vjtorley

It has been more than a year since kairosfocus posted his now-famous challenge on Uncommon Descent, inviting Darwinists to submit an essay defending their views. A Darwinist named Petrushka has recently responded, over at The Skeptical Zone. (Petrushka describes himself as a Darwinist in a fairly broad sense of the term: he accepts common descent as a result of gradual, unguided change, which includes not only changes occurring as a result of natural selection but also neutral change.) The terms of the original challenge issued by kairosfocus were as follows: Compose your summary case for darwinism (or any preferred variant that has at least some significant support in the professional literature, such as punctuated equilibria etc) in a fashion that Read More ›

Professor James M. Tour is one of the ten most cited chemists in the world. He is famous for his work on nanocars (pictured above, courtesy of Wikipedia), nanoelectronics, graphene nanostructures, carbon nanovectors in medicine, and green carbon research for enhanced oil recovery and environmentally friendly oil and gas extraction. He is currently a Professor of Chemistry, Professor of Computer Science, and Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science at Rice University. He has authored or co-authored 489 scientific publications and his name is on 36 patents. Although he does not regard himself as an Intelligent Design theorist, Professor Tour, along with over 700 other scientists, took the courageous step back in 2001 of signing the Discovery Institute’s “A Scientific Read More ›

Professor Jerry Coyne can’t seem to leave the Adam and Eve question alone. In a recent post, Professor Coyne criticizes Bryan College in Dayton, Tennessee, for requiring its teaching professors to sign an updated “statement of belief” which, for the first time, explicitly affirms the existence of an historical Adam and Eve. Since Bryan College describes itself as “a nondenominational evangelical Christian college named after William Jennings Bryan: statesman, orator, and renowned prosecuting attorney in the famous Scopes Evolution Trial,” this requirement should hardly occasion surprise. What would be surprising is if the college didn’t require its professors to believe in a literal Adam and Eve. In a related post published late last year, Coyne explains in detail why he Read More ›

As kairosfocus pointed out in a recent post, my 2013 article on macroevolution skeptic Professor James Tour seems to be doing the rounds on Facebook and Reddit. Some commenters have accused Professor Tour of confusing macroevolution with the scientific problem of how life originated. To make such an accusation against one the world’s leading chemists is not only extremely impertinent but also factually wrong, as the skeptics would have realized if they had read my follow-up post, Macroevolution, microevolution and chemistry: the devil is in the details. (While they’re at it, they might also like to read my post, Could the eye have evolved by natural selection in a geological blink?) On a deeper level, however, the skeptics’ attempt to Read More ›

I’m delighted to announce that Dr. Robin Collins has written a thought-provoking paper titled, The Fine-Tuning for Discoverability, which develops a new fine-tuning argument for the existence of God, to the effect that some of the laws, initial conditions, and the fundamental parameters of physics were set in order to make the existence of an Intelligent Designer of the cosmos more easily discoverable by the embodied conscious agents (such as human beings) living in the cosmos. I should point out that Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay Richards first drew attention to a striking correlation between habitability and measurability in their book, The Privileged Planet, back in 2004. As Richards put it in a conversation with lawyer and apologist Lee Strobel: “What’s Read More ›

Recently, while reading a post by Professor Larry Moran over at his Sandwalk blog, I stumbled across a lively discussion of Haldane’s dilemma in the comments section. Not being a geneticist, I hadn’t really paid much attention to the dilemma, until now. For those who are interested in following up the matter, I’m going to post a few links to relevant articles arguing that Haldane’s dilemma remains unsolved (with asterisks placed in front of what I think are the best ones), plus some of the best responses to the dilemma that I’ve seen by evolutionists, before throwing the discussion open to readers. Articles arguing that Haldane’s dilemma is a real problem for evolution A Dilemma for Haldane by PaV at Read More ›

Did Charles Darwin ever invoke his own theory in order to justify the extermination of one race by another? If the term “extermination” refers to systematic genocide, the answer is an emphatic “No”; but if “extermination” is defined more broadly to include the displacement and consequent extinction of one race by another, more technologically advanced race in the battle for scarce resources, then I would argue that the answer is “Yes.” I recently came across some highly revealing correspondence between the celebrated author and Anglican divine, Charles Kingsley (see here) and Charles Darwin, whom he greatly admired, (see here) indicating that Darwin, like Kingsley, looked forward to “the higher races of men, when high enough, replacing & clearing off the Read More ›

Over at Raw Story, feminist blogger Amanda Marcotte has written an interesting post, New Darwin Documentary Shows Creationists Aren’t Dumb. They’re Fearful, about a new HBO documentary, Questioning Darwin, which features interviews with creationists. Marcotte comments: I agree with the New York Times reviewer that the creationists are presented non-judgementally, but as these clips amassed by Gawker make clear, the creationists do all the work for you anyway. There’s a pastor explaining he would have to accept it if the Bible said “2+2=5″ and people talking, over and over again, about the strategies they have to employ to shut down their minds in the event that they’re presented with an opportunity to think more broadly. The major emotion that comes Read More ›

By now, most readers will have read about the jaw-dropping problem-solving feats of a New Caledonian crow named 007. In the course of just three minutes, 007 managed to solve a complex eight-stage puzzle in order to get some food, in an experiment devised by Dr. Alex Taylor (home page here), a lecturer in evolutionary psychology at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. Here’s what 007 had to do, as described by journalist Sarah Griffiths in an article in Daily Mail online (11 February 2014) which also includes a video of 007’s performance: First the crow pulls a string attached to the branch it is perched on towards itself to reach a short stick dangling below. The crow picks up Read More ›

Over at his Sandwalk blog, Professor Larry Moran has recently created something which he has previously declared to be impossible: a moral absolute. Readers might be wondering: what is Professor Moran’s moral absolute all about? Is it about the inherent wrongfulness of killing the innocent, or taking away people’s freedom, or oppressing the poor, or violating a commitment one has given? Wrong, wrong, wrong and wrong! Here’s Professor Moran’s new moral absolute, in all its resplendent glory: It is totally wrong, all the time, to discriminate against someone based on their sexual preferences… There is NEVER a time when an enlightened society should tolerate, let alone legalize, bigotry. The reason why I was surprised to read this statement on Professor Read More ›

A little over a year ago, I wrote a reply to a post by skeptic John Loftus, arguing that in a godless universe, senseless evils are precisely what we would expect to happen. Shortly afterwards, Jeffery Jay Lowder, President Emeritus (and co-founder) of Internet Infidels, Inc., posted a reply to my post, which I’d like to respond to today. In my post, I accused John Loftus of making seven philosophical errors. Jeffery Jay Lowder has responded to each of my seven points. I’d now like to reply to Lowder’s arguments. Mistake #1: Loftus’ failure to take account of prior probabilities In his reply, Jeffery Jay Lowder conceded that John Loftus had failed to take account of prior probabilities in his Read More ›

Every year, around five people in the United States die from snakebite. More than 38,000 Americans die from suicide every year – and the true figure is far higher, according to Julie Phillips, an associate professor of sociology at Rutgers University, whose research on rising suicide rates has led her to conclude that suicide in the United States is “vastly underreported“. Over the pascouple of days, there has been a veritable deluge of news reports (see here, here, here, here and here ) about a “snake-handling preacher,” Jamie Coots, who was bitten by a rattlesnake last Saturday in Middlesboro, Kentucky, and who died an hour later, after refusing medical treatment. It’s estimated that no more than 125 churches in the Read More ›

Over on his Why Evolution Is True Website, Professor Jerry Coyne has posted a short passage on the papal condemnation of Galileo, excerpted from Andrew Dickson White’s A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (New York, NY: D. Appleton and Company, 1896). However, all the passage proves is that neither White nor Coyne understand the theological doctrine which they are attacking: they are all at sea about the dogma at which they are aiming their barbs. The Conflict Thesis The reason why Professor Coyne quoted from the work of Andrew Dickson White at some length was that White was a zealous proponent of what historians of science refer to as the conflict thesis – the view Read More ›

My previous post, An exchange with an ID skeptic seems to have kicked off a firestorm of criticism. So many readers of this post have rebuked me with the question, “Why didn’t you argue [XYZ], when you were debating Dr. McGrath?” that I feel obliged to respond. My goals, in engaging with Dr. McGrath First of all, my dialogue with Dr. McGrath was an exchange of views, as I clearly stated in my opening paragraph. It was not a debate, and it was never intended to be such. Consequently, questions about who won are entirely beside the point. I wasn’t aiming for a “knock-out blow.” Dr. McGrath did a very good job of defending his viewpoint; and for that, I Read More ›

Recently I posted a reply on Uncommon Descent, to a post by Dr. James F. McGrath, an Associate Professor of Religion at Butler University, criticizing Intelligent Design. Dr. McGrath and I then continued to exchange views over on his post. I hope he will not mind if I reprint our online correspondence on this post at Uncommon Descent, where readers can view it at their leisure. I would also like to personally thank Dr. McGrath for his courtesy, professionalism and kindness, in taking so much of his time to respond to my queries. First, a little bit of background information. In his original post, Dr. McGrath had posed the following dilemma to Intelligent Design proponents: Either God can create a Read More ›