vjtorley

In this post, I shall attempt to get to the nub of a vital but often overlooked point of difference between Intelligent Design theory and some of its Thomist critics. The issue relates to precisely what it is that makes a thing a thing, and not just a virtual imitation of a thing. I’m also going to talk about Harry Potter, so stay tuned. What I shall attempt to argue is that the concept of “top-down creation” is unintelligible. Things have to also be made from the bottom up: in order to create something, de novo, you have to fully specify what it is that you’re creating. That means filling in all the details. More generally, what I’m claiming is Read More ›

My intention in writing this post is to clear Rev. William Paley of two charges that have been leveled against him: first, that the God he argues for is different in certain vital respects from the God of classical theism, and second, that Paley’s design argument leads us to a false God: not a Creator, but a mere cosmic architect, who is a powerful but finite being, differing from us merely in degree. Both of these charges have been hurled against Paley by Associate Professor Edward Feser (who surely needs no introduction here) and by Professor Christopher F. J. Martin, of the University of St. Thomas, Department of Philosophy and Center for Thomistic Studies, in Houston, Texas. These are grave Read More ›

In my previous post on Rev. William Paley’s argument from design, I showed that the argument was carefully formulated to rebut Hume’s criticisms of design arguments that were current in his day. I also demonstrated that Paley’s argument was not (as is commonly believed) an argument from analogy; that it was not intended to be an inductive, probabilistic argument but a deductive proof; and that it was intended to establish the existence of a Deity Who is no absentee landlord or impersonal Force, but a living, personal Being Who continually maintains Nature in existence and keeps the various systems in the universe running, in addition to having designed them. In this post, I’m going to address another myth about William Read More ›

There are many modern-day skeptics who apparently still subscribe to the myth that the Scottish empiricist philosopher David Hume soundly refuted Rev. William Paley’s argument from design on philosophical grounds, even before Darwin supposedly refuted it on scientific grounds (see here, here and here for examples). The supposition is absurdly anachronistic: Hume died in 1776, and his posthumous Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion were published in 1779, but Paley’s Natural Theology was not published until 1802, three years before Paley’s death in 1805. Some of the more intelligent skeptics, such as Julian Baggini, are aware of this fact, but still make the risibly absurd claim (see here) that Hume anticipated and refuted Paley’s argument from design. The truth, however, is the Read More ›

It has been eight years since the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004, that took the lives of over 230,000 people. In his December 14, 2012 post, Today We Grieve With Those Who Grieve, Barry Arrington wisely warned against the vain enterprise of trying to “make sense of this senselessness,” and he quoted from the essay, Tsunami and Theodicy by theologian David Bentley Hart, who forthrightly asserts that we have no right to “console ourselves with vacuous cant about the mysterious course taken by God’s goodness in this world, or to assure others that some ultimate meaning or purpose resides in so much misery. Ours is, after all, a religion of salvation; our faith is in a God who has come Read More ›

Earlier this week, I put up a post about Professor Mohamed Noor, of Duke University, who also runs a free online course entitled, “Introduction to Genetics and Evolution” through Coursera, which “gives interested people a very basic overview of the principles behind these very fundamental areas of biology … and tries to clarify some misconceptions.” People I know who have completed the course have praised it for the quality of its exposition. In the final lecture of the course for 2012, Professor Noor put up a Powerpoint slide claiming that Hitler believed in Intelligent Design. In my post, I argued that Professor Noor’s claim reflected a misunderstanding on his part of what Intelligent Design actually is. It takes a big Read More ›

I visited New Orleans back in 1994, during a whirlwind three-month tour of the United States (courtesy of Greyhound buses) in which I crossed the continent four times, and got to see 34 states. I still have fond memories of the Big Easy: dining at Cafe du Monde, walking along Bourbon St. (pictured above, courtesy of Adrian Pingstone and Wikipedia), traveling on a street car along St. Charles Avenue, and going on a swamp tour along a nearby bayou, during which I got to meet a one-year-old pet alligator named Elvis. So it was with some amusement that I read an article by Stephen C. Webster in The Raw Story (19 December 2012) reporting that the school board for Orleans Read More ›

Dr. Mohamed Noor is the Earl D. McLean Professor and Associate Chair of Biology at Duke University. His specialties include evolution, genetics and genomics. Professor Noor also runs a free online course entitled, “Introduction to Genetics and Evolution” through Coursera, which “gives interested people a very basic overview of the principles behind these very fundamental areas of biology … and tries to clarify some misconceptions.” By all accounts, Professor Noor’s exposition of evolutionary theory is admirably lucid and succinct. In the last week of his course, Dr. Noor discusses some applications and misapplications of the theory of evolution. In the final lecture, Dr. Noor puts up a Powerpoint slide claiming that Hitler believed in Intelligent Design! The text is below: Read More ›

Over at his blog, Professor Larry Moran is shocked, shocked, that the arguments of Professor William Lane Craig for the existence of God are treated with respect by Craig’s philosophical colleagues. “Is it true that philosophy departments have sunk to this level?” he asks. A few days earlier, Craig had written an article for The Washington Post entitled, Humanism for Children, in which he pointed to “a resurgence of interest in arguments for God’s existence based on reason and evidence alone” among philosophers, and added: All of the traditional arguments for God’s existence, such as the cosmological, teleological, moral, and ontological arguments, not to mention creative, new arguments, find intelligent and articulate defenders on the contemporary philosophical scene. Professor Moran Read More ›

On Sunday, November 25, Dr. Paul Nelson gave a video presentation at Pastor Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church in southern California, entitled, Darwin or Design? Watching the video, I thought that he did a brilliant job in exposing the inadequacy of natural selection to account for major evolutionary changes – especially, the origin of animal body plans. I strongly recommend that Uncommon Descent readers take the time to watch Dr. Nelson’s presentation. It’s one of the best critiques of neo-Darwinian evolution that I’ve ever seen. Devastating is the only word I can use to characterize it. How Animal Body Plans expose the inadequacy of Neo-Darwinian Evolution, in a nutshell Dr. Nelson has kindly summarized his case, in a comment he made Read More ›

This is a post about two scientists, united in their passion about one crazy idea. Brain scientist and serial entrepreneur Jeff Stibel thinks that the Internet is showing signs of intelligence and may already be conscious, according to a recent BBC report. So does neuroscientist Christof Koch (pictured above). Koch, who has done a lot of pioneering work on the neural basis of consciousness, was the Lois and Victor Troendle Professor of Cognitive and Behavioral Biology at California Institute of Technology from 1986 until September 2012, when he took up a new job as Chief Scientific Officer of the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle. Stibel, who is nothing if not passionate about his cause, refers to the Internet Read More ›

One of the clearest and most compelling arguments against materialism is that it is unable to account for the simple fact that our thoughts possess a meaning in their own right. As philosopher Ed Feser puts it in an online post entitled, Some brief arguments for dualism, Part I: Thoughts and the like possess inherent meaning or intentionality; brain processes, like ink marks, sound waves, and the like, are utterly devoid of any inherent meaning or intentionality; so thoughts and the like cannot possibly be identified with brain processes. The argument seems especially convincing when we consider abstract concepts. Consider the famous line, “Honesty is a greatly overrated virtue,” from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. It seems preposterous to suppose Read More ›

I’d like to thank skeptical philosopher John Loftus for his prompt reply to my post, Detecting the supernatural: Why science doesn’t presuppose methodological naturalism, after all. In his post, which is titled, Heads I Win Tails You Lose: Another Christian Apologist’s Trick, Loftus zeroes in on what he sees as the fatal weaknesses in my argument. Let’s take a look at them. (The image at the top, by the way, is of a humpback whale breaching, courtesy of Whit Welles and Wikipedia.) When discussing biological Intelligent Design, I calculated that by a very generous estimate, there had been perhaps 10,000,000 “acts of intervention” (to use Loftus’ term), during the 4,000 million year history of life on Earth. I also emphasized Read More ›

Memo to Eugenie Scott and the National Center for Science Education: the claim that scientists must explain the natural world in terms of natural processes alone, eschewing all supernatural explanations, is now being openly denied by three leading scientists who are also outspoken atheists. I’m referring to physicist Sean Carroll, and biologists Jerry Coyne and P. Z. Myers, who hold that there are circumstances under which scientists can legitimately infer the existence of supernatural causes. That’s a pretty formidable trio. The NCSE is perfectly free to disown these scientists if it wishes, but I think it would be severely undermining its own credibility if it did so. Let me state at the outset that Intelligent Design, while open to the Read More ›

In my previous two posts (see here and here) on feminist atheist Libby Anne’s Love, Joy, Feminism blog, I critiqued her embrace of evolutionary naturalism, and her rejection of the view that the cosmos was designed by an Intelligent Being. I then exposed the deficiencies in her ethical views, which have led her to conclude that human beings do not become persons until the moment of birth, and that abortion should be a woman’s legal right at any time before her baby is born. In my final post, I’m going to address the factual claims that Libby Anne makes in a post that subsequently went viral, entitled, How I lost faith in the pro-life movement. Her opening paragraph immediately grabs Read More ›