GilDodgen

What perplexes me is that Darwinists, when confronted with the astronomically sophisticated technology found in a “simple” living cell, continue to defend the proposed Darwinian process of chance, physical law and natural selection as a plausible explanation, when there is no evidence of this degree of creative power through such a mechanism, and that their proposition defies logic and even the most trivial analytical scrutiny. But it gets worse. They go much further than just attempting to defend such transparent irrationality. They propose that their fantasies are established, incontrovertible, scientific fact, when nothing could be further from the truth. And it gets worse still. These people insist that other people’s children must be indoctrinated with this stuff in government funded Read More ›

Lawrence Johnston died last week. In the summer of 2009 I came back to Pullman, Washington from Southern California for my 40th high school reunion. Pullman is home of Washington State University, and the University of Idaho is a sister college located just eight miles away in Moscow, Idaho. (I was born in 1950 in Moscow.) Lawrence was a professor of physics at the University of Idaho, and my dad was a professor of physical chemistry and the founder of an experimental nuclear reactor at Washington State University. Lawrence used my dad’s reactor for some neutron-activation analysis for his research. What these two men had in common was that they worked on the Manhattan A-bomb project during WWII. During that Read More ›

I work for a great company. I frequently ask for permission to be sent away for training in state-of-the-art computational technology — computer simulations that involve finite element analysis (FEA), Arbitrary Lagrangian Eulerian/Fluid Structure Interaction (ALE/FSI), and Navier-Stokes Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). Today I spent the day with a group of brilliant students and a great instructor in a CFD class. What one learns with hands-on experience with such technology is the following: You can’t just make stuff up. You can’t assume stuff, write a computer program based on those assumptions, and expect to get a valid result. In fact, if such an approach is pursued, a totally invalid, and most likely a catastrophically invalid result is guaranteed. An intimate Read More ›

In some ways I have great respect for Will Provine, who is honest enough to declare the inevitable philosophical consequences of atheistic materialism (no free will, no dogs or gods worth having, no foundation for ethics, no ultimate purpose or meaning in anything, and eventually drop dead and go straight to eternal nihilistic oblivion). Richard Dawkins has written a children’s book (The Magic of Reality, an oxymoronic title if ever there was one). Dawkins could have easily distilled his most recent magnum opus into the following (with the obviously benevolent intent of edifying young children concerning Ultimate Truth and Real Science): Dear Children, You are the product of a random, materialistic process that did not have you in mind. (Please Read More ›

Michael Behe and I had the same reaction after reading Michael Denton’s Evolution: A Theory in Crisis. Our reaction was, “Why haven’t we heard any of this stuff before?” The answer is simple. All criticisms of Darwinian orthodoxy were successfully branded by Darwinists as the mindless fantasies of religious fanatics whose purpose was to destroy “science.” But let us ask, Who are those who have engaged in mindless fantasies concerning origins? In the information age, the notion that random errors can produce highly sophisticated biological information, information-processing machinery, and the associated error-detection-and-repair mechanisms and algorithms, is so preposterous that I conclude that Darwinists have either lost their minds, are pathetically uninformed, or have chosen to deny evidence, rationality, and the Read More ›

Because the News item concerning Lynn Margulis will quickly scroll away on this forum, I offer the following. Lynn Margulis is dead. Richard Dawkins (on whether she was a one-hit wonder and her obituary): Yes, that is exactly what she was. She was right about one big thing – and not many people can say that, so she deserves credit for it. But she more than used that credit up being wrong, in a big way, about almost everything else. She bizarrely saw herself as anti-Darwinian, and bad-mouthed the entire neo-Darwinian synthesis and just about everybody associated with it. She once said, in my presence, “John Maynard Smith doesn’t understand evolution”. Fortunately she was not taken seriously enough for her Read More ›

Spooky action at a distance.

Like Michael Behe, I read a book by another Michael. Behe and I had the same reaction: Why haven’t we heard any of this stuff before? The answer is that questioning Darwinian orthodoxy essentially represents committing suicide in academia — an institution that promotes tolerance, diversity, free thought, and skepticism as the highest virtues — but which punishes any deviation from Darwinian dogma with draconian suppression, no matter how logical or evidential the challenges might be. Michael Denton, in his book Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, challenged that dogma, with no theological or philosophical precommitment as far as I can tell. I would encourage everyone with intellectual curiosity to read that book. The following I find to be one of Read More ›

Here’s how a debate between Behe and Dawkins would go: Behe would present this. In response, Dawkins would counter: Once upon a time there was a squirrel-like creature that jumped from a tree at a certain height; let us call it H. Then, through random mutations, the squirrel-like creature got some flaps under its arms, which broke its fall. Just follow this logic and it’s easy to see how birds and bats evolved by random mutation and natural selection from non-flying ancestors!” Dawkins won’t debate Behe because Dawkins’s version of “science” is the above, and Behe’s version of science is actually evaluating the evidence.

Food for thought.

Why are ID theorists skeptical of “man-caused carbon dioxide emissions leading to the destruction of the planet” theory? The reason is that we follow the evidence, and have a nose that smells out junk science in the name of an ideological (indeed, a religious) agenda. At a recent men’s church retreat I chatted with our pastor about how it seemed obvious to me that the global-warming thing exhibited all the attributes of a religion. Mother earth is a goddess. We have sinned against her with technology. If we do not repent and return to primitive living she will call down her wrath and fry us all with vengeance. Little did I know that Michael Barone, in his essay Collapse of Read More ›

What Darwinists don’t recognize is that, in the name of promoting science, they are actually promoting skepticism about what can be trusted in the name of science. Bears evolved into whales? No, that’s been rejected. “Scientists” suggest that whales might have evolved from a cat-like animal, or a hyena-like animal, or (fill in the blank). “It is thought by some that…” This is “science”? Evolution is a fact, if evolution is defined as the observation that some living systems are not now as they once were. According to this definition I count myself as an evolutionist. But Darwinists are unwilling to acknowledge their ignorance concerning how this all came about, and persist in presenting unsupported speculation in the name of Read More ›

I find the “skeptic” claim on the part of Darwinian materialists very interesting and equally illuminating. Darwinists exhibit no skepticism whatsoever about the thesis that physical stuff turned into Mozart by chance. (Don’t try to deny this, Darwinists, that is the essence of your claim. You can try to obfuscate with legion “peer-reviewed scientific papers,” but you’re not going to fool me and many others about what you are actually promoting and advocating.) I choose Mozart not just because I am a classical concert pianist, but because his existence epitomizes everything that Darwinian theory is totally powerless to explain. Darwinists, claiming to be skeptics, actually exhibit the antithesis of skepticism — making transparently ludicrous claims and providing a never-ending stream Read More ›

In this post we discover: According to Darwinian theory, new species emerge when mutations produce individuals who can outperform the stock they came from… This statement, and so many like them, reveal how Darwinian “logic” is based primarily upon hyper-imaginative speculation, and not anything that could be described as science. Here’s how Darwinian logic works: Given #1: A certain feature of a living system exists. (Let’s try a trivial example, like Mozart’s ability to write symphonies.) Given #2: Since this feature exists, it must have a survival advantage. Given #3: Since it is known (scientifically) that Darwinian mechanisms can explain everything about the history of life, there must have been a gradual pathway such that random mutations and natural selection Read More ›

Dawkins is clearly a fading star in a world in which modern science, technology — and especially computational and information theory — have relegated him to the status of a vestigial remain of the 19th century. Richard Dawkins: Science doesn’t yet know how everything started. And as I said last time, they’re working on it. Dawkins’ logic and grammar are strangely confused. Science is not a person, and therefore doesn’t “know” anything. Of course, “they” are still “working on” how inanimate matter spontaneously generated complex information-processing software and hardware, just as the alchemists were “working on” how chemical reactions could turn lead into gold. The only problem is, lead can’t be turned into gold with chemical reactions; it doesn’t work Read More ›