July 2014

A thermodynamically closed system that is far from equilibrium can increase the amount of physical design provided it is either front loaded or has an intelligent agent (like a human) within it. A simple example: A human on a large nuclear powered space ship can write software and compose music or many other designs. The space ship is closed but far from equilibrium. But complexity can still increase because of the human intelligent agent. Consider then a robot whose sole purpose is to make other robots like it or even unlike it in a similarly thermodynamically closed system. It can do this provided the software is front loaded into the robot. Can the robot make something more irreducibly complex than Read More ›

A few days ago, Professor Jerry Coyne attacked fellow atheist and Darwinist Michael Ruse, for going too easy on the cosmological argument for God’s existence in an interview with philosopher Gary Gutting, titled, Does Evolution Explain Religious Beliefs? (New York Times, July 8, 2014). In the interview, Ruse, a professor of philosophy at Florida State University and the author of the forthcoming book Atheism: What Everyone Needs to Know, indicated that although he did not find the traditional philosophical arguments for God’s existence at all persuasive, he could respect people who did, and he added that he found Richard Dawkins’ attempted refutations of these arguments downright embarrassing, as a philosopher: If the person of faith wants to say that God Read More ›

It is difficult to keep track of all the studies indicating that junk DNA isn’t really junk DNA after all. I have no idea how much actual junk there is in our genomes, but evolution has a long history of failed claims of disutility, inefficiency and junk in nature’s designs. That is why I think Dan Graur took the wrong side of history in his “either the genome is mostly junk or evolution is false” proposition.  Read more

I hope our materialist friends will help us with this one. As I understand their argument, entropy is not an obstacle to blind watchmaker evolution, because entropy applies absolutely only in a “closed system,” and the earth is not a closed system because it receives electromagnetic radiation from space. Fair enough. But it seems to me that under that definition of “closed system” only the universe as a whole is a closed system, because every particular place in the universe receives energy of some kind from some other place. And if that is so, it seems the materialists have painted themselves into a corner in which they must, to remain logically consistent, assert that entropy applies everywhere but no place Read More ›

As I viewed the animation of the working of molecular machinery Dr. Torley posted below, two things occurred to me. 1. It is the very acme of absurdity to assert those machines assembled themselves spontaneously through the accretion of random errors sorted by a fitness function. 2. Many highly educated people assert just that. Then a third thing occurred to me. 3.Vast amounts of education do not necessarily insulate one from making absurd asertions; to the contrary, for many people it appears to have equipped them to do so.

Some oppose a design conception of the cosmos only because they consider bizarre a “Designer” of the cosmos. This way they show to have an anthropomorphic, wrong idea of the Designer. So I think it is useful to dedicate a post to counter the error of anthropomorphism. Specifically anthropomorphism is the error of attributing to God the human form and properties. On the contrary, the supreme Being not only transcends any human, even transcends any specific particular “being”, even transcends any “form” whatsoever. There is no reason why one should conceive the universal Intelligence, symbolically called “Designer”, from which the cosmos fully gets its existence and design, as something limited by a form, human or whatever. To my knowledge, in Read More ›

Ann Gauger Further to Biologic Institute’s Ann Gauger’s reflections on biology’s many surprises, after a lifetime in science, including surprises about human origins: Cann et al sequenced mitochondrial DNA from around the world to show that all women were descended from a single woman who lived some time around 200,000 years ago. (Similar work was also done for the Y chromosome and the male lineage.) One of the possible interpretations of this study was that the single woman was Eve. The scientist Francisco Ayala did not like this interpretation. To do him justice, it is indeed possible that there were many women alive at the time of the woman progenitor “Eve”, and that their lineages died out over time. Nontheless, Read More ›