Barry Arrington

In a prior thread mikev6 asked: “If God is required to be moral, and I don’t believe in God, does that make me immoral?” I responded: “mikev6. Just because you are an atheist you will not necessarily act in an immoral way. No one said you would. It is a fact, however, that you are unable to ground your morality on anything other than your whim at the moment.” Ov responded to me: “Barry Arrington, in response to mikev6, said: “It is a fact, however, that you are unable to ground your morality on anything other than your whim at the moment.” I agree that such morality having an absolute grounding is not the case, but calling what mikev6 holds Read More ›

Dr. Behe’s “Misusing Protistan Examples to Propagage Mythes about Intelligent Design” is up at his UD blog.

The disgraced former head of a U.N. backed climate research center admits 1.  No global warming in the last 15 years. 2.  It might have been warmer in medieval times than now.

My grandfather was a prolific arrowhead collector.  He spent countless hours walking back and forth over the plains, hills and creek bottoms of Texas looking for “points,” as he called them, and by the time he passed away his collection ran into the hundreds.  When I was a young boy in the 60’s papa sometimes let me come along with him to look for points, but I did not have the patience required for this game.  Instead of emulating my grandfather’s painstaking and systematic search techniques, I mainly wondered around with my head in the clouds.  From time to time I would snatch up a random rock and run to show it to papa, yelling, “What about this one?”  My efforts invariably yielded the same response.  Papa would glance at the rock and hand it back to me while shaking his head and muttering “shah, shah, shah” under his breath.

What was the difference between my random rocks and the points my grandfather was looking for?  The rocks he rejected and the rocks he collected were all rocks, so what made the “points” special?  Just this.  In my grandfather’s judgment each rock he added to his collection was different from the thousands upon thousands of rocks he rejected because it bore complex marks that conformed to a specified pattern.  In short, like every other archeologist who has ever separated artifacts from natural objects, he made a design inference.  Read More ›

Joe Carter connects the dots.

Below Dr. Dembski replies to Dr. Barr over at First Things.  Dr. Torley has also posted an excellent rebuttal at FT that I reproduce here: 

Professor Barr, 

With the greatest respect, you are sadly mistaken about ID, and about design arguments in general. I have a Ph.D. in philosophy, and I’ve been following the ID movement closely for a few years now. I’m neither a young-earth nor an old-earth creationist; I’m quite happy to accept common descent, although I would not be at all perturbed if it were proved false. The way I see it, there are at least five good design arguments for the existence of God. All of them are probabilistic, all of them use abductive reasoning (appealing to the best-known explanation of an observed fact), and all of them are scientifically falsifiable.  As we shall see, ID design arguments are not particularly different from the others.  Let’s summarize the design arguments briefly. Read More ›

Intellectual hubris drove the Enlightenment project from its beginning, and many Enlightenment thinkers even believed that “reason” was an all-powerful force with which man could unlock all of the secrets of the universe.  After millennia of being mired in superstition and tradition man had finally emerged into a new day of unfettered reason boding limitless possibilities. Or so the narrative went, and at its zenith some actually believed that through reason, at least in principle, literally “everything” could be known. Pierre-Simon Laplace perhaps articulated this peculiar idolatry best when he wrote:

We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes.

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Yet another part of the “overwhelming evidence” is pure baloney: A LEADING British government scientist has warned the United Nations’ climate panel to tackle its blunders or lose all credibility. Robert Watson, chief scientist at Defra, the environment ministry, who chaired the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) from 1997 to 2002, was speaking after more potential inaccuracies emerged in the IPCC’s 2007 benchmark report on global warming. The most important is a claim that global warming could cut rain-fed north African crop production by up to 50% by 2020, a remarkably short time for such a dramatic change. The claim has been quoted in speeches by Rajendra Pachauri, the IPCC chairman, and by Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general. This Read More ›

For 80 years it has been accepted that early life began in a ‘primordial soup’ of organic molecules before evolving out of the oceans millions of years later. Today the ‘soup’ theory has been over turned in a pioneering paper in BioEssays which claims it was the Earth’s chemical energy, from hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor, which kick-started early life. Rest of the story here.

The IPCC’s beleaguered climate report faces the prospect of still more errors, as Dutch authorities point out factual inaccuracies about the Netherlands. Dutch environment ministry spokesman Trimo Vallaart has asked the U.N.’s climate change panel to rethink its assertion that more than half of the Netherlands is below seal level. Dutch authorities explain that, in fact, only 26 percent of the country is below sea level. According to an AFP story, IPCC experts calculated that 55 percent of the Netherlands was below sea level by adding the area below sea level — 26 percent — to the area threatened by river flooding — 29 percent — Vallaart said. “They should have been clearer,” Vallaart pointed out, adding that the Dutch Read More ›

The United Nations’ expert panel on climate change based claims about ice disappearing from the world’s mountain tops on a student’s dissertation and an article in a mountaineering magazine. The revelation will cause fresh embarrassment for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which had to issue a humiliating apology earlier this month over inaccurate statements about global warming. The IPCC’s remit is to provide an authoritative assessment of scientific evidence on climate change. In its most recent report, it stated that observed reductions in mountain ice in the Andes, Alps and Africa was being caused by global warming, citing two papers as the source of the information. However, it can be revealed that one of the sources quoted was Read More ›

The chairman of the leading climate change watchdog was informed that claims about melting Himalayan glaciers were false before the Copenhagen summit, The Times has learnt. Rajendra Pachauri was told that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment that the glaciers would disappear by 2035 was wrong, but he waited two months to correct it. He failed to act despite learning that the claim had been refuted by several leading glaciologists. The IPCC’s report underpinned the proposals at Copenhagen for drastic cuts in global emissions. Dr Pachauri, who played a leading role at the summit, corrected the error last week after coming under media pressure. He told The Times on January 22 that he had only known about the error Read More ›

  This is looking more and more like a farce: This is to be found in Chapter 13 of the Working Group II report, the same part of the IPCC fourth assessment report in which the “Glaciergate” claims are made. There, is the startling claim that: “Up to 40% of the Amazonian forests could react drastically to even a slight reduction in precipitation; this means that the tropical vegetation, hydrology and climate system in South America could change very rapidly to another steady state, not necessarily producing gradual changes between the current and the future situation (Rowell and Moore, 2000). It is more probable that forests will be replaced by ecosystems that have more resistance to multiple stresses caused by temperature Read More ›

Last week we linked to a report that the IPCC had published unsubstantiated anecdotes masquerading as peer reviewed science.  In a stunningly candid admission, they now admit they included the false “science” in a conscious effort to move policy makers.  The scientist behind the bogus claim in a Nobel Prize-winning UN report that Himalayan glaciers will have melted by 2035 last night admitted it was included purely to put political pressure on world leaders. Dr Murari Lal also said he was well aware the statement, in the 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), did not rest on peer-reviewed scientific research. In an interview with The Mail on Sunday, Dr Lal, the co-ordinating lead author of the Read More ›

Full article here. THE United Nations climate science panel faces new controversy for wrongly linking global warming to an increase in the number and severity of natural disasters such as hurricanes and floods. It based the claims on an unpublished report that had not been subjected to routine scientific scrutiny — and ignored warnings from scientific advisers that the evidence supporting the link too weak. The report’s own authors later withdrew the claim because they felt the evidence was not strong enough.