2020

Ac 27 records Paul’s journey to Rome as an appeals prisoner, including a shipwreck. After adverse winds had led them to Fair Havens, Crete, a ship’s council decided to sail on despite danger to reach a better port 40 miles down the coast, despite the hazard and counsels of caution by the Apostle in chains. A seemingly desirable South wind came up, giving them a reach wind to sail the 40 miles. But then an early Nor’easter struck. By v 20, they had been kept in its grips and were reduced to emergency measures: Ac 27:20 When neither sun nor stars appeared for many days, and no small tempest lay on us, all hope of our being saved was at last Read More ›

From Wikipedia:  “The motte-and-bailey fallacy** (named after the motte-and-bailey castle) is a form of argument and an informal fallacy where an arguer conflates two positions with similar properties, one modest and easy to defend (the “motte”) and one much more controversial (the “bailey”).” It occurs to me that the entire Darwinian project is often portrayed in terms of a motte-and-bailey fallacy.  How many times have you heard the statement “evolution is as certain as gravity”?  Well, given a certain sense of the word “evolution,” the statement is true or nearly so.  Consider the following proposition:  Evolution means “change in the biosphere over time.”  No one – from the most ardent materialist atheist to the most fervid young earth creationist – Read More ›

Thanks to News for plugging our new book here: Excerpt from new ID book: Evolution and Intelligent Design in a Nutshell Couple of follow-up items worth checking out, for those interested in the origin of life. How much progress are we really making in abiogenesis research? From Evolution News: Origin Stories — RNA, DNA, and a Dose of Imagination From ID the Future podcast: https://www.discovery.org/multimedia/audio/2020/06/new-id-book-puts-self-replicating-molecules-under-the-microscope/ (Apologies for the audio quality in the latter; I think the second episode, hopefully coming out next week, will be slightly better.)

IHU- Méditerranée Infection, Marseille, is a significant French research institute that has continued its work on CV 19. For the record, here are excerpts from some recent work, headlined from threads where such would be buried: EXH 1: >>COVID-IHU #15 Version 1 du 27 Mai 2020 Early diagnosis and management of COVID-19 patients: a real-life cohort study of 3,737 patients, Marseille, France Abstract Background: In our institute in Marseille, France, we proposed early and massive screening for coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). Hospitalization and early treatment with hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin (HCQ-AZ) was proposed for the positive cases. Methods: We retrospectively report the clinical management of 3,737 patients, including 3,054 (81.7%) treated with HCQ-AZ for at least three days and 683 (18.3%) Read More ›

Evidence is the enemy: In their more candid moments, some leading lights in the evolutionary community admit that the Darwinian worldview comes complete with a set of blinders. They even urge the wearing of the blinders. The great biophysicist Francis Crick, for example, said, “Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved.”1 Harvard geneticist Richard Lewontin was even more explicit. In an essay he wrote for The New York Review of Books, he defined science as ruling out, by definition, the possibility of God intelligently designing life — never mind that belief in a rational, orderly cosmic Creator was the soil from which modern science sprang. Jonathan Witt, “Darwin’s Silver Chair” at Read More ›

As philosopher Richard Johns explains, sims do not understand simhood: How can Alice determine whether the strange little man in her apartment who claims to be her Programmer is telling the truth? Recently, philosopher Richard Johns (left), whose work was profiled here at Mind Matters News in “A philosopher explains why thinking matter is impossible,” has now written a piece for Medium. In it, he explains why we cannot create a sim that is a conscious, rational being. He uses a dialogue between “Alice” and “The Programmer” to unpack the idea: The dialogue begins with Alice returning from school to find a strange little man in her apartment. He seemed not to notice her entering the room, and remained seated Read More ›