vjtorley

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 the Intelligent Design movement, which will transform it into a bona fide scientific discipline: the task of reverse-engineering life itself. Readers who wish to view the talk may do so here: Why Tour’s talk is the perfect resource for American high school science teachers who want to counteract evolutionary propaganda At the beginning of his talk, Tour explicitly declared that he would make no reference Read More ›

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 are largely based on unreliable memories and a highly distorted oral tradition. But Bethune does not stop there: citing the work of New Atheist Richard Carrier, he goes beyond Ehrman and maintains that Jesus may never have even existed at all. The issues raised by Professor Ehrman in his book are of immense philosophical significance, for they pertain to the trustworthiness of human testimony. If Read More ›

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 come up with. My findings, in a nutshell 1. Latin Americans are actually the world’s happiest people; Danes are the world’s most contented people. 2. The success of Sweden and Denmark is due to its social homogeneity and its Protestant work ethic, rather than socialism. 3. Scandinavian societies are egalitarian, but they also tend to stifle individuality. 4. Denmark and Sweden have their own social Read More ›

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 drastic measures are necessary and justifiable. Before I go on, I’d better introduce myself. My name is Vincent Torley, and I’m an Australian Catholic layman (now residing in Japan), with a Ph.D. in philosophy and several other degrees. Thanks to my years of study in an open academic environment where people were free to defend any and every point of view, I have a firm Read More ›

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, and Stacy Trasancos apparently agrees; Ken Miller says they were not – which puts him in the same camp as Jesuit astronomer George Coyne and Catholic theologian John Haught, two outspoken defenders of evolution who were not cited in Farrell’s article. However, the clear teaching of the Catholic Church is that humans and other living things were designed by God. What I find astonishing is Read More ›

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 introduces the debate, which is sponsored by Wycliffe College, in partnership with Faith Today, Power to Change, Ravi Zacharias International Ministries and the Network of Christian Scholars. Professor Lawrence Krauss will speak first, followed by Dr. Stephen Meyer and finally, Dr. Denis Lamoureux. Professor Lawrence Krauss’s talk Professor Krauss begins by announcing that he wants to clear up a misconception. 3:52 Krauss declares: “The Discovery Read More ›

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 (such as the various machine learning algorithms used in artificial intelligence, and the computation of relative frequencies of positive or negative reinforcements, which is what pigeons do when they undergo conditioning) in order to help them home in on their learning target. Of course, there are several differences as well: computers don’t need reinforcements such as food to motivate them; computers learn a lot faster Read More ›

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. He puts his perspicacious intellect to good use by playing mentally challenging games, and he always wins. Tom’s freakish ability to win games by performing astonishing leaps of mental intuition leaves many spectators baffled. “How on earth do you do it?” they ask him, whenever he chalks up a victory against yet another hapless opponent. “It’s a strange gift I have,” Tom answers modestly. “I Read More ›

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 wishes to make a closing rebuttal. Dr. Trasancos’s question for the Intelligent Design community I’d like to begin by answering the (rather lengthy) question which Dr. Trasancos poses at the end of her response to my article. She writes: If 1) certain molecules provide the best evidence for a Designer; and if 2) the “primordial Fiat Lux, uttered at the moment when, along with matter, Read More ›

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, Ming-Jin Liu, explains: We are sorry for drawing the debates about creationism. Our study has no relationship with creationism. English is not our native language. Our understanding of the word “Creator” was not actually as a native English speaker expected. Now we realized that we had misunderstood the word “Creator.” What we would like to express is that the biomechanical characteristic of tendi[n]ous connective architecture Read More ›

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 Earth at near unprecedented levels is a perennial story that has been blared in the media for more than two decades. In the year 2000, the United Nations’ Millennium Ecosystem Assessment estimated that species are going extinct 1,000 times faster than they naturally do, and that this rate could increase to 10,000 times. These rates translate to between 17,000 and 140,000 species going extinct each Read More ›

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 science can provide inductive support for the existence of a Creator, only theology can provide deductive arguments for God’s existence. In any case, we shouldn’t need to prop up our belief in God with scientific arguments. Dr. Trasancos rejects the view that some scientific conclusions are compatible with God’s existence, while others are not. Christians, she says, should start from the fundamental notion that God Read More ›

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 articles defending Dr. Denton’s views (see here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here). Let me say at the outset that I have not yet read Dr. Denton’s latest book, which has been reviewed by Barry Arrington here. Rather than reviewing Dr. Denton’s work, my aim in today’s post is to summarize its central thesis, discuss its significance for how scientists should do biology, Read More ›

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 thousands of brands of religion, many making conflicting and incompatible claims.” In today’s short post, I’d like to explain why Coyne’s assertion about science is fundamentally mistaken. First of all, “conflicting claims” and “conflicting brands” are two very different things. At any given moment, there are literally thousands of conflicting and incompatible claims being made within each field of science. That’s part of the way Read More ›

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 a little more reading. The first post, titled, Can theology produce true knowledge?, critiques Dr. Denis Alexander’s claim that there are other, equally valid, ways of knowing besides science. Professor Moran thinks this is flawed on three counts: first, natural theology is question-begging because “you have to assume the existence of a creator god before you would even think of interpreting the natural world as Read More ›