I am seriously considering abandoning giving ID-talks in Christian settings, as it seems completely purposeless and because I find it exhausting, depressing and frustrating. While atheists and theistic evolutionists reject ID because they consider it creationism, the creationists reject ID because it is not creationism
Month: September 2019
Discovery: Spiders fly hundreds of miles using electricity
They sense and manipulate Earth’s electric fields.
Re Jeffrey Epstein: Let’s not complicate the issues
Epstein wasn’t even a scientist. It wasn’t like trying to figure out how to deal with a Nazi who has a cure for cancer. Don’t let the people who are implicated invoke high and difficult questions to cloud over plain old wrongdoing.
How Materialist Fundamentalists Are Like Islamic Fundamentalists
A few weeks ago I posted How Materialist Fundamentalists Are Like Christian Fundamentalists in which I argued that Christian and Materialist fundamentalists are alike in this respect: Their religious/metaphysical commitments come first and the evidence comes second. If the evidence seems to contradict conclusions compelled by their faith commitments, they will either reject the evidence […]
Life’s building blocks may have formed in interstellar clouds
Essential building blocks of DNA — compounds called nucleobases — have been detected for the first time in a simulated environment . . . See the story here. Presumably, one can create a simulation in which one may “detect” anything one wishes. Meanwhile, tucking the origins of life inside simulations of environments several light years […]
Fields medalist says math really exists
So okay, if math really exists, it undermines a great deal of the nonsense barked about consciousness as an evolved illusion. That is, if consciousness enables us to apprehend what really exists, there is good reason for believing that consciousness itself exists
Discredited paper claiming that religious children are less generous is still cited in media
We love it. “Correction mechanisms in science can sometimes work slowly… ” Why does that remind us of “Nature has retracted a major oceans warning paper, after ten months of mass freakouts? The suspicion raised—and it is not unreasonable—is that the harm that wrong information does is useful to some parties. It’s almost like we sense the retraction coming conveniently after the damage is done.
Michael Egnor: Did consciousness evolve to help us “find love”?
Egnor: How tight a link might we expect between reproductive success and the contemplation of truth? Not a lot, it would seem, if the experience of philosophy majors on the dating scene is any measure.
“Spengler” speaks out on David Gelernter (the Yale computer guy who dumped Darwin)
When the smart people abandon Darwinism, who’s left and what does that mean for what happens next?
Sean Carroll: “Nowadays, when a more scientific worldview has triumphed and everyone knows that God doesn’t exist . . . ” — really?
Carroll, here, was responding to a Weekly Standard cover article on the reactions to philosopher Nagel’s publication of Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False : What I find particularly interesting in the captioned clip is the laudatory reference to “a more Scientific WORLDVIEW” which is immediately problematic, […]
Rob Sheldon on the renewal of 3.5 billion-year-old life claims
Sheldon: My best guess is that he has found something organically simple such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH), if only because 3.5 billion years is a long time for organics to survive, and PAHs are the sort of keratonized (turned into keragen) that is stable.
Sabine Hossenfelder explains the problem with the “many worlds” hypothesis
Hossenfelder: In the many worlds interpretation, if you set up a detector for a measurement, then the detector will also split into several universes.
Should we infect Mars with bacteria?
Natalie Coleman at Futurism: A paper published last month … argues that the “primary colonists” of the Red Planet should be “microorganisms” — the bacteria, viruses, and fungi that support many of life’s processes here on Earth.
Eric Holloway: Friendly AI would kill us all
Our friendly godbot, Alfalfa and Omega would feel constrained to take such an action by the superior logic of its programming.
Science organizations continue to reel from Jeffrey Epstein “bombshells”
A MIT Media Lab director kept Epstein’s name off the records in such a way as to make it hard to claim they did not know there was a problem.