vjtorley

I am currently reading a thought-provoking book titled, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Dr. Yuval Noah Harari, who has a Ph.D. in History from Oxford University and who now lectures at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Dr. Harari is no friend of religion, but he is quite frank in acknowledging that liberal humanism is founded on monotheistic beliefs, and that the current scientific consensus among evolutionary biologists is increasingly at odds with the tenets of liberal humanism. In chapter 6 of his book, Dr. Harari contrasts two documents: Hammurabi’s Code (written in 1776 B.C.) and the American Declaration of Independence (written in 1776 A.D.). Under Hammurabi’s Code, society was viewed as a hierarchy: people were divided into two Read More ›

I have greatly enjoyed reading three recent posts on memory by Professor Michael Egnor, an accomplished neurosurgeon with more than 20 years’ experience. In his first post, Recalling Nana’s Face: Does Your Brain Store Memories?, Professor Egnor criticized what he regards as two pernicious myths regarding memory: first, the popular notion that the brain stores actual memories themselves; and second, the more sophisticated (but equally mistaken) notion that what the brain stores is coded information which enables us to retrieve memories at will. Neurologist and skeptic Dr. Steven Novella, who is an assistant professor at Yale University School of Medicine, published a reply, accusing Dr. Egnor of faulty reasoning – a claim echoed by Dr. P.Z. Myers on his blog. Read More ›

Paula Kirby is one of the more thoughtful contemporary critics of religion. A few years ago, I was much struck by a remark she made in one of her essays, that even Christians don’t all believe in the same God. This, to my mind, is a much more powerful argument against religious faith than the puerile “One God further” objection which is frequently hurled against believers by the New Atheists, and which has been ably refuted by Barry Arrington on Uncommon Descent, and also by the Thomist philosopher (and former atheist), Professor Edward Feser (see here and here). In all fairness, I have to acknowledge that there is some truth to Paula Kirby’s contention: even within a single Christian denomination, Read More ›

In my recent post, On the impossibility of replicating the cell: A problem for naturalism, I argued that naturalism, even if true, cannot be shown to be true or even probable – in which case, I asked, why should rational people believe it? The responses of my critics reveal a real poverty of thinking on the part of those who believe evolution to be a totally unguided process. The “naturalism” that I criticized in my post was not methodological naturalism (which makes no claims about the nature of reality, but merely states that non-naturalistic explanations of reality don’t properly count as scientific ones). My target was a more robust kind of naturalism, which I termed “scientific naturalism”: namely, “the view Read More ›

I have sometimes had the idea that the best way for Intelligent Design advocates to make their case would be to build a giant museum replicating the complexity of the cell on a large scale, so that people could see for themselves how the cell worked and draw their own conclusions. Recently I came across an old quote from biochemist Michael Denton’s Evolution: A Theory in Crisis (Adler and Adler, 1985) which put paid to that idea, but which raised an interesting philosophical puzzle for people who adhere to scientific naturalism – which I define here as the view that there is nothing outside the natural world, by which I mean the sum total of everything that behaves in accordance Read More ›

Amid the fog of recent controversies, I can discern a hopeful sign: the key figures in the ongoing debate over specified complexity on Uncommon Descent are actually converging in their opinions. Allow me to explain why. Winston Ewert’s helpful clarifications on CSI In a recent post, ID proponent Winston Ewert agreed that Elizabeth Liddle had a valid point in her criticisms of the design inference, but then went on to say that she had misunderstood what the design inference was intended to do (emphases mine): She has objected that specified complexity and the design inference do not give a method for calculating probabilities. She is correct, but the design inference was never intended to do that. It is not about Read More ›

Matthew Inman of The Oatmeal has written a comic that attempts to rebut a common criticism of atheism: the link between atheistic regimes and crimes against humanity. The dialogue proceeds as follows: A: You argue that some of the worst atrocities in history were done in the name of religion, but plenty of atheists did terrible things too! My pastor told me that Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin were BOTH atheists!* [Author’s note: Hitler wasn’t actually an atheist. He was a Christian.] What does that tell you about atheism? B: First off, just because they were both atheists doesn’t mean that their atheism caused them to do terrible things. They both had mustaches too. Does that mean that having a Read More ›

One of the more thoughtful critics of Intelligent Design is Keith S, from over at The Skeptical Zone. Recently, Keith S has launched a barrage of criticisms of Intelligent Design on Uncommon Descent, to which I have decided to reply in a single post. Is Dembski’s design inference circular? Keith S’s first charge is that Intelligent Design proponents have repeatedly ignored an argument he put forward two years ago in a comment on a post at TSZ (19 October 2012, at 5:28 p.m.), showing that Dr. William Dembski’s design inference is circular. Here is his argument: I’ll contribute this, from a comment of mine in the other thread. It’s based on Dembski’s argument as presented in Specification: The Pattern That Read More ›

In my previous post, Six bombshells relating to H. L. Mencken and the Scopes Trial, I exposed six journalist bombshells relating to the Scopes trial in Dayton, Tennessee, in 1925. I also accused Mencken of lying on nine particular points – a charge for which I shall provide substantiation in today’s post. Mencken’s Nine Major Misrepresentations – An Executive Summary What did Mencken lie about, in his reporting on the Scopes trial? First, Mencken lied about the key point at issue in the Scopes Trial, which was not whether the theory of evolution could be taught in Tennessee’s public high schools, but whether the evolution of man from “lower animals” could be taught as a scientific theory to high school Read More ›

KeithS has been requesting scientific evidence of a genuine barrier to macroevolution. The following is a condensed, non-technical summary of Dr. Douglas Axe’s paper, The Case Against a Darwinian Origin of Protein Folds. Since (i) proteins are a pervasive feature of living organisms, (ii) new proteins and new protein folds have been continually appearing throughout the four-billion-year history of life on Earth, and (iii) at least some macroevolutionary events must have involved the generation of new protein folds, it follows that if Dr. Axe’s argument is correct and neo-Darwinian processes are incapable of hitting upon new functional protein folds, then there are indeed genuine barriers to macroevolution, in at least some cases. The argument put forward by Dr. Axe is Read More ›

In this short post, I’d like to explain what’s wrong with KeithS’s argument for unguided evolution. The argument, in a nutshell, goes like this: 1. We observe objective nested hierarchies (ONH) 2. Unguided evolution explains ONH 3. A designer explains ONH, but also a trillion alternatives. 4. Both unguided evolution and a designer are capable of causing ONH. Conclusion: Unguided evolution is a trillion times better at explaining ONH. The first thing I’d like to point out is that while KeithS, in his post over at TSZ leans heavily on the evidence assembled by Dr. Douglas Theobald in his article, 29+ Evidences of Macroevolution, it is very odd that Dr. Theobald himself does not put forward this argument anywhere in Read More ›

Catholic author Mark Shea has recently written two blog articles (see here and here) in which he attempts to clarify what Pope Francis really meant when he addressed the Pontifical Academy of Sciences on creation and evolution, on October 27. Shea claims that the Catholic Church has been evolution-friendly in its thinking since the time of St. Augustine, who “sees creation happening, not by God perpetually applying little fixes and magicking a tyrannosaurus out of thin air, but by Nature unrolling (Latin: evolvere) the potentialities that God placed in it from the start,” while St. Thomas Aquinas sounds “pretty darned evolutionary” to the good Mr. Shea. What the Pope is saying, according to Shea, is that “God is not a Read More ›

In a previous post two years ago, entitled, H. L. Mencken: Is this your hero, New Atheists?, I accused H. L. Mencken (pictured left) of lying and character assassination, in his reporting on the 1925 Scopes trial. Specifically, I charged that Mencken knowingly and deliberately made false statements about William Jennings Bryan (pictured right), a three-time Democratic Presidential candidate and eloquent orator, whose passionate opposition to Darwinism led him to volunteer his services an assistant prosecutor during the Scopes trial. To accuse a highly respected author such as Mencken of slander is a very serious matter, and in today’s post and an upcoming post, I’m going to substantiate this charge. Mencken not only slandered Bryan; he also slandered the people Read More ›

Are ID advocates guilty of selective hyperskepticism? Professor Larry Moran evidently thinks we are. In a recent post, he writes: Let’s take the formation of bacterial flagella as a good illustration of how they use selective hyperskepticism. They begin with the unshakeable assumption that gods exist, that that they must have created life. They then find an example of something complex where the exact evolutionary pathway hasn’t been worked out and declare that the gods made it. They refuse to answer any questions about how, when, where, and why and they refuse to present any evidence that gods did it. When evolutionary biologists present some evidence that bacterial flagella could have arisen by evolution the creationists turn into selective hyperskepticists Read More ›

Last year, I reviewed Daniel Friedmann’s best-seller, The Genesis One Code, which argued that the Bible, when properly interpreted, teaches that the universe is 13.74 billion years old – which is about as old as scientists currently believe it to be (13.798 billion years). Friedmann’s book also made a number of scientifically falsifiable claims – including the striking prediction that the Earth would turn out to be 9 billion years old and to pre-date the solar system (which sounds unlikely but just might turn out to be true). Friedmann’s scientific background as a professional engineer with a master’s degree in engineering physics who is also the CEO of a leading aerospace company undoubtedly lent his book extra credibility. Friedmann’s second Read More ›