in making this bizarre claim. It is not controversial that it is not true, yet evolutionists routinely insist that, as Richard Dawkins once put it, genes across a range of species fall into a “perfect hierarchy, a perfect family tree.” If, like many, your first question is “what are they thinking?” then go to the [1:33:21] mark in the Nelson-Velasco debate where for the final few minutes of his response segment, Velasco sheds light on the closing of the evolutionary mind.  Read more

One of the underlying debates linked to the design issue is the notorious mind-brain gap challenge. It keeps coming up, and on both sides of the ID debate. I would therefore like to spark a bit of discussion with a clip from a Scott Aaronson Physics course lecture: >> . . . If we interpret the Church-Turing Thesis as a claim about physical reality, then it should encompass everything in that reality, including the goopy neural nets between your respective ears. This leads us, of course, straight into the cratered intellectual battlefield that I promised to lead you into. As a historical remark, it’s interesting that the possibility of thinking machines isn’t something that occurred to people gradually, after they’d Read More ›

To support their high claim that the spontaneous origin of the species is a fact, evolutionists enlist all kinds of scientific evidence. But inevitably their scientific evidence isn’t quite right. One problem that surprised me when I first began studying evolution is the downright misrepresentation of the evidence. Sometimes these misrepresentations are exaggerations that convert otherwise ambiguous evidence into supporting evidence. Other times the misrepresentations are starker. In any case, to marshal evidence for the fact of evolution misrepresentation is required. And so it was not too surprising that in his recent debate against Paul Nelson, evolutionist Joel Velasco continued this unfortunate tradition.  Read more

Professor Edward Feser and Intelligent Design defender Dr. Lydia McGrew have been having a lively exchange of views on classical theism, miracles and Intelligent Design. Dr. McGrew, who is also a Christian apologist, concluded her blog post, Things God can do to reveal Himself, with these words: God has revealed Himself personally, by audible language, in incidents in Scripture. We know that. There is therefore no reason in principle why God could not reveal Himself personally, by the language of programmed code and intricate nanotechnology, in biology. Theory must accommodate fact, or it is bad theory. It is my hope that classical theism can rise to the occasion. Professor Feser’s reply to Dr. McGrew can be found here. Dr. Lydia Read More ›