Culture
Coffee!!: The evolutionary theory of why you feel smarter after a few beers
Here. From evolutionary medicine profs – your moral and intellectual superiors. Hat tip: The Sheepcat
The very idea of design in the universe utterly obliterated: Chronicle 4382
In “Creationism lives on in US public schools” (New Scientist 20 October 2010), John Farrell revisits the Dover trial: IN DOVER, Pennsylvania, five years ago, a group of parents were nearing the end of an epic legal battle: they were taking their school board to court to stop them teaching “intelligent design” to their children. But the monster never sleeps, it seems: None of this means that the Discovery Institute, the Seattle-based think tank that promotes intelligent design, has been idle. The institute helped the conservative Louisiana Family Forum (LFF), headed by Christian minister Gene Mills, to pass a state education act in 2008 that allows local boards to teach intelligent design alongside evolution under the guise of “academic freedom”. Read More ›
Prophet of Pointlessness sues Inventor of the Scarlet A
Richard Dawkins is known as the Prophet of Pointlessness because it was Dawkins who said: “[the universe] has precisely the properties we should expect if there is at bottom no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pointless indifference.” Dawkins has something of a cult following and encourages his troops to wear a scarlet A on their chest. (the new scarlet A is for Atheist, whereas in Hawthorne’s book the scarlet A stood for Adulterer). This scarlet letter is often found on Gnu Atheist websites. The inventor of the new scarlet A, Josh Timonen, worked for Dawkins and is now being sued by Dawkins. See: Dawkins Claims Employee Rolled Him and Employee Complains GLENDALE, Calif. (CN) – Evolutionary Read More ›
Darwin vs. Einstein?
Frank Tipler writes at Pajamasmedia: The current battle for America is, as Angelo Codevilla has recently emphasized in his seminal essay, a war between the majority of Americans and America’s ruling class. This conflict is a reflection of a battle between the two greatest scientists of the past two centuries, Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein. Einstein famously claimed that “God does not play dice with the universe,” whereas Darwin claimed that God does, indeed, play dice with the universe. Codevilla pointed out the self-image of the ruling class rests on its belief that humans are the unforeseen outcome of chance mutations acted upon by natural selection. Not so. God decreed the evolution of humans before time began. The ruling class Read More ›
UK Centre For Intelligent Design Claims It Will Focus On Science, Not Religion
Dr Alastair Noble, director of the Center for Intelligent Design in Glasgow, says ID is ‘consistently misrepresented as a religious position’ and he’s ready to engage the debate on the grounds of actual evidence, according to this article at the UK’s Guardian.
Does Atheism Poison Everything? Debate Between David Berlinski and Christopher Hitchens
The debate is happening today, Sept. 7th, at the Fixed Point Foundation.
Our next debate features famed atheist Christopher Hitchens, author of God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, and Dr. David Berlinski, author of The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions. The question being debated: What are the implications of a purely secular society? It promises to be a formidable clash of titans. In addition to being highly entertaining and witty, these two men have a serious message they want to communicate.
The Does Religion Poison Everything? Debate begins at 7 p.m., September 7.
The luncheon, reception, and debate all take place at the Sheraton Birmingham Hotel:
Oxford Mathematician John Lennox Weighs-In On Stephen Hawking’s Recent Claim That The Universe Came From Nothing Through The Laws Of Nature
There’s no denying that Stephen Hawking is intellectually bold as well as physically heroic. And in his latest book, the renowned physicist mounts an audacious challenge to the traditional religious belief in the divine creation of the universe…The Big Bang, he argues, was the inevitable consequence of these laws [of physics] ‘because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing.’
Unfortunately, while Hawking’s argument is being hailed as controversial and ground-breaking, it is hardly new.
Writes John Lennox, Oxford Professor of Mathematics, in an article at dailymail.co.uk in response to Hawking’s recent claim that the laws of physics, such as gravity, will spawn a universe such as ours.
But, as both a scientist and a Christian, I would say that Hawking’s claim is misguided. He asks us to choose between God and the laws of physics, as if they were necessarily in mutual conflict.
But contrary to what Hawking claims, physical laws can never provide a complete explanation of the universe. Laws themselves do not create anything, they are merely a description of what happens under certain conditions.
What Hawking appears to have done is to confuse law with agency. His call on us to choose between God and physics is a bit like someone demanding that we choose between aeronautical engineer Sir Frank Whittle and the laws of physics to explain the jet engine.
That is a confusion of category. The laws of physics can explain how the jet engine works, but someone had to build the thing, put in the fuel and start it up. The jet could not have been created without the laws of physics on their own – but the task of development and creation needed the genius of Whittle as its agent.
Similarly, the laws of physics could never have actually built the universe. Some agency must have been involved…
To use a simple analogy, Isaac Newton’s laws of motion in themselves never sent a snooker ball racing across the green baize. That can only be done by people using a snooker cue and the actions of their own arms.
Do atheists know enough about the concept of God to reject it on rational grounds?
Sometimes I think atheists are simply having arguments with themselves – or, more precisely, with phantoms bred by their own ignorance. It’s easy to see why atheism does not make more headway, even in modern secular society: Once atheists begin to spell out the sort of deity they are rejecting, it becomes clear that they don’t know what they’re talking about.
Media Mum about Deranged Darwinist Gunman
John West of the Discovery Institute Reports: But when a gunman inspired by Darwinism takes hostages at the offices of the Discovery Channel, reporters seem curiously uninterested in fully disclosing the criminal’s own self-described motivations. Most of yesterday’s media reports about hostage-taker James Lee dutifully reported Lee’s eco-extremism and his pathological hatred for humanity. But they also suppressed any mention of Lee’s explicit appeals to Darwin and Malthus as the intellectual foundations for his views. At least, I could find no references to Lee’s Darwinian motivations in the accounts I read by the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, ABC, CNN, and MSNBC. Major Media Spike Discovery
National Apologetics Conference — October 15-16, 2010
This is an important event. I would encourage all UD readers to try to make it to it. I’ll be speaking on ID. For conference information, click here.
The Evolutionary Psychology Journal, Serious Entertainment
“That scientific gentleman with the bald, egg-like head and the bare, bird-like neck had no real right to the airs of science that he assumed. He had not discovered anything new in biology; but what biological creature could he have discovered more singular than himself? Thus, and thus only, the whole place had properly to be regarded; it had to be considered not so much as a workshop for artists, but as a frail but finished work of art. A man who stepped into its social atmosphere felt as if he had stepped into a written comedy.”
~G. K. Chesterton, The Man Who was Thursday
I am endlessly intrigued by Evolutionary Psychology. I found this evolutionary psychology journal, and it’s just too good not to share. Here are a few articles, and a quote from their respective abstract:
1. Parent-Offspring Conflict over Mating: The Case of Mating Age
Parents and offspring have asymmetrical preferences with respect to mate choice. So far, several areas of disagreement have been identified, including beauty, family background, and sexual strategies. This article proposes that mating age constitutes another area of conflict, as parents desire their children to initiate mating at a different age than the offspring desire it for themselves. More specifically, the hypothesis is tested that individuals prefer for their offspring to start having sexual relationships at a later age than they prefer for themselves to do so.
Coffee! Smiling android is a great date?
A friend wrote recently to advise re this article, that goes to the 365 000 members of the largest engineering society in the world, about an effort to create a female android that smiles. Look, even Dilbert would not take her out for the evening, and that is saying a lot. He would otherwise spend yet another evening with Dogbert and Catbert. I suspect the designers will not get past the barrier created by the fact that the real human brain is more like an ocean than a machine, and many human decisions are not made by step-by-step pathways. (Which does not mean that they are badly made, either.) I stay away from gatherings like the author of the article Read More ›
Albert Mohler’s Open Letter to Karl Giberson
Al Mohler has written an interesting open letter to Karl Giberson, titled “On Darwin and Darwinism: A Letter to Professor Giberson“, which is a response to Giberson’s article at The Huffington Post, titled “How Darwin Sustains My Baptist Search for Truth“.
The disagreement between the two is ultimately about the compatibility of Darwinism and Christianity, but the specific context of Giberson’s complaint against Al Mohler pertains to what Giberson claims is a misrepresentation of Darwin by Mohler in a speech given at Ligonier Ministries:
The second great challenge was the emergence of Darwin’s theory of evolution. Coming at the midpoint of the 19th century, we need to be reminded that Darwin was not the first evolutionist. We need to be reminded that Darwin did not embark upon the Beagle having no preconceptions of what exactly he was looking for or having no theory of how life emerged in all of its diversity, fecundity, and specialization. Darwin left on his expedition to prove the theory of evolution. A theory that was based upon the fossil record and other inferences had already been able to take the hold of some in Western civilization. The dawn of the theory of evolution presents a direct challenge to the traditional interpretation of Genesis and, as we shall see, to much more.
Giberson’s complaint is this:
In this talk Mohler made false statements about Darwin. He apparently wanted to undermine evolution by suggesting that it was “invented” to prop up Darwin’s worldview, rather than developed to explain observations in the natural world. He said, “Darwin did not embark upon the Beagle having no preconceptions of what exactly he was looking for or having no theory of how life emerged in all of its diversity, fecundity, and specialization. Darwin left on his expedition to prove the theory of evolution.”
Watch the video of the speech here or read the transcript here. The speech was actually more concerned with the age of the Earth than Charles Darwin. Nevertheless, Mohler’s response to Giberson in the open letter:
“We [Darwinists] Suck”, says Coyne after realizing 63% of nation’s biology teachers are “creationists”
Jerry Coyne is exasperated with the findings of a scholarly publication that surveyed the beliefs of biology teachers. Coyne interprets the results of this survey as follows:
47% believe in Intelligent Design
28% in [godless] evolution
16% in creationism
9% no opinion
(See: We Suck and Selective Creationists)
He labels the 47% who believe in Intelligent Design (which is he equates with Theistic Evolution) as “Selective Creationists”. So combined with the 16% of traditional creationists, that’s 63% of the biology teachers who are in his view “creationists”.
But what would happen if the 47% of Theistic Evolutionist/Intelligent Design biology teachers realized that Darwin is being refuted by secular scientific literature with every passing day? Will they, as Coyne fears, join ranks with ID proponents? Coyne observes:
Read More ›