Barry Arrington

David, thank you for your post.  Let me start out by saying that I do not have a dog in the YEC/OEC fight.  My father, for whom I have an immense respect, love and admiration is a YEC, and he and I have discussed the matter extensively over the last three and half decades.  That I ultimately concluded that I could not embrace the YEC position did not decrease my esteem for him in the least.  He and I disagree in love and mutual respect, and I hope I can do the same with other YECs.  Indeed, my best friend is a YEC and some months ago he posed the “why couldn’t God have done it this way” question to me, and Read More ›

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while you know I like to play poker.  I have read numerous poker books and articles over the years, and the concept of “expected value” is at the core of every one.  Expected value theory helps skilled players calculate whether a particular play will, in the long run, be profitable.    Here’s a simple example.  Suppose I’m playing Texas Hold ‘em and my hole cards are the king of hearts and the three of hearts.  The flop comes and the community cards are the ace of hearts, the four of clubs and the nine of hearts.  My opponent is in front of me and bets out for $10 into a pot of Read More ›

Sacramone rips up the latest evolutionary psychology spewings over at Strange Herring.  

At the Smithsonian: Why hominids evolved upright walking is one of the biggest questions in human evolution. One school of thought suggests that bipedalism was the most energetically efficient way for our ancestors to travel as grasslands expanded and forests shrank across Africa some five million to seven million years ago. A new study in the Journal of Human Evolution challenges that claim, concluding that the efficiency of human walking and running is not so different from other mammals. HT: Scott

I was certain the Darwinists would spin the ENCODE findings, but even I am stunned at their sheer audacity. In response to my previous post, Critical Rationalist says that the ENCODE findings, which falsify a prediction Darwinists have been making for decades, far from being a crushing defeat for the theory and its proponents is a positively good thing for Darwinists. CR writes: “all theories contain errors of varying degree and that finding them is how knowledge grows . . . Surviving criticism and *not* surviving criticized is a win win situation, which doesn’t represent a blow to human intellect.” Then CR makes the outlandish suggestion that ENCODE is somehow a loss for ID. He writes: “[When ID] Merely assum[es] Read More ›

The ID community, including many writers here at UD, has been predicting for years that so-called junk DNA would be  found to be functional.  The Darwinists have scoffed.  Now ID proponents are being vindicated.  My prediction:  The Darwinists will change their story to “we’ve been saying this all along.” The Washington Post reports on the breakthrough research published in Nature. Most of a person’s genetic risk for common diseases such as diabetes, asthma and hardening of the arteries appears to lie in the shadowy part of the human genome once disparaged as “junk DNA.” Indeed, the vast majority of human DNA seems to be involved in maintaining individuals’ well being — a view radically at odds with what biologists have Read More ›

Dennis Venema is an associate professor in the biology department at Trinity Western University, a Christian university near Vancouver, British Columbia.  Over at Biologos Venema has an article entitled The Sorrows and Joys of Teaching Evolution at an Evangelical Christian University in which he recounts his efforts to indoctrinate his students in Darwinian evolution. In the opening paragraphs of his article Venema describes one of his teaching methods:  After the “information dump” using the fruit fly examples, it’s time for a class discussion/application before the students drift off too much. Ok, here’s a slide that shows the chromosome structure of a group of organisms that other lines of evidence suggest are part of a group of related species. What do you Read More ›

UD Editors:  No one has come close to refuting UB’s thesis after 129 comments.  We are moving this post to the top of the page to give the materialists another chance. I take the following from an excellent comment UB made in a prior post.  UB lays out his argument step by step, precept by precept.  Then he arrives at a conclusion.  In order for his argument to be valid, the conclusion must follow from the premises.  In order for his argument to be sound, each of the premises must be true. Now here is the challenge to our Darwinist friends.  If you disagree with UB’s conclusion, please demonstrate how his argument is either invalid (as a matter of logic Read More ›

“This above all: to thine own self be true.” William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 1, scene 2.   Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.) Walt Whitman, Song of Myself Watching the materialists tangle themselves into linguistic and intellectual knots in the comment thread over at my On Self Evident Moral Truth post put me in mind of these two famous quotations.  Let me explain. Astronomers estimate the universe contains more than 100 billion galaxies and 300 sextillion (3X10^23) stars.  On the atheist/materialist account, I am nothing but a jumped up hairless ape walking around on my hind legs on a speck of dust orbiting another speck of dust in a collection Read More ›

Some years ago I posted an excerpt from Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov in which Ivan Karamazov brings his indictment against God to his brother Alyosha.  In it he describes a number of atrocities based on real life stories.  (Warning:  Not for the faint of heart):  People talk sometimes of bestial cruelty, but that’s a great injustice and insult to the beasts; a beast can never be so cruel as a man, so artistically cruel. The tiger only tears and gnaws, that’s all he can do. He would never think of nailing people by the ears, even if he were able to do it. These Turks took a pleasure in torturing children, too; cutting the unborn child from the mother’s womb, Read More ›

“When you cannot even act as if what you say is true, you really should reconsider your beliefs.” William J. Murray

Watching atheists debate moral issues is fascinating.  Like a man wading a river with water up to his nose and saying “water, what water?” they are up to their noses in irony and yet appear to be completely oblivious to it. Two atheists debating moral issues are like two card players arguing over whether a particular play is legal when one of them is judging the play by the rules of bridge and the other is judging the play by the rules of poker. The rules of bridge and the rules of poker, like the rules of all card games, are arbitrary.  Arbitrary rules work fine so long as all the players agree to abide by them.  But what happens Read More ›

My wife teaches sixth grade reading in a public middle school and today the students return from summer vacation.  So it seemed like an auspicious time to write about how she regularly employees the techniques of design detection in her job. During the course of any given school year she assigns several writing projects.  She is always pleased to receive papers showing excellent writing skills and large vocabularies – up to a limit.  We have all heard that if something seems too good to be true it probably isn’t true.  Sadly, on several occasions each year my wife will receive writing projects that force her to conclude one of two things:  (1) this sixth grader writes like an adult with a Read More ›

Between these following: Scenario 1: Galileo:  The earth orbits the sun Galileo’s opponent:  Idiot.  Ptolemy established that the sun orbits the earth 1,500 years ago and that theory has served us well ever since. Scenario 2: ID proponent:  The best explanation for the existence of complex specified information in living things is “act of an intelligent agent.” ID opponent:  IDiot.  Darwin proposed a chance/necessity mechanism to explain everything about all aspects of living things 150 years ago, and that theory has served us well ever since. The only difference I can see is that Galileo’s opponent seems to have a better argument, because the theory he was defending had been around 10 times longer.

David W. Gibson writes in a comment to a prior post: Joe, I think you have identified the problem here. In order to make his case airtight (i.e. that no other possible process can produce his entailments), Upright BiPed must prove a negative [Editors, i.e. that only intelligent agents produce semiotic* systems]. And I think he realizes this, which is why he simply continues to assert this. When the number of possibilities is unknown, process of elimination is not a valid means of picking one. I’d be willing to bet that Bill et. al. feel that they have indeed identified an alternative process, backed by 150 years of increasingly detailed scientific research. Their alternative may not meet what you feel Read More ›