I posted my No Bomb After 10 Years post on October 23 and left for vacation the next day, and I’ve had very limited access to the internet since then. I am back and I am amazed at the energy that has gone into responding to that post (1,608 comments!). I have had a chance to go over the comment thread and can report that there is still no bomb. Amusingly, keiths insisted that he had posted a bomb over at The Skeptical Zone that proved that Darwinism is “trillions” of times better at explaining the data than ID. His argument failed at many levels. Yet, even more amusingly, he kept on insisting he had debunked ID after his so-called Read More ›

Islands of function in a space of configurations, of course, are used as a metaphor for special zones T, which has been visualised at UD as follows, based on the underlying Mathematics of phase spaces and configuration spaces, using among other inputs, Dembski’s remarks in his No Free Lunch: U/D: A way to visualise the search challenge on the gamut of our solar system: A good way to visualise what is happening in physical, ordinary 3-d space as we inject functionally specific complex organisation and associated information would be to take a pile of lego bricks: . . . and contrast it with the functional organisation of a lego brick castle: . . . or that of the “exploded view” Read More ›

Recently, Mark Frank and I had a brief dialogue in the OP,“Didn’t everyone already know this about dogs?” I’ve decided to clean it up a bit and re-post it because after my last question, I received no responses. At the outset, I would like to say that I place no blame about lack of responses on Mark Frank or anyone else in the last OP (as my post was rather quickly buried.) Having said that, in this OP I would like somebody to address the question. After one go around where I’d suggested that “success” should be counted as an increase in genetic information, Mark Frank corrected me, writing: In biology success is breeding in the available environment. As a Read More ›

2350 years ago, in The Laws, Bk X, Plato gave a sobering warning on the morally and socially corrosive nature of evolutionary materialism and resulting ideologised factions (and by extension, enabling fellow travellers) that the past few days here at UD, sadly, bring back to mind:  >>Ath. . . .[The avant garde philosophers and poets, c. 360 BC] say that fire and water, and earth and air [i.e the classical “material” elements of the cosmos], all exist by nature and chance, and none of them by art . . . [such that] all that is in the heaven, as well as animals and all plants, and all the seasons come from these elements, not by the action of mind, as Read More ›

Catholic author Mark Shea has recently written two blog articles (see here and here) in which he attempts to clarify what Pope Francis really meant when he addressed the Pontifical Academy of Sciences on creation and evolution, on October 27. Shea claims that the Catholic Church has been evolution-friendly in its thinking since the time of St. Augustine, who “sees creation happening, not by God perpetually applying little fixes and magicking a tyrannosaurus out of thin air, but by Nature unrolling (Latin: evolvere) the potentialities that God placed in it from the start,” while St. Thomas Aquinas sounds “pretty darned evolutionary” to the good Mr. Shea. What the Pope is saying, according to Shea, is that “God is not a Read More ›

I was just challenged to reply to the KS “bomb” claim, and though I am busy, I will pause to note briefly, and will link this FYI-FTR to the thread of discussion where the challenge was made. I think WJM, in his post on the failure of the bomb, ably put his finger on the first main failure: Ultimately, keiths asks the question of IDists (to paraphrase) – “why did the designer pick just one form of life and utilize just one lineage, when it could have utilized any number of alternate, non-nested systems?” – yet, keiths fails to ask the same question of the natural forces argument – why just one form of life, why one lineage, why one Read More ›