Brazilian Intelligent Design Society President emeritus Enézio E. De Almeida Filho informs us that rabid ID-critics in his country are accusing Intelligent Design advocate Dr. William Dembski of fabricating the following quotes from Schopenhauer and J. B. S. Haldane in his book, The Design Revolution: Answering the Toughest Questions About Intelligent Design (Intervarsity Press: Downers Grove IL, 2004, p.20), because he failed to document their sources. These critics, who I’m told are mainly atheists and agnostics, are claiming that the two quotes below are not genuine: “The acceptance of radical ideas that challenge the status quo (and Darwinism is as status quo as it gets) typically runs through several stages. According to Arthur Schopenhauer, ‘All truth passes through three stages. Read More ›

Here’s a discussion between theologian Michael Chaberek, O.P. and Joseph E. Gorra at the Evangelical Philosophical Society site, on Chaberek’s new book  Catholicism and Evolution (2015): What do you find to be the leading historical and historiographical challenges regarding the ‘story of evolution’ among Catholic leadership and theology? Immediately after Darwin presented his theory, the vast majority of Catholic scholars opposed Darwinian ideas. Today, those scholars who accept “some form of macroevolution” and think that this is theology’s way to go try to diminish that initial opposition. Moreover the private documents of the Church from that period remained virtually unknown until 1997 when the Archives of the Holy Office where opened to researchers. What was learned? We have only recently learned how Read More ›

For Premier Christian Radio’s “Unbelievable?” program. Here: Note: Maybe God is the best explanation. But the formulation of the problem begs a whole bunch of questions we need to unpack in future years. Some of us don’t see how we can get anywhere until we get rid of the superstition of Darwinism, that random changes can produce vast masses of complex information. Much believed, never demonstrated. See Data Basic And if it were true, life forms would be coming into existence from lifeless matter all over. Never happens. The only argument I ever heard against that was the lame excuse that current life forms would expunge new ones. But wait, that means Darwinism probably didn’t happen in the past either. Read More ›

Pearcey i author of Finding Truth, and these podcasts touch on its themes: Are Humans Simply Robots? Nancy Pearcey on the “Free Will Illusion” and “Freeloading” from Religion: Nancy Pearcey on Materialism and Human Rights Well, robots gotta freeload, right? But wait! CAN they?

From the Interface Focus special issue: ‘Are there limits to evolution?’, organized by Simon Conway Morris, Jennifer F. Hoyal Cuthill and Sylvain Gerber: Introduction is Open access: Abstract The 11 contributions to this thematic volume touch on a large range of issues concerning the landscape of biological possibilities and the manner by which it may be traversed by evolving life forms. The contributors also consider how this landscape might be mapped by evolutionary biologists, with an emphasis on how one might identify the limits of such maps. While some agreements emerge on the question of limits on evolution, not surprisingly few contributors look towards the same horizons. Rather than providing a potted summary of the 11 papers, our aim in Read More ›

Assume the following facts for the sake of a thought experiment: There are two competing explanations for a particular phenomenon, which we shall call “Explanation A” and “Explanation B.” Explanation A indubitably qualifies as a scientific explanation. Just as indubitably Explanation B does not qualify as a scientific explanation. Explanation A is false and Explanation B is true. Would our materialist friends prefer Explanation A or Explanation B?

From Yahoo News: In unexpected discovery, comet contains alcohol, sugar Scientists on Friday identified two complex organic molecules, or building blocks of life, on a comet for the first time, shedding new light on the cosmic origins of planets like Earth. Ethyl alcohol and a simple sugar known as glycolaldehyde were detected in Comet Lovejoy, said the study in the journal Science Advances. But while the latest study does not end the debate over whether falling comets indeed seeded Earth with the components necessary for life, it does add something to our knowledge, said study co-author Dominique Bockelée-Morvan, an astrophysicist at the French National Center for Scientific Research. More. The story doesn’t offer information as to why those elements might Read More ›

(O’Leary for News’s regular night job) Edward Snowden: “When you collect everything, you understand nothing.” Mass spying on citizens “fundamentally changes the balance of power between the citizen and the state.” (On the eve of the new Snowden-themed Bond film, Spectre. ) Writing for the internet is like writing on water The internet may be forever; our pages are not. Is our e-mail private? No. What protects most of us is that our words are lost among the trillions no one is looking for. Does new media make us value democracy less? Maybe, and facing elections and upheavals around North America and Europe, it’s bad news. Whoa, Rosie! Twitter is not a family conference! We all have family problems, and let’s Read More ›

Computer programmer Glenn Williamson now claims that ICR geneticist Jeff Tomkins made an elementary error when using the nucmer program to show that human and chimp DNA are only 88% similar. Williamson also asserts that 60 de novo protein coding genes said to be unique to human beings have very similar counterparts in apes, contrary to claims made last year by Dr. Cornelius Hunter, who is an adjunct professor of biophysics at Biola University. What Dr. Tomkins allegedly got wrong As readers of my recent post, Human and chimp DNA: They really are about 98% similar, will recall, Glenn Williamson demolished Dr. Tomkins’s original claim, made back in 2013, that human and chimp DNA are only about 70% similar. Williamson’s Read More ›

Einstein’s hidden variables tests two ways, closing both loopholes. From the Economist: To save physics from the spooky, Einstein invoked what he called hidden variables (though others might describe them as fiddle factors) that would convey information without breaking the universal speed limit. … By now, most physicists reckon the hidden-variable idea is flawed. But no test had closed both loopholes simultaneously—until this week, that is. Ronald Hanson of the University of Delft and his colleagues, writing in Nature, describe an experiment that starts with two electrons in laboratories separated by more than a kilometre. Each emits a photon that travels down a fibre to a third lab, where the two photons are entangled. That, in turn, entangles the electrons that Read More ›

From Popular Science: It’s thought that our hands are what make us human. Combined with our big brains, our fully opposable thumbs enabled our ancestors to make complex tools to conquer the world. But according to biologist David Carrier of Utah State University, that’s not all they were good for. He thinks the human hand’s uniqueness was shaped, in part, so we could punch each other in the face. Carrier introduced this off-beat hypothesis a few years ago, to much controversy. Now he and his colleagues have come out with a study that sort of supports but doesn’t confirm the idea. How could it? The fact that we are the only animals with fists is hardly decisive. There are a Read More ›

Today I ran across one of my favorite Francis Schaeffer aphorisms: “Truth demands confrontation” I was thinking about this later today when I read that Caitlyn Jenner has been proclaimed “woman of the year” by Glamour magazine. Now Bruce Jenner can certainly change his name to Caitlyn Jenner.  But he cannot change himself into a woman.  He can no more be woman of the year than my left shoe can. Well, that’s just narrow minded and bigoted, Barry.  Nope.  If you say 2+2=5,203, you have erred.  And when I say “Nope, it’s 4,” I am confronting your error with the truth, but I am not being narrow minded and bigoted.  No matter how much you sincerely wish that 2+2 equaled 5,203, Read More ›

From Nautilus: Is Life Special Just Because It’s Rare? For centuries, we human beings have speculated on the possible existence and prevalence of life elsewhere in the universe. For the first time in history, we can begin to answer that profound question. At this point, the results of the Kepler mission can be extrapolated to suggest that something like 10 percent of all stars have a habitable planet in orbit. That fraction is large. With 100 billion stars just in our galaxy alone, and so many other galaxies out there, it is highly probable that there are many, many other solar systems with life. From this perspective, life in the cosmos is common. However, there’s another, grander perspective from which Read More ›

Jonathan McLatchie writes to mention that University of Toronto biochemist Larry Moran is hot on the trail again, this time in response to McLatchie’s vid (below) “Is ID a science?” I agree that many ID proponents try to use the science way of knowing to prove that creator gods must have built some complex molecular structures inside modern cells. They try to use evidence and they try to use rational thinking to arrive at logical conclusions. That qualifies as science, in my opinion, even though ID proponents fail to make their case. They don’t have the evidence and their logic is faulty. It’s science but it’s bad science. Lot’s of genuine scientists also publish bad science. Unclear what Dr. Moran Read More ›

Someone reminds us of Lawrence Krauss’ claims that quantum mechanics makes it inevitable that something comes out of nothing just by random processes and that our existence is random and inevitable because of quantum mechanics. See here at BBC News (2014): Their admittedly controversial answer is that the entire universe, from the fireball of the Big Bang to the star-studded cosmos we now inhabit, popped into existence from nothing at all. It had to happen, they say, because “nothing” is inherently unstable. This idea may sound bizarre, or just another fanciful creation story. But the physicists argue that it follows naturally from science’s two most powerful and successful theories: quantum mechanics and general relativity. Here, then, is how everything could have come Read More ›