Cosmologists Say Last Week’s Announcement About Gravitational Waves and Inflation May Be Wrong. 🙂 Hey, I want to take a chance too at being wrong too. Here is my shot at being wrong, I agree with Katirai: Andromeda has 1 star, not billions. Professor of Astronomy YP Varshni published in 2005 that quasar Ton 202 is only about 700 light years away, not 3.3 Giga light years. If quasars are close, why not everything else? And if everything else is close, then galaxies are close, and if galaxies are close, the Andromeda galaxy isn’t billions and billions of stars but rather a single star surrounded by gas, debris, and maybe planets. Do you believe your eyes or do you believe Read More ›

Allen teaches biology at Cornell, one of the world’s finest academic institutions. He accepts and defends evolutionary biology, but he has also defended the rights, reputation and treatment of ID-sympathetic students. He has done so even at peril to his own standing and reputation. In 2005 the president of Cornell Condemned the Teaching of ID as science. In 2006, Allen dared to at least raise the question and at least attempt to properly argue ID is not science by putting together a class devoted to exploring the question fairly in his infamous “Evolution and Design” class, perhaps the only class of its kind to ever be hosted on an Ivy League campus. Students confided to me that they felt Allen Read More ›

Comments by Skeptical Zone evolutionists are a never ending source of entertainment. I made what I thought was a simple, indisputable statement: I don’t see dead cells evolving into living ones. A dead dog stays a dead dog. Law of biogenesis, etc. But far be it for an evolutionist to ever be seen agreeing with a creationist on the most basic truths. In response to my claim, “A dead dog stays a dead dog,” Severky says, No, it doesn’t. 😯 Serversky justifies his claim by saying how a dead dog doesn’t stay a dead dog if its dead body parts get digested by another living organism. What about the dog’s memories and experiences, everything that defines the dog. Where did Read More ›

Thanks to UD, I was able to make improvements to version 1 of an essay I published at UD here. I cleaned up the essay thanks to the comments and criticisms and published version 2 at CEU Insight and Inspiration. Thank you to all those who helped me make a better essay, and it became the featured topic of discussion on Episode #578 of the Revolution Against Evolution Godtube Channel and it made RAE.org list of featured essays.

David Heddle, a professor of physics asks the question: Why is P.Z. so dumb? Because he can’t grasp that fine-tuning is a metaphor. He is a afraid that it gives to much ammunition to the theists. This had to be one of the most entertaining take downs of Victor Stenger and PZ Myers by a fellow scientist. David Heddle points out the very people labeling climate change dissidents as science deniers are themselves science deniers of fine-tuning. They are fine-tuning deniers. Let me give my definition of fine-tuning. Fine-tuning: It is the observation that the ability of the universe to synthesize heavy elements (heavy = anything beyond Helium, or “metals” to Astronomers), which are necessary for any kind of life, Read More ›

Tragic Mishap has been a long and faithful member of the UD community, and so I’m highlighting a project he is thinking about: I’ve had an idea rolling around in my head for awhile based on Douglas Axe’s research on a 150 residue section of beta-glutamase. He used experiments to come up with a number for the probability of finding a functional fold by mutating it. It was approximately 10^-77. (I’m not sure of the exact number but it doesn’t matter for the illustration.) Ever since becoming aware of that research, I have wondered if it would be possible to theoretically predict such results by simply restricting the type of amino acid substitutions which are allowed. For instance, a protein Read More ›

The saying “nothing in evolution makes sense in the light of biology” is widely attributed to famous creationist Duane Gish. In 2006, I used the phrase myself here. Casey Luskin points out a recent peer-reviewed article critical of Darwinism almost got the phrase right: The evolutionary biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky famously noted that “nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution,” but perhaps, too, “nothing in evolution makes sense except in the light of biology.” Combatting Evolution to Fight Disease They didn’t get it exactly right, but still that’s progress. 🙂 You don’t need to understand evolution in order to understand biology! Evolutionism provides no useful insight to biology. HT: BA77

A new discussion forum which I mentioned previously is now mostly operational. Forums serve a radically different function than blogs. Forums are great for exploring and developing ideas, whereas blogs are great for promoting ideas. This fact became evident when participants of the old ISCID and ARN forum left the forums and migrated to Pharyngula, PandasThumb, UD, Telic Thoughts, ENV, etc. Hard to believe that 14 years ago, ARN and ISCID hosted interactions of some the founding names of the ID/Evolution blogsphere of today: PZ Myers, William Dembski, Jonathan Wells, Paul Nelson, Casey Luskin, etc. The forum is obviously for Christians but anyone interested is welcome to participate. I’ve often argued that creationists will benefit from learning ID. Believing a Read More ›

[This is an essay I wrote originally for a creationist audience which I cross posted at Insight and Inspiration from CEU (where comments are shut off, but comments are invited here at UD however). I post it here at UD unchanged because the ID community might be able to glean some useful information from it even though it was originally written for a creationist audience. ] When I watched the Ken Ham vs. Bill Nye debate, I lamented, “Why Lord do we not have an Isaac Newton of today defending your creation?” In years gone by, Christians were at the forefront of intellectual advancement in science, technology, medicine, literature, art, music, etc. I lamented, “dear Lord, why has this happened? Read More ›

UD is privileged to have occasional visits by radio show hosts like Jason Rennie, Bob Enyart, and now we can add to the list, Richard Walker. I’ve often said, ID needs to be marketed to the creationist community. This may seem surprising since many creationists already accept ID. But believing a claim isn’t the same as being versant in a claim. I believe in magnetism and electricity, but that’s quite different than being versant in understanding magnetism and electricity. Engineering and Physics students really can appreciate the difference between believing and understanding! Studying ID is more than just believing it, it is understanding it, and understanding ID will help someone better understand creation. I am so grateful ID is welcomed Read More ›

There have been some developments that have finally precipitated my decision to start 1 experimental forum and 2 experimental creationist blogs. The most important catalyst for my decision being I got invitation to make presentations to university students for which they can get homework credits for attending, and I needed an internet presence to supplement what they learn in the presentations. The decision was also was peripherally connected to some of the reader complaints about creationism being overemphasized at UD and some desire to have an ARN/ISCID-like discussion forum for conversations that may require weeks to conduct. UD and EvolutionNews (ENV) blogs are what I consider advocacy blogs for ID. People come to these blogs for a variety of reasons. Read More ›

I have debated Darwinists for many years, and I don’t debate them in order to persuade them, but rather to humiliate their claims as best I can, and this is done by arguing from the most unassailable positions possible. A few months ago, in a discussion on The Fundamental Law of Intelligent Design, I pleaded with Barry to pose a question to Nick Matzke, and this was the result: A Statistics Question for Nick Matzke. We didn’t ask Nick, “are 500 coins heads designed” or “are 500 coins heads intelligently designed” or “are 500 coins heads intelligently designed, and therefore isn’t ID science” we asked: If you came across a table on which was set 500 coins (no tossing involved) Read More ›

[youtube YrGGNaHblJQ] Crowe Tweets Pope Francis and invites him to watch [creationist] movie Now “Noah” star Russell Crowe is trying to reach a higher power, beseeching Pope Francis on Twitter to watch his upcoming biblical adventure, which is based on the Noah’s Ark story from the Book of Genesis. Addressing the pontiff as “Dear Holy Father,” Crowe on Monday tweeted, “#Noah film. Screening?The message of the film is powerful , fascinating , resonant.” Crowe followed up with a tweet aimed at his own 1.37 million followers, writing, “given his environmental focus/scholarly knowledge, trying to screen #Noah for Pope Francis.” Crowe also asked his followers to retweet his previous message. Francis, who boasts 3.7 million Twitter followers (@Pontifex) and more importantly Read More ›

It would be an interesting debate as to whether legal decisions by juries are considered science. Does anybody really care whether a jury verdict is called science or non-science? Was the verdict against Jodi Arias for killing Travis Alexander science? Or how about the conviction of Bernie Madoff, is that science? Isn’t it more important that the verdicts delivered are correct and faithful to the facts? Whether the inferences and verdicts can be labeled science or not seems to be extremely irrelevant in the scheme of things. In similar fashion, that has been my view about the debate whether ID is science. A case can be made either way, and if we let something as flimsy as Darwinism and multiverses Read More ›

This was such a non-news item at the time because the movie bombed so badly most didn’t even realize there was a movie. It hit theaters November 29, 2013. ‘The Unbelievers,’ With Richard Dawkins Richard Dawkins and Lawrence Krauss on a triple-continent series of public engagements, Gus Holwerda’s unforgivably superficial documentary is too busy drooling over its subjects to flesh out their body of work. … Too slight to persuade, “The Unbelievers” is also too poorly made to entertain. The rational roots of atheism deserve a much better movie than this. Total Worldwide Gross = $14,000 😯 [youtube ZxDLkoK8vQQ] HT Mike Gene