Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

It’s Just Getting Worse: Our Retina Structure is “optimized for our vision purposes”

Research out of Israel continues to hammer away at the once powerful proof text for evolution, that our retina is one big kludge given that the photocells were obviously installed backwards. Not only that, but to add insult to injury, the resulting neuron wire bundle had to go somewhere, and the result was a blind spot in our retina. Such a kludge could only be ascribed to the blind process of evolution. The problem with such arguments, aside being nonscientific, is that they are vulnerable to the inexorable march of scientific progress. The act has played out repeatedly: When we first observe a design we don’t understand it and conclude it must be mostly nonsense and another confirmation of evolution. Then, years Read More ›

RDM’s challenge to naturalistic hyperskeptics regarding THEIR “extraordinary claims”

NB: RDM paper, here In the current VJT discussion thread on What Evidence is, RD Miksa asks a telling question (slightly adjusted for readability) of naturalistic hyperskeptics: RDM, 25:  . . . the ironic thing to note in terms of comments from the anti-super-naturalist side is how they fail to realize that their very own arguments undermine their own naturalistic position. Indeed, note their use of the poorly-formulated but often used mantra “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” Note how this mantra is used to claim–in the context of this discussion–how it is apparently more rational to believe that hundreds of witnesses hallucinated or colluded or lied rather than believe that a man levitated. But the problem is, such an argument Read More ›

Why atheists can’t show that Ken Ham is wrong

Professor Jerry Coyne has written a post titled, Ken Ham vs. Dawkins: On the nature of science and physical law, in which he criticizes Ken Ham’s claim that evolution is a “historical” science, dealing with events that can’t be observed, and hence can’t be verified. Coyne contends that “there is no distinction between historical science and real-time experimental science: both are based on observation, prediction, and testability.” First, evolution can make predictions about the past which scientists can subsequently verify (e.g. the prediction that “birds evolved from dinosaurs and whales from land-dwelling animals”). It can also make “retrodictions,” by making sense of previously puzzling data: for instance, it can explain “biogeographic patterns like the absence of endemic mammals on oceanic Read More ›