GilDodgen

Or, why is Michael Shermer so selectively skeptical? As a software engineer I think in powers of two (and in French on occasion, just like David Berlinski, a secular Jew, with whom I had a wonderful conversation in French at BIOLA when his book, The Devil’s Delusion, was first released). But I digress. Click here for a discussion about the “Who designed the designer?” debate. There is a very simple answer to this question. If time came into existence at the birth of the universe, its cause transcends time. It therefore has no past (a quality of time), and therefore no history. That which has no history has no point of origin, and therefore no designer. But the real question Read More ›

For those with open minds (genuine skeptics, not selective skeptics) check out Prager University, especially this. Like Frank Pastore I was once a devout atheist, but eventually realized that I could no longer muster up enough blind faith to believe in a completely materialistic explanation for everything. It was to a great extent that my interest in science, engineering, mathematics, and reason forced me to abandon my materialistic and therefore inherently nihilistic worldview (but there was much more, including the birth of my first daughter after a long infertility ordeal). My conversion from materialistic atheism to Christian theism — to a great extent through reason, logic, and evidence — is what really scares people like Dawkins and his ilk. The Read More ›

Listen to this rant, and then tell me that this guy is sane. His rants are perfectly analogous to those of people like Dawkins concerning challenges to Darwinian orthodoxy.

Here we read: Alan Rogers addresses the political controversy over the theory of evolution… The comment about “a political controversy” inspired the following. First of all, the theory of evolution (whatever that means) is so plastic, so poorly defined, and so perfectly designed to be amenable to any subjective or a priori interpretation that it is essentially vacuous as a scientific hypothesis, much less a theory. It is also cleverly designed to be impervious to negation or even challenge, due to its infinite logical and evidential plasticity. It’s not a political controversy. It is: 1) An evidential controversy (for example, the fossil record, especially the Cambrian explosion). 2) A logical and computational controversy (the insufficiency of random errors producing highly Read More ›

I’m not quite sure who Michael Denton is. I’ve read his two books, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis and Nature’s Destiny. It was Crisis that first inspired me to exclaim to myself, How could you have been so stupid as to have been duped into believing this transparent Darwinian-gradualism-and-random-mutation-natural-selection nonsense? In Destiny he presents some remarkable insights, not just about the fine tuning of the laws of physics, but about the remarkably fine-tuned properties of water, the carbon atom, light, and much more, for the eventual appearance of living systems. For Denton’s comments about stardust see here. For his comments on mathematics see here. So far, ID theory has addressed two primary domains: cosmology and biology. However, I believe that Read More ›

I write this post from a hotel room in Livermore, California, home of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where my company has sent me for advanced training in computational fluid dynamics using LS-DYNA, arguably the most advanced finite element analysis program ever devised, originally at LLNL in the 1970s for the development and analysis of variable-yield nuclear weapons. I have a particular interest in LLNL because my father worked on the Manhattan A-bomb Project during WWII, and was the founder and director of an experimental nuclear reactor at Washington State University, which has been named in his honor. Here is some info from the LLNL website: For more than half a century, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has applied cutting-edge science and Read More ›

Thomas Cudworth in his post here referenced “…being competent in the field of evolutionary biology.” My question is, What does it mean to be “competent” in the field of evolutionary biology? It seems to me that it would mean providing hard empirical evidence that the mechanism of random variation/mutation and natural selection which is known to exist (e.g., bacterial antibiotic resistance) can be extrapolated to explain the highly functionally integrated information-processing machinery of the cell — at a very minimum! This empirical demonstration should be a prerequisite, before we even begin to entertain speculation about how this mechanism produced body plans and the human brain. Yet, the theoretically most “highly competent” evolutionary biologists never even attempt to address this requirement. Read More ›

When I was seven years old I figured it all out. It was a simple, logically inescapable conclusion. I believed that I was the product of a purely materialistic, random process that did not have me in mind. When I die and my chemistry shuts down I will cease to exist, enter eternal oblivion, and nothing I ever achieve or do will have any ultimate purpose or meaning. Furthermore, there is no ultimate justice. Hitler and the millions he tortured and murdered will have the same ultimate fate: pointless, meaningless oblivion. I lived my life in a complete state of depression, anger and despair for 43 years as a result of this notion, although I accomplished much during that time Read More ›

When I was in college I studied classical piano with Istvan Nadas who was a Hungarian concert pianist and a student of Bela Bartok. Istvan was a miraculous survivor of one of Hitler’s death camps. The stories he told me still haunt me to this day. The commandant of the death camp liked to play Bach over the loudspeaker system while he had random inmates shot or hung, just for fun and entertainment. Nadas told me about the horror of listening to Bach while he watched his fellow inmates being machine-gunned to death in front of him. Nadas told me, “I knew every note of that music and could play it on the piano, but I also knew that if Read More ›

Marvin Olasky at Townhall.com has written an essay with this title. Here are a few excerpts: Woodrow Wilson started federal government expansion in 1912 by opposing the “Newtonian” view that the government should have an unchanging constitutional foundation, somewhat like “the law of gravitation.” He argued that government should be “accountable to Darwin, not to Newton. It is modified by its environment, necessitated by its tasks, shaped to its functions by the sheer pressure of life. . . . Living political constitutions must be Darwinian in structure and in practice.” … Evolutionary thinking influenced not only Social Darwinists but socialists like H.G. Wells who thought it was time to advance beyond competitive enterprise. (Karl Marx in Das Kapital called Darwin’s Read More ›

For those who trust wikipedia as a neutral and objective source of information, check out this. I use wikipedia for looking up mathematical formulae, and technical information concerning aeronautical, mechanical, electrical, and software engineering — all relevant to my work. In such realms it is a great resource. But as a resource concerning ID, it is the equivalent of TV faith-healing con-artistry.

Granville Sewell’s sin is pointing out the obvious that anyone can understand. This represents a tremendous threat. As David Berlinski has observed, Darwinists — who have invested their worldview and even their careers in Darwinian storytelling — react with understandable hostility when told that their “theory” is simply not credible. It’s really easy to figure out that the Darwinian mechanism of random mutation and natural selection cannot possibly do that with which it is credited. Life is fundamentally based on information and information processing — a software computer program and its associated, highly functionally integrated execution hardware. Computer programs don’t write themselves, and they especially don’t write themselves when random errors are thrown into the code. The fact that biological Read More ›

After much thought and consideration, I have decided to announce at UD that I believe in evolution.
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