vjtorley

A few days ago, The Week published a pro-evolution article with the paradoxical title, “Why you should stop believing in evolution” by Keith Blanchard, a former editor-in-chief of Maxim magazine who is now the chief digital officer of the World Science Festival. Evolution, argued Blanchard, isn’t something we believe in, but something we simply grasp: “You either understand it or you don’t.” Blanchard then proceeded to demonstrate that he doesn’t understand the very theory he advocates: his article is riddled with scientific errors and non sequiturs. I’m not the first person to criticize Blanchard’s article on scientific grounds. That honor belongs to Glenn Branch, Deputy Director of the National Center for Science Education, whose article, Five Quibbles for Blanchard was Read More ›

In today’s short post, I shall argue that (a) there are at least some messages which we can identify as the product of an intelligent agent, regardless of their linguistic and social context, and (b) there is no context in which it would be reasonable for us to conclude that a message visible to everyone was a hallucination. What prompted this discussion In a post titled Signature in the cell?, Professor Edward Feser argued that no message, in and of itself, could warrant the inference that it was the product of an intelligent agent, without a knowledge of the context of the message. Referring to the hypothetical scenario in which a “Made by Yahweh” message was discovered in every human Read More ›

In his reply to my latest post, Edward Feser took me to task for focusing exclusively on the teleological argument instead of his favorite argument: the cosmological argument (which includes St. Thomas Aquinas’ first, second and third ways). Today, I’ve decided to remedy that defect. In 2013, Professor Feser gave a talk titled, “An Aristotelian Proof of the Existence of God”. The talk, which is just over an hour long, is well worth viewing, and Feser rebuts popular objections to the argument towards the end, at 50:40. However, I would strongly urge readers to peruse Feser’s post, So you think you understand the cosmological argument? (July 16, 2011) before watching the video. http://vimeo.com/60979789 For those who don’t like watching videos, Read More ›

Imagine that scientists discovered the best documentary evidence for God’s existence that anyone could possibly hope for: messages in the DNA of each and every human cell, saying “Made by Yahweh.” Imagine that a notorious New Atheist and a well-known Catholic philosopher are both asked by journalists what they make of this evidence. The New Atheist shocks everyone by announcing that he now (provisionally) accepts that there is a God. “Sure, aliens might have made those messages,” he concedes. “But it’s not likely, is it? For the time being, I’m going with the hypothesis that God did it. This looks like pretty good evidence to me.” The Catholic philosopher is asked what he makes of the new discovery. To everyone’s Read More ›

Professor Kenneth Miller, the acclaimed author of Finding Darwin’s God, was recently interviewed by Swedish magician and skeptic Samuel Varg for a three-part series on faith, science and magic. Here’s the 33-minute interview, which Varg posted on Youtube: Who is Samuel Varg? Two weeks ago, Matt Young of Panda’s Thumb put up a post about the interview, in which Varg described his background as follows: You want my background? OK. I’m a Swedish guy, and I’m 31 years old. When I was around 17, I became involved in creationism and bought that whole concept of this black-and-white worldview with evolution as a big lie. Around 20 I started to look into the actual debate and wanted to know “the enemy,” Read More ›

These days, it is fashionable among science writers to claim that the difference between humans and other animals is one of degree. Well, here’s one clear-cut difference: only human beings are aware of what other individuals can see, while guide dogs appear to be blissfully unaware that their owners cannot see. A 2008 study by the French anthropologist Florence Gaunet, titled, “How do guide dogs of blind owners and pet dogs of sighted owners (Canis familiaris) ask their owners for food?” (Animal Cognition, July 2008, 11(3):475-83) was the subject of a recent blog article in Discover magazine (Seriously Science, July 1, 2014). The design of the experiment was simplicity itself: Dr. Gaunet reasoned that if guide dogs understood that their Read More ›

Readers who were taught about ring species as evidence for evolution in high school are due for a surprise: it now appears that there aren’t any, after all. There were only a few alleged cases to begin with, but now, they’ve all been discredited. The last “good example” of a ring species has just been struck off the list, in a new paper by Miguel Alcaide et al. in Nature “What’s a ring species?” I hear some of you ask. In a recent post titled, There are no ring species, which is well worth reading, evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne describes the process whereby ring species supposedly originate: It works like this: a species expands its range and encounters a roughly Read More ›

A few days ago, Professor Jerry Coyne attacked fellow atheist and Darwinist Michael Ruse, for going too easy on the cosmological argument for God’s existence in an interview with philosopher Gary Gutting, titled, Does Evolution Explain Religious Beliefs? (New York Times, July 8, 2014). In the interview, Ruse, a professor of philosophy at Florida State University and the author of the forthcoming book Atheism: What Everyone Needs to Know, indicated that although he did not find the traditional philosophical arguments for God’s existence at all persuasive, he could respect people who did, and he added that he found Richard Dawkins’ attempted refutations of these arguments downright embarrassing, as a philosopher: If the person of faith wants to say that God Read More ›

I recently received a message from someone who had a fascinating video on transcription, which he wanted to share with people he knew. The video, titled “The Central Dogma,” was produced by the RIKEN Omics Science Center for the exhibition titled ‘Beyond DNA’ held at National Science Museum of Japan, and can also be viewed here. Readers are invited to form their own conclusions. Any further comment on my part would be superfluous: the old adage that a picture is worth a thousand words was never truer than for the video you are about to watch. Here’s the Youtube video:

Work by a husband-and-wife team of virologists is shedding new light on an old scientific dispute: did viruses emerge before or after the development of cellular life? Until recently, many scientists believed that viruses only appeared after the first cells emerged on the primordial Earth. However, the recent discovery of strange genes in giant viruses is leading some scientists to suggest that the ancestors of viruses evolved before cells. Are they alive or aren’t they? Giant viruses, which were first described in 2003, straddle the gap between viruses and bacteria. Despite the fact that viruses undergo natural selection and reproduce by creating multiple copies of themselves through self-assembly – an ability which University of Cape Town virologist Ed Rybicki considers Read More ›

The writer, philosopher and home-maker Lydia McGrew makes some very sensible points about Intelligent Design arguments in a recent post on her blog, titled, Special agent intention as an explanation (May 12, 2014), which cogently rebuts the claim (made by some critics) that ID rejects the notion of God as the necessary Cause of created things. She writes: All Christians believe that God made the universe and sustains the universe. All Christians also believe that God sometimes does things that in some sense “go beyond” making and sustaining the universe. We usually call those miracles. Some have argued that, if a particular “going beyond” was “front-loaded” into the initial conditions of the Big Bang, it shouldn’t be considered a miracle. Read More ›

The Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) has placed a full-page advertisement in the July 3 issue of the New York Times, protesting against the Supreme Court’s recent decision (in Burwell vs. Hobby Lobby) that two for-profit corporations with sincerely held religious beliefs do not have to provide a full range of contraceptives at no cost to their employees, pursuant to the Affordable Care Act. The two companies in question are closely held corporations, like 90 per cent of all businesses in the United States. Brett Logiurato, writing for Business Insider, points out that closely held companies comprise 52% of the American workforce, citing a 2002 study from New York University. Writing in National Review Online (July 1, 2014), Matt Bowman Read More ›

The United Kingdom has now banned the teaching of “any doctrine or theory which holds that natural biological processes cannot account for the history, diversity, and complexity of life on earth and therefore rejects the scientific theory of evolution” at all schools receiving public funding, including academies and free schools (see also here). In science classes, alternative beliefs about origins may not be presented to pupils “as a scientific theory”; however, discussion of these beliefs is permitted in religious education classes, “as long as it is not presented as a valid alternative to established scientific theory.” The new guidelines (which readers may access here) “explicitly require that pupils are taught about the theory of evolution,” without specifying which theory of Read More ›

Last Friday RealClearReligion.org, featured an article titled, The Pope Believes in Evolution (Aleteia, 13 June 2014) by M. Anthony Mills, a Ph.D. candidate in the history and philosophy of science at Notre Dame University. Mills’ article was written in response to an earlier article by George Dvorsky (io9.com, March 16, 2013), titled, Does the new Pope believe in evolution? In his article, Dvorsky argued that Catholicism and Darwinism don’t mix: you cannot accept both. Darwinian evolution, according to Dvorsky, is “a God killer,” “a stand alone system,” a “fully autonomous process that does not require any guiding ‘rationality’ ([Pope] Benedict’s term) to function.” In his reply to Dvorsky, Anthony Mills makes several concessions that are quite remarkable, for a Catholic Read More ›

In a series of recent posts, RDFish has made several penetrating criticisms of the Intelligent Design project, which can be summarized as follows: (i) the ID project does not currently possess an operational definition of “intelligence” which is genuinely informative and at the same time, suitable for use in scientific research; (ii) the explanatory filter used by the Intelligent Design community assumes that intelligence is something distinct from law and/or chance – in other words, it commits itself in advance to a belief in contra-casual libertarian free will (the view that when intelligent agents make a decision, they are always capable of acting otherwise), a view which is appealing to “common sense,” but which is highly controversial on both scientific Read More ›