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Intelligent Design

Critical Theory is Certainly Correct

Indeed, it is more than merely true; it is an inexorable logical certainty if the premises of the theorists are true.  That is the question I will address in this post. Before we go on, we need to understand what ‘critical theory’ is.  Wikipedia has a good summary:  In sociology and political philosophy, the term Critical Theory describes the Western-Marxist philosophy of the Frankfurt School, which was developed in Germany in the 1930s and draws on the ideas of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud. . . . Postmodern critical theory analyzes the fragmentation of cultural identities in order to challenge modernist-era constructs such as metanarratives, rationality, and universal truths, while politicizing social problems ‘by situating them in historical and cultural Read More ›

Michael Egnor skewers claim that there is no continuity of the human self

Egnor: if Blackmore is not the same person now that she was a moment ago, then it makes no sense to call the YouTube video above an interview with Susan Blackmore. Perhaps it should be called interviews with Susan Blackmores or interviews with countless women, one of whom was Susan Blackmore. Or interviews with women formerly known as Susan Blackmore... Read More ›

An Overview of Design Evidence

The following is an overview of the evidence for design which I wrote recently for a political journal whose readers have mostly had little exposure to ID arguments. It was rejected. It is a pretty basic summary, nothing here that UD readers have not seen many times, but maybe you may find it useful as an introduction to ID for friends. The real meat is in the videos linked, the text here is just an outline. The idea that natural selection of random variations could explain all the apparent design in the living world might have seemed superficially plausible in 1859, but, in recent years, as scientific research has continually revealed the astonishing dimensions of the complexity of life, especially Read More ›

Sabine Hossenfelder: Einstein’s greatest legacy was the thought experiment

She notes that one needs evidence from real experiments to demonstrate that the outcome of a thought experiment is real. But it is significant that the human mind is capable of developing the basis for momentous discoveries even before we commit to stuff that requires a budget. Read More ›

Could COVID-19 help us understand the current buzz in science media about space aliens?

It’s worth noting that we haven’t established that there are even fossil bacteria on Mars. But we are starting to hear more than ever that there are intelligent aliens out there, most recently from Ars Technica and Scientific American. Fundamentally, we have found nothing since the Sixties that truly suggests extraterrestrial civilizations. Nothing. If they want to keep looking, fine. Nobody’s stopping them. But spare us the dramatics. Read More ›

Richard Dawkins, as seen apart from proxy Darwin worship

It also felt like the truest, most human work I could do: to love someone into whomever they would become. Meanwhile, the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins tweeted that it was immoral for a pregnant woman to knowingly carry to term a child with Down syndrome... Read More ›

Wintery Knight: Does the multiverse counter the fine-tuning argument for God’s existence?

Knight: The multiverse is not pure nonsense, it is theoretically possible.But even if there were a multiverse, the generator that makes the universes itself would require fine-tuning, so the multiverse doesn’t get rid of the problem. And, as Lightman indicates, we have no independent experimental evidence for the existence of the multiverse in any case. Read More ›

Can AI stand in for God? John Lennox comments

John Lennox : I spent most of my life contending with people that think that science replaces God. And I see that as a very foolish argument really. It’s like saying that if you understand how a Ford motor car works, you don’t need to believe in Henry Ford. Read More ›

The New York Times runs an “aliens are maybe real” story

There are many total mysteries out there. We need more to go on than mere mystery to take aliens seriously. One remembers the astronomer who convinced himself recently that space detritus Oumuamua was an extraterrestrial light sail and accused the rest of us of being too dumb to see that. Read More ›