As I have often written in these pages, happy-faced New Atheists are simpering cowards. They say you are a cosmic accident with no more intrinsic value than a grub worm.  There is no meaning.  There is no foundation for ethics.  Everything you do is utterly determined by impersonal natural forces, so free will cannot exist.  Indeed, even “you” cannot exist, because the most primordial of your experiences – your subjective self-awareness – is an illusion. But, hey, be happy. Barf. There is a glaring disconnect between their premises and the conclusions that must follow from those premises, and their unwarranted optimism.  Cowards that they are – they steadfastly avert their gaze from their conclusions so they can retain their optimism. I Read More ›

Theology can lead us to some weird places. From Evolution News and Science Today, in a continuing series on Adam and the Genome, As if on cue, science news today reports a remarkable discovery: cave art in Spain from upwards of 64,000 years ago, apparently by Neanderthals. The Wall Street Journal aptly summarizes the takeaway: Neanderthals, once considered the low-brows of human evolution, may have been among the world’s first artists, creating cave paintings long before modern humanity arrived on the scene… “Once considered”? This is timely because in the book Adam and the Genome, which we’ve been reviewing here, theistic evolutionist and biologist Dennis Venema discusses DNA that has been extracted from fossils of extinct members of the genus Read More ›

From Robert Wright and Galen Strawson at Meaning of Life TV: 0:30 Why scientific materialism is harder to define than you think 14:42 Galen explains panpsychism 27:36 What does “mind is all there is to reality” mean? 32:48 Is human consciousness epiphenomenal? 40:35 Do physical laws come from somewhere? 44:35 Is it like something to be a rock? (And is Galen saying it is?) 50:57 Galen: Discussion of the mind-body problem was better 100 years ago The reader who sent this link suggests that panpsychism may be “better than pure materialism.” But one wants to ask, better in what sense? If everything is conscious, nothing is. So the primary materialist (naturalist) assertion, that your consciousness (and his) is an illusion, Read More ›

Saturday 24th February 2018 – 02:30 pm Seems to be up now in EST. Audio:Premier Christian Radio: A bacterial flagellum acts as the outboard motor on a bacteria. But is the complex arrangement of parts that enable it to do its job a result of design or evolution? Michael Behe first opened the debate on the ‘irreducible complexity’ of biochemical machines in his 1996 book Darwin’s Black Box. Intelligent Design proponent Jonathan McLatchie and theistic evolutionist Keith Fox debate whether Behe’s theory has stood the test of time, the bacterial flagellum and whether ID is a science stopper or theologically helpful. More. Comment: Given that most traditional science greats believed that they lived in a meaningful universe that showed evidence Read More ›

From George Busby, offering five examples, at the Conversation: 3. Our ancestors evolved surprisingly quickly Interbreeding accounts only for a tiny amount of human adaptation around the world. Analyses of DNA are showing us that, as our ancestors moved around the world, they evolved to different environments and diets far more quickly than was originally thought. For example, the textbook example of a human adaptation is the evolution of lactose tolerance. The ability to digest milk past the age of three is not universal – and was previously assumed to have spread into Europe with agriculture from the Middle East starting some 10,000 years ago. But when we look at the DNA of people over the past 10,000 years, this Read More ›

From Maria Temming at Science News: Computers get a say in these life-changing decisions because their crime forecasts are supposedly less biased and more accurate than human guesswork. A comparison of the volunteers’ answers with COMPAS’ predictions for the same 1,000 defendants found that both were about 65 percent accurate. “We were like, ‘Holy crap, that’s amazing,’” says study coauthor Hany Farid, a computer scientist at Dartmouth. “You have this commercial software that’s been used for years in courts around the country — how is it that we just asked a bunch of people online and [the results] are the same?” There’s nothing inherently wrong with an algorithm that only performs as well as its human counterparts. But this finding, Read More ›

From David Snoke at the Christian Scientific Society: Quantum mechanics is a strange theory, and it has been used to justify all manner of religious claims such as extra-sensory perception. This year we bring together five experts on the physics of quantum mechanics to discuss what we know and what we don’t know. We will work both to make the basic laws of quantum mechanics accessible to the non-expert, while at the same time addressing cutting-edge debates in the philosophy and application of quantum physics. Location: The Twentieth Century Club, 4201 Bigelow Blvd., Pittsburgh, PA Speakers include: 7:45 P.M. Dr. Erica W. Carlson, “Quantum Mechanics For Everyone” Abstract: Can I use quantum mechanics to create my own reality? Does God Read More ›

From U Wisconsin paleoanthropologist John Hawks: Bernard Wood’s research group has a new paper on brain size evolution in hominins, led by Andrew Du in Proceedings of the Royal Society, Series B: “Pattern and process in hominin brain size evolution are scale-dependent”. In this paper, I notice that the researchers have done a really weird thing: Their analyses include only hominin fossils before 500,000 years ago. … The specimens reflect every hominin species from Australopithecus afarensis up to “Homo heidelbergensis”. Modern humans and Neanderthals have been left out of the dataset—they don’t fall within the pre-500,000-year time range. On the basis of this dataset, the authors conclude that the entire hominin lineage is compatible with a single pattern of gradual Read More ›

Update: Lawrence Krauss, a world-renowned theoretical physicist who led Arizona State University’s Origins Project for nearly a decade, will not lead the initiative any longer, he announced on Twitter Thursday. Krauss was accused of sexual misconduct in a February Buzzfeed News story and placed on paid leave by the university in March while it conducted an investigation. The story included allegations of inappropriate comments and behavior from multiple women. Krauss has strongly denied the allegations. Rachel Leingang, “Renowned ASU professor Lawrence Krauss ousted from post after sex misconduct claims” at Arizona Republic, August 3, 2018 He was founder and director since 2009. — From Peter Aldhous: BuzzFeed News has learned that the incident with Hensley is one of many wide-ranging Read More ›

Culturally that’s a big one. From Carolyn Gramling at ScienceNews: The once-lengthy list of “definitely a dinosaur” features had already been dwindling over the past few decades thanks to new discoveries of close dino relatives such as Teleocrater. With an April 2017 report of Teleocrater’s skull depression (SN Online: 4/17/17), yet another feature was knocked off the list. … “I often get asked ‘what defines a dinosaur,’ ” says Randall Irmis, a paleontologist at the Natural History Museum of Utah in Salt Lake City. Ten to 15 years ago, scientists would list perhaps half a dozen features, he says. “The only one to still talk about is having a complete hole in the hip socket.” The abundance of recent discoveries Read More ›

From a 2016 paper by University College’s Chris Knight: Highlights • Language emerged in only one species, H. sapiens. • Such a system cannot evolve in a Darwinian social world. • Language emerged for reasons which no currently accepted theoretical framework can explain. Abstract: Language evolved in no species other than humans, suggesting a deep-going obstacle to its evolution. Could it be that language simply cannot evolve in a Darwinian world? Reviewing the insights of Noam Chomsky, Amotz Zahavi and Dan Sperber, this article shows how and why each apparently depicts language’s emergence as theoretically impossible. Chomsky shuns evolutionary arguments, asserting simply that language was instantaneously installed. Zahavi argues that language entails reliance on low cost conventional signals whose evolutionary emergence Read More ›

From neuroscientist (zoology) Björn Brembs at Frontier in Human Neuroscience: In which journal a scientist publishes is considered one of the most crucial factors determining their career. The underlying common assumption is that only the best scientists manage to publish in a highly selective tier of the most prestigious journals. However, data from several lines of evidence suggest that the methodological quality of scientific experiments does not increase with increasing rank of the journal. On the contrary, an accumulating body of evidence suggests the inverse: methodological quality and, consequently, reliability of published research works in several fields may be decreasing with increasing journal rank. The data supporting these conclusions circumvent confounding factors such as increased readership and scrutiny for these Read More ›

From Scuzzaman, commenting at “Fine-tuning is easy to explain: The universe itself is conscious and somewhat like a human: The thing I find most amusing and dismaying is that, as long as one affirms some kind of pan-darwinian orthodoxy vis-a-vis common descent by modification, literally ANY kind of madness is back on the menu. It is this, more than anything else, that identifies evolution as a religious mania. It’s a perverse mirror image of the worst political aspects of historical religion wherein the only possible heresy is not dissent but disobedience. In modern science you can be respectable while disobeying every fundamental precept of the discipline, as long as you do not dissent from its primal dogma: common descent by Read More ›

. . . at age 99 years. Condolences to those who mourn. Thoughts? END

That’s “cosmopanpsychism.” An earlier version is rocks have minds. From Philip Goff at Aeon: In the past 40 or so years, a strange fact about our Universe gradually made itself known to scientists: the laws of physics, and the initial conditions of our Universe, are fine-tuned for the possibility of life. It turns out that, for life to be possible, the numbers in basic physics – for example, the strength of gravity, or the mass of the electron – must have values falling in a certain range. And that range is an incredibly narrow slice of all the possible values those numbers can have. It is therefore incredibly unlikely that a universe like ours would have the kind of numbers Read More ›