Wade: “The lab at Wuhan, where researchers were manipulating Covid-type viruses, received funding from the U.S. National Institutes of Health. Could Francis Collins and Anthony Fauci, the NIH’s senior officials, have had any possible motive for suppressing their experts’ initial conclusion that the Covid virus was probably artificial?”
Books of interest
At Socrates in the City: Eric Metaxas and Stephen Meyer Tackle Science and God
Meyer is author of “The Return of the God Hypothesis: Three Scientific Discoveries that Reveal the Mind Behind the Universe.” Eric Metaxas is a radio talk show host and author of Is Atheism Dead?
At Mind Matters News: Computer prof: You are not computable and here’s why not
Dr. Robert J. Marks’s new book, Non-Computable You: What You Do That Artificial Intelligence Never Will (Discovery Institute Press, 2022), comes out just as Google has placed an engineer on leave for claiming an AI chatbot he tends is a real person…
Denton’s prior fitness argument: Everything seems to have come together to produce humans
But didn’t Freeman Dyson (1923–2020) say, “The more I examine the universe and the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known we were coming.” The idea isn’t new; there’s just much more evidence for it.
Michael Denton’s new book: Nature is fine-tuned for human existence
Publisher: Drawing on discoveries from a myriad of scientific fields, Denton masterfully documents how contemporary science has revived humanity’s special place in nature.
At Claremont Review of Books: “The God Hypothesis should be considered as a possible explanation for our universe.”
Reviewer: Meyer argues that the materialist assumption now poses an obstruction to understanding, compelling scientists to embrace implausible and untestable hypotheses as a defense against the God hypothesis… But Gelernter and Nagel make a good case that religious zealotry, and a refusal to debate the facts honestly, now characterize Meyer’s opponents more than they do Meyer and his supporters.
A reader reflects on Science Uprising #9: Spot on but the problem is an old one
Species don’t change substantially, and we know why, genetically. If they departed indefinitely from type, we could breed a dog into a cat. As Phil J queried, if we can’t do this using skill and persistence, what makes us think that blind natural processes can do it?
Register for a webinar with Eric Cassell on remarkable animal algorithms
After an interview between Luskin and Cassell, the cyber-floor will be opened for the audience to ask Cassell questions about his ideas.
New book focuses on animal intelligence as not product of pure randomness
“[H]ow did these embedded programs arise in the history of life? There’s the problem for evolutionists. “Specified complexity, irreducible complexity, and the Cambrian explosion are inexplicable from a Darwinian viewpoint,” comments Baylor University computer engineer and intelligent design theorist Robert J. Marks. “In this book, Cassell masterfully adds animal algorithms to the list.”
A Review of Steve Meyer’s The Return of the God Hypothesis
Scambray: Meyer summarizes his thesis early on when he points to three 20th century mutually supporting scientific discoveries that provide strong evidence for belief in the God of Judaism and Christianity. (from review)
Douglas Axe chapter excerpt: Can proteins evolve?
Axe: A random gene would specify a random sequence of amino acids, which would flop around without folding. Chains like that are rapidly broken back down into amino acids to keep them from interfering with cellular processes. Very special amino acid sequences are needed for protein chains to fold into stable structures.
New Comprehensive Guide to science and faith focuses on ID
We will try to provide excerpts from the less hinged reviews from Darwinians. They go nicely with light wine and sushi.
Book from Cambridge defends ID. So readers write to say…
Of course Darwinism is nonsense. But it is profitable nonsense and easy to spout in an uncritical environment. The question of the day is, how do we get probing critiques to travel from the ivied walls to the pop science mag rack — where, it is fair to say, most writers and readers are unaware of any of the problems identified. So far as they know, Darwin brilliantly explained why men golf and women cheat and some people go to church…
Historian Peter Harrison’s five best science and religion books
Harrison: If you look at the frequency of the word “religion”, no one talks about it much until the 17th century—this is true for English, originally Latin, and also the European vernacular languages, too. So, “religion” as a category is not really important to anyone until the modern period. With science, the practices that we regard as science went under a range of different labels.
Privileged Address: An excerpt from Neil Thomas’s Taking Leave of Darwin
Neil Thomas: Through the lens of a celestial telescope, it is true, one can see little but the unfeeling immensity of that unremittingly hostile universe invoked by [Bertrand] Russell, but if we look around us here on Earth we can see a planet which seems entirely discontinuous with the rest of the observable cosmos and abounding in a host of benign phenomena so numerous that they tend to go largely unnoticed.