Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Scott Turner hopes for academic freedom for ID theorists

From J. Scott Turner in Purpose and Desire:What Makes Something “Alive” and Why Modern Darwinism Has Failed to Explain It, What modern Darwinism is asking us to admire is a husk of something once living, but with its vital core drained away as we have poked and prodded with our naughty thumbs until we are left with nothing but the beautiful shell. In short, the science of life has become disenchanted with life itself. That is the looming crisis I described in the Preface. (Kindle Locations 4263-4266). Sometimes, hope floats along on hidden reservoirs of the best tradition of classical liberalism, as in Stephen Jay Gould’s quiet supervision of a young Earth creationist, Kurt Wise, for his doctoral degree in Read More ›

It’s Friday night: What’s the most important question in science?

According to Alex Berezow at American Council on Science and Health: “How do we know what we claim to know?” is quite easily the most important question in science. In fact, the scientific method is designed precisely to answer that question. Through a process of careful observation, hypothesizing, and tightly controlled experimentation, scientists have been able to explain why they know what they claim to know for hundreds of years. Rigorously following this procedure is what separates science from all other disciplines. We’re fine with that but naturalism entails a different approach: Consciousness is an illusion and evidence is an outdated concept where cosmology is concerned. Now here is where the wheels came off: Most aspects of our lives cannot Read More ›

Origenes and the argument from Self-Prediction

Origenes, has put up an interesting argument that we need to ponder as food for thought. It’s Friday, so this should be a good thing to start our weekend on: >>>>>>>>>>>>>> ORIGENES: Here I will argue that self-prediction cannot be accommodated by materialism. In daily life we all routinely engage in acts of self-prediction — ‘tomorrow morning at 9 o’clock I will do 2 push-ups’, ‘I will do some Christmas shopping next Friday’ … and so forth. The question is: how does materialism explain that familiar phenomenon? Given that specific behavior (e.g. doing 2 push-ups) results from specific neural states, how is it that we can predict its occurrence? The fact that one can predict her/his own behavior suggests that Read More ›