vjtorley

Professor Victor Stenger is an American particle physicist and a noted atheist, who popularized the phrase, “Science flies you to the moon. Religion flies you into buildings”. Professor Stenger is also the author of several books, including his recent best-seller, The Fallacy of Fine-Tuning: How the Universe is Not Designed for Humanity (Prometheus Books, 2011). Stenger’s latest book has been received with great acclaim by atheists: “Stenger has demolished the fine-tuning proponents,” writes one enthusiastic Amazon reviewer, adding that the book tells us “how science is able to demonstrate the non-existence of god.” Well, it seems that the great Stenger has finally met his match. Dr. Luke A. Barnes, a post-doctoral researcher at the Institute for Astronomy, ETH Zurich, Switzerland, Read More ›

Professor Jerry Coyne has written an op-ed piece for USA Today entitled, Why you don’t really have free will. The kind of free will that Professor Coyne is concerned with is the kind that ordinary people believe in: “If you were put in the same position twice — if the tape of your life could be rewound to the exact moment when you made a decision, with every circumstance leading up to that moment the same and all the molecules in the universe aligned in the same way — you could have chosen differently.” Coyne is adamant that any lesser kind of freedom is not worth having: As Sam Harris noted in his book Free Will, all the attempts to Read More ›

Dr. Denis Alexander, who is the Director of the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion at Cambridge University, is an eminently qualified molecular biologist with a very odd combination of theological beliefs. In a recent article in The Guardian (December 23, 2011) entitled, Evolution, Christmas and the Atonement, he rejected belief in a literal Adam and Eve and an historical Fall, on the grounds that it was totally incompatible with scientific discoveries over the last few decades, which clearly indicate that “we last shared a common ancestor with the chimps about 5-6 million years ago, and humans have been gradually emerging through a series of hominid intermediates ever since.” Dr. Alexander had no time for belief in an immaterial soul, Read More ›

Professor Moran has graciously replied to my recent post, “Will this do, Professor Moran?” (18 December 2011) in which I attempted to flesh out the argument that irreducible complexity requires an Intelligent Designer. I would like to thank him for taking the trouble to write a detailed rebuttal of my argument. Since Professor Moran is a respected biochemist, I won’t be contesting his claim that the citric acid cycle evolved in a Darwinian fashion. What I’ll attempt to show is that it fails as a counter-example to my argument. “Unlikely” is not the same thing as “impossible” Before I address Professor Moran’s scientific arguments, I’d like to draw his attention to one brief but important passage in my post: Note: Read More ›

In a recent post, entitled, Barry Arrington Explains Irreducible Complexity, Professor Laurence Moran sought to discredit the argument that irreducible complexity requires an Intelligent Designer. Let me state up-front that I am a philosopher, not a scientist. However, I believe in arguing rigorously, so I have attempted to state the argument from irreducible complexity in a rigorous fashion. I’d appreciate hearing from Professor Moran thinks of this argument, as a biologist. What is irreducible complexity? I’d like to quote a passage from an online paper entitled, Irreducible Complexity Revisited (version 2.0; revised 2/23/2004) by Professor William Dembski. The basic logic of IC [Irreducible Complexity] goes like this: A functional system is irreducibly complex if it contains a multipart subsystem (i.e., Read More ›

Christopher Hitchens has passed away at the age of 62. Diagnosed with esophageal cancer in 2010, Hitchens finally succumbed to pneumonia, a complication of his cancer, on 15 December 2011, at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. During his lifetime, Christopher Hitchens achieved worldwide recognition as an acclaimed author, journalist, literary critic, New Atheist and vocal champion of the philosophical values of the Enlightenment. He was also a brilliant debater, and I always enjoyed watching his public performances online. Although I never had the pleasure of meeting him, I will miss him. Hitchens’ passion, uncompromising honesty and sense of humor put him in a class of his own. An outspoken critic of religion, Hitchens was nonetheless Read More ›

I’d like to put three hypothetical questions to my readers. They might sound rather silly, but as we’ll see, they have profound implications for the very concept of what it means to be human. Let us assume that the very first creatures on Earth who possessed a natural capacity to reason – i.e. the first people – had primate parents who lacked this capacity. Let us also assume for argument’s sake that there were only two people in the beginning – Adam and Eve – who later went on to have several children. Adam and Eve’s parents were therefore non-rational animals. Here are my three questions: (1) Would it have been possible for Adam to have had an identical twin Read More ›

My Home Page. The photo on the right is a picture of Albert Einstein, shortly after receiving the Nobel Prize in 1921. The photo on the left shows how Einstein looked when he was very young (about three days old). The aim of this essay is to demonstrate on purely philosophical (i.e. non-religious) grounds that a human embryo is a person, who matters just as much as you or I do. I shall also attempt to explain exactly why an embryo is just as valuable as you or I. From this it follows that the embryo from which the adult Einstein developed had exactly the same moral worth (or intrinsic value) as Einstein the man, and that an outside party Read More ›

For some time, I’ve been looking for a way of communicating to Darwinists, in their own language, just how problematic the whole idea of neo-Darwinian evolution is. A couple of months ago, I had the good fortune to listen to a talk posted on Youtube, entitled, Life as Evolving Software. The talk was given by Professor Gregory Chaitin, a world-famous mathematician and computer scientist, at PPGC UFRGS (Portal do Programa de Pos-Graduacao em Computacao da Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul.Mestrado), in Brazil, on 2 May 2011. I was profoundly impressed by Professor Chaitin’s talk, because he was very honest and up-front about the mathematical shortcomings of the theory of evolution in its current form. As a mathematician who Read More ›

For several years now, Professor Richard Dawkins, the renowned evolutionary biologist and author of The God Delusion, has refused to debate the topic of God’s existence with the philosopher and Christian apologist, Professor William Lane Craig. That is Professor Dawkins’ privilege; he is under no obligation to debate with anyone. Until recently, Dawkins’ favorite reason for refusing to face off against Professor William Lane Craig was that Craig was nothing more than a professional debater. But now, in an article in The Guardian (20 October 2011) entitled, Why I refuse to debate with William Lane Craig, Richard Dawkins leads off by firing this salvo: “This Christian ‘philosopher’ is an apologist for genocide. I would rather leave an empty chair than Read More ›

[Image courtesy of Jurgen Schoner and Wikipedia.] Here’s an old joke: how do snails move? Philosopher Julian Baggini, writing in The Guardian (“Religion’s truce with science can’t hold”, October 14, 2011) seems to have forgotten that there are two answers to this question. Here’s the scientific answer: “By gliding along on their muscular foot, which is lubricated with mucus.” And here’s the other answer: “Very slowly.” As we’ll see, this humorous example perfectly illustrates what’s wrong with secular humanists’ complaints about religion encroaching on the domain of science. As readers of this blog are well aware, Intelligent Design theory makes no claims about the identity of the Designer. However, since Dr. Baggini criticizes the claims of religion in his article, Read More ›

Professor Jerry Coyne has recently written a highly critical post entitled, Ken Miller, confused, finds free will in quantum mechanics, in which he attacks Professor Miller’s invocation of quantum physics to rescue free will. In a recent Youtube video, made on March 23 of this year at the New York Academy of Sciences, and featuring theologians John Haught and Nancey Murphy, Professor Miller elaborated his views: At its finest level, matter has an inherent unpredictability, which certainly doesn’t explain free will, but certainly gives the lie to the notion that any inherent mechanical system is ultimately predictable. And I don’t think we are predictable: I think that capacity to make choices is ultimately wired into the circuity of our brain, Read More ›

(Globe of Science and Innovation at CERN. Courtesy of Adam Nieman and Wikipedia.) Dr. Victor Stenger is a physicist who worked for 30 years with neutrinos until his retirement in 2000. He is also an outspoken New Atheist and a leading critic of Intelligent Design. In a recent Huffington Post article (No cause to dispute Einstein), Dr. Stenger has some very sensible things to say about the latest CERN experiments suggesting that neutrinos can travel faster than the speed of light, and not surprisingly, his verdict on the CERN results is negative: “[I]f I were a wagering man, I would bet the effect will go away because of some systematic error no one has yet been able to think of.” Read More ›

(Photo of a gnu or wildebeest in the Ngorongoro Crater, Tanzania. Courtesy of Muhammad Mahdi Karim and Wikipedia.) Do sapient beings deserve respect, simply because they are sapient? An affirmative answer to this question seems reasonable, but it also imperils the Gnu Atheist project of basing morality on our shared capacity for empathy. My short parable about two machines illustrates why. Let’s call them Machine 1 and Machine 2. Since this post is a parable written for atheists, I shall assume for argument’s sake that machines are in principle capable of thinking and feeling. Machine 1 is like HAL9000, in the movie 2001. It has a fully human psyche, which is capable of the entire gamut of human emotions. It Read More ›

This post is my personal attempt to reconcile recent statements made by Barry Arrington and Eric Holloway, regarding whether or not a supernatural Designer is required in order to produce a living thing. The claim I am putting forward here is that there are four levels of inquiry in Intelligent Design: (1) Which patterns in Nature can be identified, through a process of scientific investigation, as the work of intelligent agents? That is, which patterns in Nature can be shown to have intelligent agents as their proximate causes? (2) Which of the patterns identified in (1) can be shown to have been caused by intelligent agents outside the observable universe? (3) For which of the patterns identified in (2) as Read More ›