Barry Arrington

Here at UD we have been discussing first principles over the last several weeks, and those discussions came to mind when I read about the recent paper After-birth Abortion:  Why Should the Baby Live?, in which Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva argue in good Nazi fashion that some newborn babies have Lebensunwertes Leben (“life unworthy of life”). In this article Gabby Speach makes all kinds of philosophical arguments against the Giubilini/Minerva thesis.  Unfortunately, while in the main I agree with Ms. Speach, her article is all but useless and will not convince anyone who is not already convinced.  Why?  Because she is trying to argue for first principles and that is a losing proposition.  First principles must be accepted as self-evident.  They are the foundation upon Read More ›

A couple of years ago I trotted out the “highly improbable things happen all the time” meme our Darwinist friends use to such advantage at my home poker game.  For those who don’t recall, this is what happened.  I dealt myself a royal flush in spades for the first 13 hands.  When my friends objected I said, “Lookit, your intuition has led you astray. You are inferring design — that is to say that I’m cheating — simply on the basis of the low probability of this sequence of events.  But don’t you understand that the odds of me receiving 13 royal flushes in spades in a row are exactly the same as me receiving any other 13 hands.  In Read More ›

Surfing the internet last night I ran across Why Minds Are Not Like Computers, a very interesting 2009 article by Ari N. Schulman in The New Atlantis. Schulman describes the way computers work by running algorithms, and he explores the question of whether the human mind can be reduced to similar computational terms. Of course, most materialists are philosophically committed to a positive answer to that question, and Schulman quotes Rodney Brooks from his 2002 book Flesh and Machines: How Robots Will Change Us,  where Brooks asserts that “the body, this mass of biomolecules, is a machine that acts according to a set of specifiable rules,” and hence that “we, all of us, overanthropomorphize humans, who are after all mere machines.” Has Read More ›

THEN: DNA and Other Designs Stephen C. Meyer First Things, April 2000 Science and Design William A. Dembski First Things, October 1998 The Unraveling of Scientific Materialism Phillip E. Johnson First Things, November 1997 NOW: The Miracle of Evolution Stephen M. Barr First Things, February 2006 The Design of Evolution Stephen M. Barr First Things, October2005 And finally what really got me thinking about the sad slide of a once-great journal.  This appears in the current issue:  So it is that young English Muslims are bombarded with material warning them of the dangers of Darwinism. In contrast, the Catholic Church and many other Christians have long accepted that the ability of nature to exhibit true creativity does not impinge upon Read More ›

Back in the early 90’s a movie came out with the peculiar title “My Own Private Idaho.”  The movie has nothing to do with my topic, but I’ve always been amused by the notion of a “private Idaho.”  In a comment to my previous post (Barr v. Arrington), Deuce captures perfectly the problem with Stephen Barr’s Darwinism.  Barr thinks he can have his “Own Private Darwinism” that means something completely different from the Darwinism universally accepted in the scientific community.  Sorry Dr. Barr.  As Deuce explains, language doesn’t work that way.  What follows from here is all Deuce: I’ve read Barr’s writings on the subject of evolution for a while, and my take is that 1) Nullusalus is right that Read More ›

Over at the First Things blog Stephen Barr said that there is no way to compute the probabilities of evolution. I disagreed and pointed him to Dembski’s and Marks’ work at the Evolutionary Informatics Lab. Barr responded by citing a 2003 article by Wesley Elsberry and said the critique of Dembski’s work was, if valid, “very damaging.” I responded by pointing out that the Dembski/Marks article to which I had linked was from 2009 and therefore it was not possible for Elsberry to have critiqued it in 2003. Here’s where things got interesting. Instead of allowing my response through, the FT moderator deleted it. When I learned this I posted the following protest: “My responses to SMB and David Nickol were deleted. Read More ›

I have a question for our materialist friends. Let’s imagine a group of chimpanzees. Say one of the male chimps approaches one of the female chimps and makes chimp signals that he wants to have sexual relations with her, but for whatever reason she’s not interested and refuses. Is it morally wrong for the male chimp to force the female chimp to have sex with him against her will? If you answer “no it is not morally wrong,” imagine further a group of humans. On the materialist view, a human is just a jumped up hairless ape. Is it morally wrong for a human male to force a human female to have sex with him against her will? If you Read More ›

At its core ID affirms the truth of two statements and then makes a logical deduction: Statement 1. Designers often leave behind objectively discernible indicia of design in the things they design. Statement 2. Some aspects of living things exhibit these objectively discernible indicia of design. Logical conclusion. Therefore, the best explanation for the existence of the aspects of living things that exhibit these objectively discernible indicia of design is that they were in fact designed. In a comment to a prior post lastyearon says the ID project is “meaningless.” That is a powerful charge to make; therefore it is incumbent upon lastyearon to prove his case. That, in turn, is a very tall order, because statement 1 is obviously Read More ›

“The very fact that otherwise sober scientists must resort to such a remarkable hypothesis [i.e., the multiverse hypothesis] is a sort of backhanded compliment to the design hypothesis.” William Lane Craig

Concerning the question of “natural evil” or “cruelty in nature” that others have been discussing today, Chesterton writes: But nature does not say that cats are more valuable than mice; nature makes no remark on the subject. She does not even say that the cat is enviable or the mouse pitiable. We think the cat superior because we have (or most of us have) a particular philosophy to the effect that life is better than death. But if the mouse were a German pessimist mouse, he might not think that the cat had beaten him at all. He might think he had beaten the cat by getting to the grave first. Or he might feel that he had actually inflicted Read More ›

Prominent climate alarmist caught in flagrante delicto: Lies, deceit, theft.

If you visit some of our more vociferous opponents’ websites that is the question being asked. The answer, of course, is that I am not stifling rational argument on this site. In fact, just the opposite is true; my purpose has been to weed out those who refuse to engage in rational argument so that rational argument can be pursued by those who remain. Since, however, recent modifications to this site’s moderation policy have caused such a brouhaha, I feel compelled to lay out a formal defense. 1. The Rules of Thought. The rules of thought are the first principles of right reason. Those rules are: The Law of Identity: An object is the same as itself. The Law of Read More ›

Stephen L. Talbott tackles the tautology question over at The New Atlantis: Along with his anecdote about the wolf, Bethell argued that evolutionary theory based on natural selection (survival of the fittest) is vacuous: it states that, first, evolution can be explained by the fact that, on the whole, only the fitter organisms survive and achieve reproductive success; and second, what makes an organism fit is the fact that it survives and successfully reproduces. This is the long-running and much-debated claim that natural selection, as an explanation of the evolutionary origin of species, is tautological — it cannot be falsified because it attempts no real explanation. It tells us: the kinds of organisms that survive and reproduce are the kinds Read More ›

In a comment to a prior post material.infantacy writes [remaining post is all his]: If one believes A = A only some of the time, and that A = !A is true for some circumstances, whether they’re referring to logical propositions or a construct of physical reality, then that person is either deluded or devious.  I recently wasted an entire evening trying to reason with someone that (analogously) two flips of a coin could yield a heads and a tails in two distinct ways (HT or TH) giving the combination a 50% chance of success over either HH or TT. This person had already decided that the two combinations were identical, and no amount of demonstration would convince her otherwise. Read More ›

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