Professor James Tour’s recent video, The Origin of Life – An Inside Story, managed to accomplish three things at once: it shattered the credibility of abiogenesis as a theory; it provided American high school science teachers with an excellent classroom resource for countering evolutionary propaganda; and (perhaps unintentionally), it set a new research agenda for Read More…
Author: vjtorley
I've just completed a Ph.D. in philosophy, but I have a fairly broad academic background (B.S. with a pure mathematics major; B.A. with computing and philosophy majors; B.Ec. with economics and accounting majors; M.A. in philosophy; Dip. Ed. in Secondary School Teaching). I'm an Australian, but I currently live in Japan with my wife and baby son.
Maclean’s inept hatchet job on Jesus
Canadian weekly Maclean’s recently featured an article by Brian Bethune titled, Did Jesus really exist? The article, which drew upon a book recently published by New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman, titled, Jesus Before the Gospels: How the Earliest Christians Remembered, Changed, and Invented Their Stories of the Savior, argues that the Gospel accounts of Jesus Read More…
Denmark: it’s no secular paradise. Neither is Sweden.
Recently there has been a spate of newspaper reports extolling Denmark as the world’s happiest country. Secular liberals often point to the Scandinavian countries as an earthly paradise, when compared with what they see as a broken-down, inegalitarian, hyper-religious United States. Are they right? I decided to check out the facts, and here’s what I’ve Read More…
An open letter to Archbishop Jerome Listecki
Your Excellency, I humbly ask you to strike a blow for academic freedom, free speech and religious freedom, by publicly forbidding Marquette University from calling itself a Catholic university henceforth, and by revoking the mandate of theology teachers at Marquette University to teach theology. In this letter, I’d like to explain why I believe these Read More…
Catholic critics of “theistic evolution” are hopelessly divided
John Farrell’s article, It’s Time To Retire ‘Theistic Evolution’ (Forbes magazine, March 19, 2016), cites three prominent Catholic thinkers who reject the term “theistic evolution.” But what Farrell overlooks is that these Catholics hold wildly divergent views on the simple question of whether living things were designed by God. Edward Feser insists that they were, Read More…
My thoughts on the Krauss- Meyer-Lamoureux debate
My verdict: The debate would have been a better one without Krauss, who generally behaved like a boor, and who engaged in deliberate dishonesty (see below). Meyer and Lamoureux had a lively but amicable exchange of views. Meyer displayed admirable fortitude in soldiering on, even though he had a splitting headache. Introduction Host Karen Stiller Read More…
Pigeons, computers and Picasso
After reading about how AlphaGo managed to trounce Lee Se-Dol 4-1 in a series of five games of Go, I had a feeling of déjà vu: where have I read about this style of learning before? And then it came to me: pigeons. Both computers and pigeons are incremental learners, and both employ probabilistic algorithms Read More…
Computer beats humans at Go: so what?
The news that a computer program has beaten Go master Lee Se-dol in a best-of-five competition may have shocked some readers. In this post, I’d like to explain why I don’t think it matters much at all, by telling a little story about three guys named Tom, Sam and Al. Tom has a brilliant mind. Read More…
Dr. Stacy Trasancos responds
A week ago, I wrote an article, Feet to the fire, in response to Dr. Stacy Trasancos’s essay, Does Science Prove God Exists? Dr. Trasancos has been gracious enough to respond to my article. In this post, I’d like to make a final reply, and I will happily give her the last word, if she Read More…
Too hot to handle: Update on the PLoS ONE paper
The retraction of a PLoS ONE paper on the hand that made repeated reference to a Creator shows that biologists are “very hostile to those who invoke the supernatural in their science,” writes Professor Jerry Coyne. But it turns out that the paper’s authors weren’t referring to God, but Nature. One of the paper’s authors, Read More…
Is the Sixth Great Extinction a big myth?
Recently, I was astonished when I came across an article titled, Are We in a ‘Sixth Great Extinction’? Maybe Not, by Ross Pomeroy, an editor of RealClearScience and a zoologist and conservation biologist by training. The author’s candor and intellectual honesty are refreshing: The notion that humans are erasing species off the face of the Read More…
Feet to the fire: A response to Dr. Stacy Trasancos
Stacy Trasancos, a homeschooling mother of seven with a Ph.D. in chemistry and an M.A. in Dogmatic Theology who is an Adjunct Professor at Holy Apostles College and Seminary, has penned a thoughtful essay over at the Catholic One Faith blog titled, Does Science Prove God Exists? Her answer, in a nutshell, is that while Read More…
Denton vs. Moran on structuralism
There has been a great deal of controversy recently regarding the theory of structuralism, which has been defended by Dr. Michael Denton in his new book, Evolution: Still a Theory in Crisis and attacked by Professor Larry Moran over at his Sandwalk blog (see here, here, here and here). Evolution News and Views has several Read More…
Is there only one brand of science?
In a recent post over at Why Evolution Is True, Professor Jerry Coyne addresses what he regards as the “main incompatibility between science and religion.” Coyne is confident that science is a legitimate arbiter of truth because “there’s only one brand of science, with most scientists agreeing on what’s true,” whereas “there are tens of Read More…
Larry Moran needs to do some more reading
I had intended to write a post on whales as products of Intelligent Design. But the whales will have to wait. In the space of just three hours, Professor Larry Moran has put up two remarkably silly posts. And in both cases, Professor Moran could have spared himself the embarrassment if he had done just Read More…