From Sedeer El-Showk at Nautilus: From the Muslim perspective, fine-tuning isn’t a problem, but rather an example of the beauty and order of the cosmos. Multiverse proposals seem to willfully undermine this beauty, positing a plethora of universes to account for the observed characteristics of our universe. To Mimouni, the idea is also unscientific. “From an ontological point of view, it’s a catastrophe, because you’re proposing things you can never observe, universes that are causally disconnected from our universe,” he says. “In fact, it’s against the philosophy of science as we understand it because it talks about entities that can never be studied or have their existence proven.” More. Got it in one. The multiverse is not only “not science.” Read More ›

In Snowflake Barbarians, I speculated about what a post-Christian polity looks like.  Here’s another clue from yesterday:

Discovery Institute’s Dr. Jonathan Wells will be presenting to my LIVE “Apologetics Academy” webinar and fielding audience Q&A today, Saturday, at 8pm GMT / 3pm EST / 2pm CST / 12noon PST. He will be speaking on the subject of “Design Beyond DNA”. I hope some of you can join us. Please click the link below to join the webinar at or shortly before the meeting’s start time: https://zoom.us/j/457736238 Doing so will immediately prompt you to download the Zoom webinar platform we use (if you have not already done so). This should only take a minute or two. You will then be automatically connected to our webinar room. Skeptics are welcome, and there will be plenty of opportunity to engage and Read More ›

From Ben Freivogel at Nautilus: If the multiverse is large and diverse enough to contain some regions where dark matter is made out of light particles and other regions where dark matter is made out of heavy particles, how could we possibly predict which one we should see in our own region? And indeed many people have criticized the multiverse concept on just these grounds. If a theory makes no predictions, it ceases to be physics. Freivogel nonetheless thinks that the multiverse is the physicist’s friend: Theoretical and observational evidence suggests that we are living in an enormous, eternally expanding multiverse where the constants of nature vary from place to place. In this context, we can only make statistical predictions. Read More ›

1. Climate Alarmism – why do Atheists/Materialists think they can recognize and understand true climate facts and extrapolate them into valid theories about the future of Earth’s climate? Do they not realize all of their mental processes have no top-down, supernatural control/override authority? They think whatever happenstance chemical interactions cause them to think, and believe whatever chance forces cause them to believe. Under such a paradigm, they believe what they do about the climate for exactly the same reason non-believers hold their non-alarmist views: chemical interactions have caused such beliefs. “Facts” and “truths” are nothing more than sensations that unintelligent, undirected physical processes cause us to attach to particular thoughts. They might eat some particular ingredient or smell something and Read More ›

From Shannon Hall at New Scientist: So where are these unseen universes in relation to ours? How many are there? What goes on inside them? And can we ever hope to visit one? Such questions might sound daft, particularly given the lack of observational evidence that the multiverse exists. And yet thanks to new ideas on where distant universes might be hiding or how to count them, physicists are beginning to get their bearings. Rather fittingly, though, there is not just one answer – depending on which version of the multiverse you’re navigating, there are many. (paywall) More. [colour emphasis added] Question: “New pics from Pluto, including strange, icy haloes” sounds like science, a matter of public interest. “How far away Read More ›

At Space.com: NASA’s New Horizons probe has visited a place never before visited by a robotic probe from Earth: Pluto. In July 2015, the spacecraft completed a nearly-decade-long journey to fly by Pluto, and reveal humanity’s first close-up look at the distant dwarf planet. See photos and images from the New Horizons mission to Pluto in this gallery. More. See also: Did Pluto get tipped over? Pluto has been resurfaced. But how? Pluto has ice mountains? and Weather Network: Slug-like object spotted on Pluto Follow UD News at Twitter!

From science philosophers Adrian Currie and Derek Turner at Aeon: Both Triceratops and Torosaurus lived in what is now western North America near the end of the Cretaceous period. Torosaurus was bigger and had a longer frill on its head, which sported openings or ‘fenestral’. The two species are considered quite distant (different genera). But In 2010, the palaeontologists John Scannella and John Horner challenged this consensus with the so-called ‘Toroceratops’ hypothesis. They argued that Torosaurus and Triceratops were really the same kind of animal, and that the differences were just a question of the creature’s age. As individuals grew up, they got bigger, their frills got longer, and they developed holes. According to this view, a Torosaurus is just Read More ›

Obviously, for all to see. A sentence appears in a paywalled article in a peer-reviewed publication (Journal of Molecular Evolution): Since the subject of cellular emergence of life is unusually complicated (we avoid the term ‘complex’ because of its association with ‘biocomplexity’ or ‘irreducible complexity’), it is unlikely that any overall theory of life’s nature, emergence, and evolution can be fully formulated, quantified, and experimentally investigated. But that is not a justified change in terminology and certainly not an improvement. “Complicated” is usually a pejorative term, that is, a term that means something negative. Compare: “The new system is more complicated” [= messy, time-wasting, not ergonomic, typical product of a committee, etc.… ] vs. “The new system is more complex” Read More ›

This article by Stephanie Margaret Bucklin in Astronomy Magazine is remarkably candid. Bucklin admits that any multiverse theory that is not testable (which, currently, is all of them) falls within the realm of metaphysics, not physics.  She writes:  “But how credible is a scientific theory that might not be testable? . . . theories like the multiverse have drawn criticism from some scientists, who warn of the danger of speculation beyond what data can tell us.” She also admits what ID proponents have known all along — fine tuning is a real thing crying out for an explanation, and a primary motivating factor behind multiverse theory is a search for a materialist answer to that problem: Though scientists have no direct Read More ›

Here, on the thugs’ attack on Thomas Nagel for doubting Darwin: The intelligentsia was so furious that it formed a lynch mob. In May 2013, the Chronicle of Higher Education ran a piece called “Where Thomas Nagel Went Wrong.” One paragraph was notable: Whatever the validity of [Nagel’s] stance, its timing was certainly bad. The war between New Atheists and believers has become savage, with Richard Dawkins writing sentences like, “I have described atonement, the central doctrine of Christianity, as vicious, sadomasochistic, and repellent. We should also dismiss it as barking mad….” In that climate, saying anything nice at all about religion is a tactical error. It’s the cowardice of the Chronicle’s statement that is alarming—as if the only conceivable Read More ›

In response to our Steampunk Darwin, David Klinghoffer observes, at Evolution News & Views, a classic example of the way in which mediocrities know they are right: Because they can attract a consensus of, mainly, themselves to end discussions of problematic new information: Shutting Down the Evolution Debate, the “Mainstream Science” Way We noted the other day our biologist colleague Cornelius Hunter’s online adventure, parachuting into a discussion with theistic evolutionists over at the BioLogos website. The debate in a thread at their Open Forum, “What is Universal Common Descent?,” is long and discursive. It runs to 212 entries so far. I can’t claim to have read every word, but this struck me as telling. At comment #203, Washington University’s Joshua Read More ›

The abstract of a paper by Rene van Woudenberg of the Abraham Kuyper Center and Jeroen de Ridder, Design Hypotheses Behave Like Skeptical Hypotheses (or: Why We Can’t Know the Falsity of Design Hypotheses) It is often claimed that, as a result of scientific progress, we now know that the natural world displays no design. Although we have no interest in defending design hypotheses, we will argue that establishing claims to the effect that we know the denials of design hypotheses is more difficult than it seems. We do so by issuing two skeptical challenges to design-deniers. The first challenge draws inspiration from radical skepticism and shows how design claims are at least as compelling as radical skeptical scenarios in undermining Read More ›

From Ewen Callaway at Nature: A virus that infects bacteria listens to messages from its relatives when deciding how to attack its hosts. Its relatives? These aren’t the viruses we learned about in health and safety class. The discovery — in viruses that attack Bacillus bacteria — marks the first time that any type of viral communication system has ever been found. But researchers say that many other viruses could communicate with each other through their own molecular languages — perhaps even viruses that are responsible for human diseases. If that is the case, scientists might have found a new way to disrupt viral attacks. When levels of arbitrium build up — after a large number of cells have died Read More ›

From Evolution News & Views: the top five big problems for evolutionary theory: namely, the fossil record, the origin of biological information, the necessity of early mutations in development, the existence of epigenetic information, and Dr. Axe’s recent contribution in his new book Undeniable, the universal design intuition. More. Here. See also: Darwinism: Replacement or extension? Follow UD News at Twitter!