Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Why Economics and ID go Hand-in-Hand

In my previous post about Bob Murphy’s support of ID, some people commented that Bob Murphy, being an economist, doesn’t count much in support of ID. However, those comments would be misplaced. Although Bob Murphy did not get into this in this podcast episode, there is actually a direct connection between ID and economics. First of all, as I have pointed out innumerable times, ID is not a theory of biology or of origins, it is a theory of causation. Biology and origins are application areas, not the core idea itself. Naturalism causes us to have blinders on not just in the case of evolution, but in any number of other academic endeavors as well. When we assume that humans Read More ›

Michael Egnor:Why the human mind is the opposite of a computer

Egnor: Mental activity always has meaning—every thought is about something. Computation always lacks meaning in itself. A word processing program doesn’t care about the opinion that you’re expressing when you use it. Read More ›

The “connectome” means we may never “understand” the brain

In the sense of “There. That’s that.” It’s just too big. Machine learning might help but machines don’t explain their decisions very well. If the brain is immensely complex, it may elude complete understanding in detail. Deep Learning may survey it but that won’t convey understanding to us. We may need to look at more comprehensive ways of knowing Read More ›

Economist Bob Murphy Explains Why He is Pro-ID

Bob Murphy, author of the book Contra Krugman: Smashing the Errors of America’s Most Famous Keynesian and host of the Bob Murphy Show, just released Episode 106 of his podcast, where he expresses his support of the ID project and relates it to other marginalized anti-establishment academic projects.

A Polish MP says Darwinian natural selection means anti-Semitic pogroms benefited Jewish people

One would be glad to hear that this is fake news but the history of popular cultural Darwinism means that it could well be genuine. Remember eugenics. Meantime, Korwin-Mikke’s said other things, consistent with this view. Read More ›

SETI @ Home shuts down

Well, the state of computing has certainly changed but, after so many years of no Contact, the magic has probably also gone out of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) project. Also, to use the “Woke” approach that is becoming increasingly popular in popular science, why should SETI get to say what is and isn’t a valid search for ET? Why should SETI control the narrative? Can't everyone have or be their own ET? Sow the wind... Read More ›

Michael Egnor asks: Is Joe Blow really anti-intellectual?

“Joe has been told since the 1980s that the world is going to end due to global warming. It sounds like those crazy guys with the placards who say the world is gonna end tomorrow. The earth’s sell-by-date keeps getting pushed forward.” One reason for many recent political upheavals in a variety of jurisdictions is that Joe has begun to wonder if he’s really the one with the problem. Read More ›

Bill Dembski on the primacy of information for science

The conversation with Fred Skiff, chair of the physics department at the University of Iowa examines why information is the most basic object of study in science and how Conservation of Information naturally leads to the conclusion that intelligence is the ultimate source of information. Read More ›

Why the universe cannot logically be infinite in time backwards

For example: The philosophical argument for the universe having a beginning is that past time cannot be infinite because an infinite amount of time cannot already have been exhausted so as to arrive at the present. Infinite time is limitless, inexhaustible, and thus cannot have been exhausted. Read More ›