GilDodgen

Atheist Raises Money for Vandalized Church For those who are not intimately familiar with the ID debate and its substance (I assume that some who visit this website fall into this category) there is an acronym, FSM: Flying Spaghetti Monster. This is an attempt by those who oppose any inference to design (the evidence be damned) within the cosmos or living systems, to portray such proponents as being out of touch with reality and incapable of thinking logically or rationally. Of course, it is the Darwinist who has abandoned reason and logic in pursuit of a materialistic philosophical agenda that is being devastated on a daily basis by the discoveries of legitimate modern science. As anyone who is familiar with Read More ›

In my work as a software engineer in aerospace R&D I use what is arguably the most sophisticated, universally applicable, finite-element analysis program ever devised by the most brilliant people in field, refined and tested for 35 years since its inception in the mid-1970s for the development of variable-yield nuclear weapons at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. It is called LS-DYNA (LS for Livermore Software, and DYNA for the evaluation of dynamic, nonlinear, transient systems). A finite element is an attempt to descretize on a macro level what occurs at a molecular level in a physical system, so that a result is amenable to a practical computational solution. The learning curve for the use of this sophisticated technology is extremely steep, Read More ›

Paying too much attention to details and not understanding the general situation is the classic definition of NSFT.

It is my view that Darwinists have become ensnared by NSFT. As the evidence of modern science — from many domains, especially the information and computational sciences, in addition to simple mathematical probabilistic calculations — has progressively and logically eviscerated the creative powers of the Darwinian mechanism, Darwinists continue to hang on to the hopelessly improbable.

How can this be? How can the Darwinist not see the forest (design) for the trees (the endlessly unsubstantiated and usually silly or even embarrassing speculations of Darwinian storytelling, as countered by the mounting evidence of design from every sector of scientific investigation, all evaluated with simple rational thought)?

In my essay here (which has generated at this writing 182 comments) UD contributor allanius presented what I believe encapsulates and elucidates the essentials concerning this enigma.

In his comment he offers the thesis that cultural epochs are self-limiting. Proponents obtain power and dominance for a season, but are eventually brought down by their inflexibility.
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At UD we have many brilliant ID apologists, and they continue to mount what I perceive as increasingly indefensible assaults on the creative powers of the Darwinian mechanism of random errors filtered by natural selection. In addition, they present overwhelming positive evidence that the only known source of functionally specified, highly integrated information-processing systems, with such sophisticated technology as error detection and repair, is intelligent design. [Part 2 is here. ] This should be obvious to any unbiased observer with a decent education in basic mathematics and expertise in any rigorous engineering discipline. Here is my analysis: The Forrests of the world don’t want to admit that there is design in the universe and living systems — even when the Read More ›

Arguing with Darwinists is like trying to teach calculus to people who have not yet mastered arithmetic. kairosfocus has an excellent presentation here. This is the kind of stuff Darwinists dismiss with a shrug of the shoulder while proclaiming that the Darwinian mechanism could have done it, and furthermore must have done it, because there is no other alternative. My AI checkers program is approximately 65,000 lines of C code, with more lines than that required to compute the endgame databases. (By the way, it’s the coolest checkers program ever, and it’s available for free. You can even download the mega-version if you have enough bandwidth and patience. In addition, you can download a paper I and my colleague wrote Read More ›

We often hear the phrase “the science is settled” from Darwinists who claim that the infinitely creative powers of the Darwinian mechanism (random errors filtered through natural selection) can explain everything. This claim is simply absurd on its face. Anyone with any awareness of the evidence and a simple education in basic mathematical logic, who is not blinded by a precommitment to Darwinian ideology, could tell you that that the science really is settled: Darwinism is greatest con job in the history of junk pseudoscience. The only evidence we have for the “creative” powers of the Darwinian mechanism is the selection of existing biological information for survival (nothing new is created; it’s just a mixing and matching of existing biological Read More ›

JGuy made the following comment in response to my comment in that thread: I like your comment on the guys from three hundred years ago. This is the kind of stuff that amazes me…today, we think we (conditioned society) are so much more civilized and evolved.. bah!.. I say, you take the most intelligent person three hundred years ago, and put him in all the same schools as today’s most intelligent person. I’d put my bets on the less degenerate genes/mind of 300 years ago. The guys I referred to were the great mathematicians Lagrange and Euler, who lived almost 300 years ago and came up with the basic mathematics we now use in computational fluid dynamics. JGuy is a Read More ›

I have an evolutionary theory which proves beyond any reasonable doubt that Darwin was right. Natural selection created me upright so I could play the piano and sit on a piano bench. One day, while in college, I was playing the piano in a practice room at the university, and my soon-to-be-wife came in to listen to me practicing the piano. We were both music and foreign language double majors, and had much in common, except that she was a Christian and I was an atheist. (This all worked out in the end, by the way.) Eventually we produced two wonderful daughters who will pass on our selfish genes. So, simple logic dictates that Darwinian evolution made me upright so Read More ›

I give UD’s Denyse credit for having come up with this insightful observation. In another UD thread I came across this link. It represents the Episcopal church’s views on ID, and it is full of misinformation and misrepresentations. The proponents of the Intelligent Design Movement assert that it is possible to discern scientifically the actions of God in nature. Wrong. Anyone familiar with any basic ID literature would not make this blatant misrepresentation. I therefore must assume that the author of this claim never took the time to investigate ID, and probably got his ideas from the popular press. …the great majority of scientists say that claims of “Intelligent Design” have not been backed up by valid scientific research and Read More ›

It’s called entropy, and it applies to everything. If you’re a pianist and don’t practice on a regular basis you don’t stay the same, you get worse, and it takes extra discipline, effort, and dedication to get better. Natural selection is a buffer against decay that is constantly operating in nature. Natural selection throws out bad stuff in a competitive environment but has no creative powers. Since decay is the norm, and random errors, statistically speaking, essentially always result in decay, a creature living underground will lose its eyes because the informational cost of producing eyes is high. Thus, a crippled, decayed creature in a pathologically hostile environment will have a survival advantage. This is devolution, not evolution. This phenomenon Read More ›

Darwinists are drunks looking for their keys under a lamppost, when their keys are not even in the same neighborhood as the lamppost. Math represents the most rigorous of all the sciences. Without a logical and clearly defined proof, nothing in mathematics is taken seriously. This is in direct contradiction to Darwinism, which proposes an unlimited universe of thoroughly unsubstantiated speculation, none of which is subject to any rigorous analytical scrutiny. Yet, we are told that anyone who even questions this unlimited universe of unsubstantiated speculation is “an enemy of science.” The reverse is precisely the case. Darwinism is the quintessential enemy of science. Science is the pursuit of knowledge about the way things really are, and when logic, evidence, Read More ›

In this UD post Ken Miller is quoted as saying: “The argument for intelligent design basically depends on saying, ‘You haven’t answered every question with evolution,’… Well, guess what? Science can’t answer every question.” No, ID says, You haven’t answered the most fundamental question about evolution: the origin of biological information. In fact, the mechanism you propose as an answer to that question is — logically (the challenge of producing functionally integrated machinery in a step-by-tiny-step process with each step being both functional and progressively advantageous), mathematically (the huge improbabilities created by combinatorial explosion), and empirically (Behe’s demonstration in the field of the severe limits of random mutation and natural selection) — inadequate to the task. In addition, ID theory Read More ›

Engineering is often thought of as one of the “lower” sciences. I propose the opposite, that the engineering disciplines are in the category of the most rigorous sciences (such as mathematics), because they expose themselves to empirical and logical invalidation. This is in complete contrast to Darwinian evolutionary “theory,” which is perpetually amorphous, explains everything and nothing at the same time, is impossible to pin down, and is impervious to logic, reason, mathematical scrutiny, or evidence. This is perhaps why an increasing number of us in the engineering community — especially the software-engineering community, since it is now obvious that living systems are fundamentally based on complex software rather than stochastic chemical interactions — find Darwinian explanations to be not Read More ›

GNU in the computer software development community stands for GNU’s Not Unix (a recursive acronym — anyone familiar with computer algorithms understands recursive, or self-referential, self-calling procedures). Unix is the famous computer operating system developed in academia during the early 1970s, for which the nearly universal Kernighan and Ritchie C programming language was invented, once it became obvious that the limitations of assembly languages (which are CPU instruction-set specific and provide no portability or programming structure) were found to be inadequate for the task. The C language was invented as essentially a portable assembler, which provided both low-level CPU access and high-level library capability. GNU/Linux is an open-source operating system which emulates and mirrors Unix capabilities but with the source Read More ›

In another UD thread I made a passing comment about the fact that I had just read Doug Axe’s essay on protein folds in The Nature of Nature. I commented: Speaking of The Nature of Nature, today I read Doug Axe’s essay, The Nature of Protein Folds: Quantifying the Difficulty of an Unguided Search through Protein Sequence Space on page 412. Anyone who reads this and comes away believing that Darwinian mechanisms can produce this technology is living on another planet than I do, or perhaps in a hyper-version of Alice’s Wonderland where a near infinite number of impossible things are believed before breakfast. You can reference the thread in the link above for comments from Mung, who went to Read More ›