Author: Barry Arrington

Claims about what ought to be can’t be tested so they are not capable of being either true or false. Thus spoke Sev Let’s test Sev’s assertion. Genocide ought not to happen. Is this claim capable of being false? If it is capable of being false, under what circumstances would you approve of genocide? If […]

Yesterday I had an exchange with Seversky that illustrates something I have observed countless times over the years.  Materialists have a blind spot regarding how their own arguments undermine, well, their own arguments.  Here is the exchange: Johnnyb wrote: The reason for this is the precise theorem that Hoffman states – in evolutionary competition, fitness […]

All that follows is from johnnyb’s comment to New Books On Consciousness Underscore Naturalism’s Fatal Problem posted by the UD News Desk yesterday. This plays very nicely into Plantinga’s “Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism”. The evolutionary argument against naturalism basically states, “if evolution is true and theism is false, we cannot know that evolution is true. […]

Consequentialism always winds up devouring itself, and this is why: STEP 1:  Define the “Good” That act is good which causes the most net [here insert synonym that allows one to pretend the statement is not a tautology, e.g. human flourishing, increased wellbeing, etc.].  What causes the most [net increase in flourishing]?  Since there is […]

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 […]

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 […]

The UD News Desk recently reported on obviously desperate origin of life researchers’ attempts to give themselves a leg up on the whole “how did life begin” issue.  I had to chuckle when I read the article, because it reminded me of my second favorite* Steve Martin routine, “You can be millionaire and never pay […]

We often get some variation of “Until ID proposes a ‘mechanism’ for how the design is accomplished, it cannot be taken seriously as an explanation for origins.” Here is an example from frequent commenter Bob O’H (who, after years of participation on this site should know better): If ID is correct, then the design has […]

In a comment to PaV’s recent post about the insurmountable problem the Cambrian Explosion presents for Darwinism, materialist fundamentalist Seversky writes: the Cambrian Explosion is no longer such a problem for Darwin’s theory Of course this is nonsense of a high order, which has been refuted 10,000 times including in the very post Sev was […]

[Spoilers below] Animal Kingdom is a TNT television drama based on a 2010 Australian movie of the same name.  The series follows the Codys, an Oceanside, California crime family.  The Codys plan and execute their crimes with meticulous attention to detail, and their crimes pay very well indeed.  The fruits of their criminal labors include […]

On this date in 1944 one of the first computers, the IBM Mark I, became operational.  See the Wiki article here.  From the article: [The Mark I] could do 3 additions or subtractions in a second.  A multiplication took 6 seconds, a division took 15.3 seconds, and a logarithm or a trigonometric function took over […]

The UD News Desk’s latest post has me thinking. The multiverse is not only unscientific, it is positively anti-scientific. If there are an incomprehensibly vast (I believe some say even infinite, though that is hard to conceptualize) number of universes, then any being or phenomenon can be explained by “we just happen to live in […]

Today at The Federalist: The plain truth from the literature, conferences, expert perception, and a bit of anecdote for color, is that current Neo-Darwinism is far from the untouchable theory it is lauded to be. Not only this, but it has serious and increasing skeptics and challengers from within the secular scientific community.