2018

From Tyler O’Neil at PJ Media: Each February 12, the scientific community celebrates the anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birthday as both Darwin Day and Academic Freedom Day. The Discovery Institute also celebrates by naming a “Censor of the Year,” and on Monday they announced that “award” goes to none other than “the free encyclopedia,” Wikipedia. … The problem goes far beyond the entry for “Intelligent Design,” however. On every entry for an intelligent design proponent, the site does not fail to describe the theory as “pseudoscientific.” Last year, Wikipedia removed the page for notable insect paleontologist Günter Bechly, seemingly for his position on ID. Walter Bradley, a Baylor University professor and ID scholar, saw his entry whittled down, with many Read More ›

In the film The Matrix, the character known as Cypher or “Mr. Reagan,” has grown weary of the endless war with the machines and his dreary living conditions.  In this scene we see Cypher contemplating a deal with Agent Smith.  In return for betraying his comrades, the Agents will return him to the Matrix as a rich and famous person (within that imaginary construct) with no recollection of the true nature of the world: Here is the dialoge from the scence: Smith:  Do we have a deal, Mr. Reagan? Reagan:  You know, I know this steak doesn’t exist.  I know that when I put it in my mouth the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious.  Read More ›

From Philip Cunningham at YouTube: It all began in 1922, when Einstein and Bergson met in an unplanned but fateful debate. Einstein had been invited to give a presentation in Paris on his theory of relativity. Time was central to Einstein’s work. It was, however, also the central issue in Bergson’s philosophy. Their conflicting views on the meaning of time set the scholars on collision course. In the debate, Bergson made it clear he had no problem with the mathematical logic of Einstein’s theory or the data that supported it. But for Bergson, relativity was not a theory that addressed time on its most fundamental, philosophical level. Instead, he claimed, it was theory about clocks and their behavior. Bergson called Read More ›

One of the things that struck me in looking at superionic water is how it is so often spoken of as though it were partly liquid and partly solid. I did a spot of reflection, which I am thinking it may help to headline. Where, some of the ideas being brought up will help us on the onward subject of looking at how memristors work. So, following up on the new form of water post: KF, 4: >>One of the interesting things about the coverage [on superionic water]  is how they phrased the properties of superionic ice in terms of being both a solid and a liquid. This may suggest to the public the notion of a contradictory state, which Read More ›

From Brandon Spektor at LiveScience: Earth’s Inner Core Shouldn’t Technically Exist In the paper, the researchers argued that the standard model of how the Earth’s core formed is missing a crucial detail about how metals crystallize: a mandatory, massive drop in temperature that would be extremely difficult to achieve at core pressures. Weirder still, the researchers said, once you account for this missing detail, the science seems to suggest that Earth’s inner core shouldn’t exist at all. More. We don’t know as much as many people think about the Moon either. See also: Textbook theory of moon’s origin is challenged Space.com: Scientists finally know how old Moon is What’s surprising, really, is how little we know about the moon in Read More ›

No really. From Evolution News: You thought you’d heard it all? All the desperate materialist theories seeking to explain the burst of biological novelty some 530 million years ago that Meyer writes about in Darwin’s Doubt? You were wrong. Along comes Lund University in Sweden with a “Novel hypothesis on why animals diversified on Earth.” Get ready for the cancer theory of the Cambrian explosion. Can tumors teach us about animal evolution on Earth? Researchers believe so and now present a novel hypothesis of why animal diversity increased dramatically on Earth about half a billion years ago. A biological innovation may have been key. [Emphasis added.] Not many of us who have seen friends suffer or die from cancer would Read More ›

From Nancy Pearcey, author of Love Thy Body: Answering Hard Questions about Life and Sexuality, at CNS: What Was Darwin’s ‘Original’ Thought? Original thinking? The truth is that there was little about Darwin’s scientific theory that was original—and the part that was original was not scientific. The idea that organisms undergo minor variations was not original. For millennia, farmers and breeders have known that they could induce minor changes in a breeding population (typically a species or genus). This process also happens in nature, where it is called microevolution. What was original was Darwin’s proposal that the same minor variations might accumulate via undirected natural selection to originate completely new organs and body plans (generating higher taxonomic categories such as Read More ›

From Sean Carroll, discussing his arXiv paper (a chapter in an upcoming book, Routledge Companion to the Philosophy of Physics) at Preposterous Universe: It seems natural to ask why the universe exists at all. Modern physics suggests that the universe can exist all by itself as a self-contained system, without anything external to create or sustain it. But there might not be an absolute answer to why it exists. I argue that any attempt to account for the existence of something rather than nothing must ultimately bottom out in a set of brute facts; the universe simply is, without ultimate cause or explanation. More. He adds, [t]his kind of question might be the kind of thing that doesn’t have a Read More ›

Water is of central interest to ID and to many other fields of study relevant to the cosmos and in the world of life. Accordingly, the recent experimental discovery of a predicted metal-like state with a grid of O atoms and with H+ ions flowing through, is significant news.  As NY Times reports: >>This new form, called superionic water, consists of a rigid lattice of oxygen atoms through which positively charged hydrogen nuclei move. It is not known to exist naturally anywhere on Earth, but it may be bountiful farther out in the solar system, including in the mantles of Uranus and Neptune . . . . [S]cientists at Lawrence Livermore first squeezed water between two pieces of diamond with Read More ›

They withered under study. There’s been a lively discussion between geneticists Dennis Venema and Richard Buggs and about whether the human race must have had more than one pair of ancestors (Venema yes, Buggs no). From Evolution News and Science Today: Earlier, we saw that evolutionary genomicist Richard Buggs has been engaged in a dialogue with Venema about the latter’s arguments against a short bottleneck of two individuals in human history. Buggs is skeptical that methods of measuring human genetic diversity cited by Venema can adequately test such an “Adam and Eve” hypothesis. Buggs’s initial email to Venema thus concluded, “I would encourage you to step back a bit from the strong claims you are making that a two person bottleneck Read More ›

Religions and Extraterrestrial Life: How Will We Deal With It? by David A. Weintraub: In the twenty-first century, the debate about life on other worlds is quickly changing from the realm of speculation to the domain of hard science. Within a few years, as a consequence of the rapid discovery by astronomers of planets around other stars, astronomers very likely will have discovered clear evidence of life beyond the Earth. Such a discovery of extraterrestrial life will change everything. Knowing the answer as to whether humanity has company in the universe will trigger one of the greatest intellectual revolutions in history, not the least of which will be a challenge for at least some terrestrial religions. Which religions will handle Read More ›

Here. Readers will recall William Lane Craig and Jordan B. Peterson. They may not know of Rebecca Goldstein but, by way of brief introduction, she is Steven Pinker’s wife and he has been on our radar a few times. Enjoy! On January 26th at the University of Toronto 1500 people packed into Convocation Hall to watch a fascinating dialogue on the meaning of life featuring philosopher William Lane Craig, psychology professor Dr. Jordan Peterson, and philosopher and author Dr. Rebecca Newberger Goldstein See also: New Scientist vs. William Lane Craig on infinity explanations Canadian psychologist takes on the howling post-modern void, largely alone and Steve Pinker on faitheism Hat tip: Ken Francis, journalist and author of The Little Book of God, Read More ›

From Chelsea Gohd at Futurism: Our species has long agonized over the concept of human consciousness. What exactly causes it, and why did we evolve to experience consciousness? Now, a new study has uncovered a clue in the hunt for answers, and it reveals that the human brain might have more in common with the universe than we could have imagined. According to a team of researchers from France and Canada, our brains might produce consciousness as something of a side effect of increasing entropy, a process that has been taking place throughout the universe since the Big Bang. More. The research is based on a small study done on epileptics. If the theory that consciousness is a natural side Read More ›

As videos: In April 2017, philosopher Alvin Plantinga received the Templeton Prize. To celebrate Plantinga’s most influential ideas and arguments, the Center for Philosophy of Religion at Notre Dame is producing a series of ten videos that explore his philosophical contributions. More. First four launched. Plantinga bio here. See also: First Things, on Plantinga’s surprising Templeton win

One of the key ideas and driving assumptions of modern evolutionary materialistic scientism is that mind can be explained on brain without residue. In an extreme form, we can see it in Crick’s the Astonishing Hypothesis (1994): . . . that “You”, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. As Lewis Carroll’s Alice might have phrased: “You’re nothing but a pack of neurons.” This hypothesis is so alien to the ideas of most people today that it can truly be called astonishing. Philip Johnson, of course, replied the next year, Read More ›