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I have been spending the past few hours reading Pope Francis’ latest encyclical, Laudato si’, alongside a document called An Ecomodernist Manifesto (sympathetically reviewed here), which was written by a group of prominent environmental thinkers and development specialists such as Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, many of whom are affiliated with a think-tank called The Breakthrough Institute. Both documents make for fascinating reading. I had expected the encyclical to be written in that very high-flown, profound but impenetrable style that some wags have dubbed “Vaticanese” – which is the main reason by most Catholics never read papal encyclicals: they just can’t get through them. But I was pleasantly surprised to find that the Pope’s encyclical actually reads quite well. I Read More ›

Reverend Fathers, Since the Pope’s upcoming encyclical on the environment, Laudato Si, is due to be released later this month, I’m sure you will be very busy telling the world’s 1.2 billion Catholic laypeople (including myself) what the encyclical means. My reason for writing this post is that while most people (including members of the clergy) are quite well-informed about the science of global warming, they tend to be poorly informed about the solutions to the problem of man-made global warming, as well as the costs of implementing those solutions. Some of you may think that these are technical issues, which the clergy need not concern themselves with. But Scripture itself counsels us to be prudent servants of the Lord, Read More ›

Recently, there has been a lively exchange of views on the subject of animal rationality and animal immortality between Eastern Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart and Thomist philosopher Edward Feser. A fair-minded reader would have to conclude that Feser has gotten the better of Hart in this exchange. (For a handy summary of the arguments put forward on both sides, I would warmly recommend Professor Feser’s latest article; his earlier articles can be found here, here and here. Hart’s articles in First Things can be found here and here.) Nevertheless, I have strong reservations about some of Feser’s arguments. In a nutshell: Feser seems to want to place a period where the available evidence – from both science and philosophy Read More ›

Professor Moran has been kind enough to grace us with his presence on my post, Bad math: Why Larry Moran’s “I’m not a Darwinian” isn’t a valid reply to Meyer’s argument. But he hasn’t answered a simple question I posed to him, regarding Dr. Stephen Meyer’s comments on the neutral theory of evolution in his book, Darwin’s Doubt (Harper One, 2013). In his discussion of the neutral theory of evolution, Dr. Meyer focuses on the ground-breaking work of Dr. Michael Lynch. Meyer argues that the neutral theory is incapable of accounting for the origin of new animal body plans, because it is built on faulty mathematical assumptions (bolding mine – VJT): Michael Lynch, a geneticist at Indiana University, … proposes Read More ›

Professor Larry Moran has written a response to my post, A succinct case for Intelligent Design. Unfortunately, Professor Moran gets his facts wrong from the get-go. He writes: It seems to me that the [Intelligent Design creationist] movement concentrates on criticizing evolution (and materialism) and doesn’t really present much of a case for believing that the history of life was directed by gods. Now, it’s no skin off my nose if Professor Moran wants to call us creationists. Frankly, I couldn’t care less. But the Intelligent Design movement has never claimed to have scientific evidence that the history of life was “directed by gods.” What we claim is that certain highly specific, functional systems which are found in living things Read More ›

Three days ago, I posted a 123-word critique of unguided mechanisms for evolution as an explanation for the genes, proteins and different kinds of body plans found in living things. The critique was taken from Dr. Stephen C. Meyer’s book, Darwin’s Doubt (Harper One, 2013), and I invited skeptics to rebut Dr. Meyer’s case, in 200 words or less. When I didn’t get a satisfactory rebuttal, I re-posted it. The critique read as follows: “This book has presented four separate scientific critiques demonstrating the inadequacy of the neo-Darwinian mechanism, the mechanism that Dawkins assumes can produce the appearance of design without intelligent guidance. It has shown that the neo-Darwinian mechanism fails to account for the origin of genetic information because: Read More ›

Yesterday, I posted A succinct case for Intelligent Design, which featured a 123-word critique of unguided mechanisms for evolution – in particular, neo-Darwinism – as an explanation for the genes, proteins and different kinds of body plans found in living things. The passage, which was taken from Dr. Stephen C. Meyer’s book, Darwin’s Doubt (Harper One, 2013), read as follows: “This book has presented four separate scientific critiques demonstrating the inadequacy of the neo-Darwinian mechanism, the mechanism that Dawkins assumes can produce the appearance of design without intelligent guidance. It has shown that the neo-Darwinian mechanism fails to account for the origin of genetic information because: (1) it has no means of efficiently searching combinatorial sequence space for functional genes Read More ›

Recently, I’ve been reading Dr. Stephen C. Meyer’s excellent book, Darwin’s Doubt (Harper One, 2013). Towards the end of the book, I came across a paragraph that struck me as the best case I’ve ever seen for Intelligent Design, in 200 words or less. “This book has presented four separate scientific critiques demonstrating the inadequacy of the neo-Darwinian mechanism, the mechanism that Dawkins assumes can produce the appearance of design without intelligent guidance. It has shown that the neo-Darwinian mechanism fails to account for the origin of genetic information because: (1) it has no means of efficiently searching combinatorial sequence space for functional genes and proteins and, consequently, (2) it requires unrealistically long waiting times to generate even a single Read More ›

Recently, ID critic Professor Jason Rosenhouse has written a series of posts on the topic of morality. In two posts (here and here), he defended the view that morality is objective, but in two other posts in reply to Barry Arrington (here and here), he attacked the only theory that provides morality with an objective grounding in a philosophically rigorous manner: natural law theory. To me, that sounds a lot like sawing off the branch that you’re sitting on. Professor Rosenhouse makes much of the fact that most people, most of the time, manage to agree about moral issues. Now, I’m happy to grant that our agreement about moral issues constitutes good prima facie evidence for the view that morality Read More ›

Mathematician Jason Rosenhouse has written an extraordinary post in which he pronounces the Intelligent Design movement officially dead: “Truly, ID is dead,” he declares. In this post, I’d like to put forward three good mathematical arguments illustrating why the Intelligent Design movement remains very much alive. All of these arguments come from scientists who are highly qualified in the fields they are writing about. Two of the scientists are committed evolutionists (one is a Darwinian, the other an adherent of the “nearly-neutral” theory of evolution), and the other scientist is the holder of a Caltech Ph.D. who has written two articles for the Journal of Molecular Biology (see here and here for abstracts), as well as co-authoring an article published Read More ›

Professor Jerry Coyne makes a surprising admission on the origins of altruism in a recent post titled, David Sloan Wilson tells the BBC that the evolution of altruism in humans is “solved”: it’s group selection (of course). In his no-holds-barred critique of David Sloan Wilson’s “group selection” theory of how altruism arose, Coyne is refreshingly frank in his acknowledgement of what scientists don’t know about altruism: The fact is that human ‘altruism’ is a mixture of diverse and complex behaviors, only one of which corresponds to the real evolutionary issue of altruism: reproductive self-sacrifice by people that benefits unrelated people who give nothing back. And we simply haven’t the slightest idea whether that form of altruism evolved, or even if Read More ›

American science journalist John Horgan, who is best known for his 1996 book, The End of Science, has written a provocative column for Scientific American, titled, Everyone, Even Jenny McCarthy, Has the Right to Challenge “Scientific Experts”, in rebuttal to journalist Chris Mooney’s recent essay, This Is Why You Have No Business Challenging Scientific Experts. While Horgan shares Mooney’s alarm at the proliferation of pseudo-science, he considers the cure proposed by Mooney to be worse than the disease that it is supposed to remedy: In support of his position, Mooney cites Are We All Scientific Experts Now?, a book by sociologist of science Harry Collins. Rejecting the hard-core postmodern view of science as just one of many modes of knowledge, Read More ›

Carl Sagan was famous for his aphorism, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” The Sagan standard, as it has been called, is often invoked by skeptics such as John Loftus and Professor Larry Moran (see here and here). However, these skeptics fail to distinguish between two kinds of skepticism: one good, one bad. If someone makes an extraordinary claim such as, “I saw a flying saucer land in my backyard last night,” then it is reasonable to consider the possibility that they did not see anything land in their backyard last night, as well as the possibility that they did see something land in their backyard, but it was not a flying saucer. What I intend to argue in this post Read More ›

Philosopher Edward Feser has written a thought-provoking critique of the Turing Test, titled, Accept no limitations. Professor Feser makes several substantive points in his essay. Nevertheless, I believe that the basic thrust of the Turing Test is sound, and in this post, I’d like to explain why. In his 1950 paper, Computing machinery and intelligence (Mind, 59, 433-460), computer scientist Alan Turing argued that the question, “Can machines think?”was a scientifically fruitless one, and that the question we should be asking instead was: would it be possible to construct a digital computer that was capable of fooling blind interrogators into believing that it was a human being, by giving answers to the interrogators’ questions that a human being would naturally Read More ›

Atheist philosopher John Gray has written an unflinchingly honest article in the Guardian, titled, What scares the new atheists. It’s an excellent piece, and I warmly recommend it to readers. A few revealing quotes convey the tenor of the article: In fact there are no reliable connections – whether in logic or history – between atheism, science and liberal values. When organised as a movement and backed by the power of the state, atheist ideologies have been an integral part of despotic regimes that also claimed to be based in science, such as the former Soviet Union. Many rival moralities and political systems – most of them, to date, illiberal – have attempted to assert a basis in science. All Read More ›