Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Aquinas, Ockham, and Descartes about God. A free adaptation of their main arguments

Video made with Artificial Intelligence. Descartes:By ‘God’, I understand, a substance which is infinite, independent, supremely intelligent, supremely powerful, and which created both myself and everything else […] that exists.“I could not possibly be of such a nature as I am, and yet have in my mind the idea of a God, if God did not in reality exist.” I have concluded the evident existence of God, and that my existence depends entirely on God in all the moments of my life, that I do not think that the human spirit may know anything with greater evidence and certitude. Thomas Aquinas’ Unmoved Mover https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t3170-aquinas-first-mover-five-ways-argument The cosmological argument for God’s existence https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t1333-kalaam-the-cosmological-argument-for-gods-existence The universe cannot be past eternal https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t1333-kalaam-the-kalaam-cosmological-argument#5124 The cause Read More ›

At SciTech Daily: The Fountain of Life: Scientists Uncover the “Chemistry Behind the Origin of Life”

The requirement of a particular sequence of amino acids endows the protein with vast amounts of information, far beyond what could be "chanced upon" by any natural process within the history of the entire universe. Read More ›

About the fine-tuning of the Solar system: By Isaac Newton

Who are the scientists of the rank of Isaac Newton today, professing God as Newton did at his time? The universe, our galaxy, our solar system, and the Earth–Moon double planet system demonstrate clearly some remarkable evidence of highly intelligent design. If we consider them separately, each characteristic appears to be highly improbable due to random chance. When taken all of them together, the probability of random chance becomes as small as to be impossible. An alternative thought, designed by an intelligent creator is a more realistic explanation to many civilized people. Either way, we must admit that we are nothing but a product of a miracle—either a miracle of chance or a miracle of design. Isaac Newton https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t1939-isaac-newton Fine Read More ›

At Phys.org: Alpine lake bacteria deploy two light-harvesting systems

Christopher Packham writes: Though humans, along with other vertebrate and invertebrate organisms, don’t photosynthesize, we’re definitely the downstream beneficiaries of the life forms that do. Phototrophic organisms at the bottom of the food chain convert abundant sunlight into the energy that ultimately powers all other life. The two metabolic systems for harvesting light energy are fundamentally different. The most familiar is the chlorophyll-based photosynthesis by which plant life uses light to power the conversion of carbon dioxide and water into sugars and starches; the other system consists of proton-pumping rhodopsins. Microbial rhodopsins, retinal-binding proteins, provide ion transport driven by light (and incidentally, sensory functions). It’s a family that includes light-driven proton pumps, ion pumps, ion channels and light sensors. Microbial rhodopsins are Read More ›

Bringing famous scientists back to life and listening to them talking about God and science

Bringing famous scientists back to life and  listening to them talking about God and science For Louis Pasteur, I used free invented text ( see below). The others are 1:1 quotes I am Louis Pasteur, French chemist and microbiologist renowned for my discoveries of the principles of vaccination, microbial fermentation, and pasteurization, the latter of which was named after me.  The American Chemical Society polled experts some time ago to identify the most beautiful experiment in the history of chemistry, they responded by giving the highest ranking to my separation of mirror-image molecular forms of tartaric acid, conducted just a year after I gained my doctorate at the Ecole Normale in Paris, in 1845. My experiments paved the way to Read More ›

Yet Another Example of How Materialism Blinds its Proponents

Over at the Reasons.org post (see here), UB and JVL are having an exchange that illustrates perfectly how materialism blinds its proponents. UB summarizes: In 1948 did John Von Neumann take a page from Alan Turing’s 1933 Machine and give a series of lectures predicting that a quiescent symbol system and a set of independent constraints would be required for autonomous open-ended self replication? Yes. In 1953 did Francis Crick, along with Watson, discover the sequence structure of that symbol system, calling it a code? Yes. And in 1955 did he further predict that an unknown set of protein constraints would be found working in the system, establishing the necessary code relationships? Yes. In 1956-1958 did Mahlon Hoagland and Paul Read More ›

At Big Think: The 4 fundamental meanings of “nothing” in science

Evidence from cosmological observations, coupled with Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity and research into the physics of the singularity out of which the universe began most strongly argues that matter and energy, space and time all came into existence from a true nothingness. Read More ›

At Nautilus: The Ancient Wisdom Stored in Trees

What very old trees can teach us about life, death, and time. Jared Farmer writes: What’s the oldest known living thing, and how do we know? Why should we even want to know? The explanation is a history of curiosity and care. It’s about our long-term relationships—spiritual and scientific—with long-lived plants, as long as long can be. It’s all about trees. A tree is a plant that people call a tree—a term of dignity, not botany. Although people construct the meaning of “trees” and assign age value to the vascular plants they call “ancient trees,” people cannot themselves create life that grows in place for centuries. Exclusively, solar-powered organisms enact that miracle. Among plants, there are ephemerals, annuals, biennials, perennials—and, Read More ›

At Phys.org: Planetary interiors in TRAPPIST-1 system could be affected by solar flares

It's worth realizing that if the energy from stellar flaring is sufficient to noticeably heat the entire planet, it's more than enough to "cook its goose." Read More ›

UB’s notes on autocatalytic reaction sets vs languages and symbol systems

UB writes: UB, only way thread, 164: >>My apologies to Origenes, he had asked for my comment, but I was away . . . . I am no expert of course, but thank you for asking me to comment. Frankly you didn’t need my opinion anyway. When you ask “What is the error in supposing something?” you likely already know there is no there there. And someone seriously asking you (like some odd prosecution of your logic) to enumerate what exactly is the biological error or the chemical error in the proposition of something that has never before been seen or recorded in either biology or chemistry — well whatever. Deacon begins by asking the question, what is necessary and Read More ›

At Live Science: Massive tentacled microbe may be direct ancestor of all complex life

Nicoletta Lanese writes: Ancient microbes whose existence predates the rise of nucleus-carrying cells on Earth may hold the secrets to how such complex cells first came to be. Now, for the first time, scientists have grown a large enough quantity of these microbes in the lab to study their internal structure in detail, Science reported. Researchers grew an organism called Lokiarchaeum ossiferum, which belongs to a group of microbes known as Asgard archaea, according to a new report, published Wednesday (Dec. 21) in the journal Nature. Named after the abode of the gods in Norse mythology, Asgard archaea are thought by some scientists to be the closest evolutionary relatives of eukaryotes, cells that package their DNA in a protective bubble called a nucleus.  On the evolutionary Read More ›