As a general rule, evolutionists never allow their own ideas to be exposed to the criteria they are using to criticize the other guy. To wit, while Greg Dawesfinds there to be all kinds of problems with appeals to divine agents, including the fact that we really can’t predict what Read more
It is good to see that philosophers such as Greg Dawes understand thatDarwin “argued for his theory by contrasting it with the idea of special creation” which he found to be “utterly puzzling.” But on the same page the University of Otago professor states that the modern sciences are naturalistic as they make no reference to non-natural agents. No reference to non-natural agents? Read more
Evolution is the most influential theory in the history of science, but where exactly does it lead? Well aside from eugenics, abortion, population control, euthanasia, anti realism, blackballing of opponents, false histories and atheism, evolution also leads to determinism. Of course like so many of its metaphysical conclusions, evolution leads to determinism only because determinism first led to evolution. For determinism was one of the planks in the so-called “Enlightenment” period, a century before Darwin. So like the French mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace from two centuries ago, today a growing number of evolutionists hold to the anti realism belief that free will is an illusion. For Harvard’s Gabriel Kreiman, our actions are governed by our neurons, and how they fire off Read More ›
It has become increasingly obvious that lncRNAs are functionalbut now Kristian Baker’s group has implicated them in encoding proteins, just like mRNA. As one report explains: Read more
The fundamental unit of life is the cell and there are many different types of cells. In humans, for example, there are skin cells, muscle cells, blood cells and so forth. In all there are hundreds of different kinds of cells that need to work together in various ways. Now a recent study has investigated the different cell types in the retina of mice. The research focused on the number of cells present in the retina. That may not sound very interesting, but the results were indeed eye-opening. Read more
As regular readers of this blog know, evolutionists use the label “creationist” not just for those with a particular interpretation of Genesis. That is their term for anyone who doesn’t accept the fact of evolution. It doesn’t matter what you particular position is, you’re a creationist, period. So it was no surprise that Britain’s new ban on “creationism” is actually a ban on “any doctrine or theory which holds that natural biological processes cannot account for the history, diversity, and complexity of life on earth.” Read more
Don’t miss the Evolution of Innovation conference at Cambridge this week where it will be explained that the recent move in computer science to Big Data is, in fact, exemplary of evolution. This is yet another example of how evolutionists cast their theory in terms of contemporary technology. As we havediscussed before, when the leading edge in biology was breeding, evolution was cast as a natural breeder. When computers became increasingly connected via networks, and artificial intelligence was thought to be on the horizon, evolution was said to use “networks.” and “molecular intelligence.” When the state of the art was genetic engineering, evolution is cast as a natural genetic engineer and “Biotechnology” was claimed as an evolutionary mechanism. Read more
According to Steven Dick, our chairman of astrobiology at the Library of Congress, the universe is too big and too vast for life not to exist somewhere else. As heexplained this week, “I think the underlying principle is, the laws of physics and biology are universal.” There’s only one problem: If the laws of biology are universal then size doesn’t matter. You see … Read more
As Hegel would have put it, evolution is the antithesis of creationism. Evolution is based on the failure of creationism. Evolutionists have no idea how the world could have spontaneously arisen, but they know it must have, because for them creationism is so obviously false. Read any defense of evolution, including Darwin’s book and works before Darwin, and you will see it is all about the failure design and creation ideas. There is no positive scientific evidence that structures so complex we still cannot figure them out, let alone construct them, spontaneously arise all by themselves. Yet that is precisely what evolution insists must be true. Not because the science says so, but because the religion says so. The constant Read More ›
The problem with evolution is that, because it is always wrong, being wrong doesn’t count against it. In fact, evolution is so wrong that even its errors have errors. And whereas a normal theory with so many flubs would have long since been discarded, since evolution is true from the start it can’t be discarded. So instead evolutionists spend their time trying to determine just how wrong they are. One of evolution’s many problem areas is with the so-called evolutionary tree. Evolutionists compare the species to figure out which branch and twig they go on, but it never works out very well. One of the problems is that the fossil comparisons are inconsistent with the molecular comparisons. This has been Read More ›
Twenty five years ago the Vatican Observatory and the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences in Berkeley jointly sponsored a long-running series of conferences and publications on theology and science. Theologian Wesley Wildman calls it theDivine Action Project as so much of the work relates to the question of how God interacts with the world. And while the various participants hold to different nuanced views of divine action, they all generally agree that special divine action—the idea of God acting in miraculous or non law-like ways—is a problem. As Wildman explains: Read more
In Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution the engine of progress is death. Nature is one big Malthusian battlefield as natural selection kills off the less-fit designs. As David Hume had put it a century before, “A perpetual war is kindled amongst all living creatures,” and nature is so arranged so as “to embitter the life of every living being.” In Darwin’s day Alfred, Lord Tennyson found that nature was “red in tooth and claw” and Herbert Spencer summarized Darwin’s new theory as the “Survival of the Fittest.” Or as Nietzsche lamented, it is the weak “who most undermine life.” But there’s only one problem: this is all the result of junk science. For every Serengeti Plain there are untold stories Read More ›
In the seventeenth century clocks were a favorite comparison with the complex workings of nature. In the eighteenth century the analogy switched to watches. Now, with the latest crystal structure mapping of the incredible spliceosome machine, which edits newly transcribed gene transcripts, we’re back to clocks. But this time the complexity services evolution rather than design. First for an explanation of the results: Read more
Who would have thought that the tiny West Africa nation of The Gambia, where British slave trade thrived centuries ago, would someday provide a devastating blow to Darwin’s theory on “the Preservation of Favoured Races.” But The Gambia’s consistent climate of rainy and dry seasons made for the perfect experimental conditions to test what is already known to be true in animals; namely, that not only does the food that you eat carry with it instructions for your body, and not only does the food that your mother eats while pregnant with you also influence your body, but the feed that she eats before conception also influences your body. Read more
In Charles Darwin’s one long argument against final causes, teleology, separate creation, independent creation or as he sometimes simply put it, the “ordinary view,” he complained, among other things, that notions of independent creation were tantamount to rejecting “a real for an unreal, or at least for an unknown, cause.” Furthermore, separate and innumerable acts of creation amounted to a tautology, “only re-stating the fact in dignified language.” And echoing Descartes’ criticism of Aristotelianism (the qualities themselves are in need of explanation), Darwin complained that viewing nature as revealing the plan of the Creator is vacuous and “nothing is thus added to our knowledge.” In summary, Darwin argued that independent creation was a vacuous tautology that appeals to unknown or Read More ›