Intelligent Design

It is often a claim of atheists/naturalists that certain individuals, groups or positions are “anti-science”. There is a narrative now that the Trump administration is “anti-science” because Trump and certain cabinet nominees do not subscribe to certain so-called “scientific” views, such as AGW or certain evolutionary claims, and do not intend to set policy according to certain views held by many scientists. I doubt anyone except perhaps actual Luddites are “anti-science” in any truthful interpretation of the word. Trump and his entire team, ID advocates and Christians of virtually every kind embrace science and use technology. Christians basically invented science and made most of the great scientific discoveries in history, whether or not those discoveries coincided with their religious views Read More ›

Wayne Rossiter holds a PhD in ecology and evolution from Rutgers and is an assistant biology professor at Waynesburg University.  In a comment to another post he writes: Literally, Jesus is their great stumbling block. Consider the words of Darrel Falk (one of the BioLogos founders): “Faith in Christ’s resurrection is thus the single most important belief that Christians hold. Is it scientifically credible? . . . It is not. Yet this is the position we hold. to a scientist . . . the belief in a risen body is irrational.” They think that purely scientific explanations for the world are compatible with Christian theism…except on Jesus. There, they will fly in the face of their science. But why? And Read More ›

From Hannah Devlin at Guardian: According to Bruno Lemaitre, an immunologist at the EPFL research institute in Switzerland, it is no longer enough to be right – or even to get there first. Reaching the top of the scientific hierarchy increasingly depends on a glittering media profile, publishing in “trophy journals” and cultivating a network of academic frenemies who are treated as close allies until they become obstacles in the path to academic glory. But performers don’t create that atmosphere; audiences do. Speaking last week at the MRC London Institute of Medical Sciences, Lemaitre described the cut-throat atmosphere of world-class laboratories and international conferences as closer to House of Cards than The Big Bang Theory. Because scientists would rather party Read More ›

From Carl Straumsheim at Inside Higher Ed: Beall’s lists have been controversial among researchers and scholarly communications experts. Advocates of open-access publishing have criticized Beall for being overly negative toward the model. In a 2013 essay, for example, Beall wrote that the open-access movement is an “anti-corporatist, oppressive and negative movement, one that uses young researchers and researchers from developing countries as pawns.” Some publishers have objected to being featured on the lists. OMICS International, a publisher Beall has previously described as “the worst of the worst,” in 2013 threatened to sue Beall, seeking $1 billion in damages. But Beall has also received credit for highlighting a growing problem in the field of scholarly publishing. A 2015 study by researchers Read More ›

No, really. From the home of the Boltzmann brain wars and information as a physical quality, we now learn, Protesting the incoming Trump administration’s anti-science agenda may not be easy – but it’s vital not just for the US, but the world THE stamp of jackboots, raps on the door, marches and uniforms; these are what we associate with the emergence of an authoritarian state. The reality is less dramatic: life for most people may carry on much as usual – except they will no longer have any sway over the governing of their nation. This is fascinating because the political movements that seem to unhinge New Scientist so much (Trump’s win and Brexit) were the result of asking voters what Read More ›

Back in November of last year, I published a post announcing a new ID blog I was working on. This post is to let UD readers know that I have now put the blog online. Do pop in and have a look around! There isn’t much material to look at yet, though there are a few static pages with further information on, that may be of interest. I will be adding additional pages and will begin putting a few articles up shortly. I will be highlighting some of the main pages in turn also. Please do head over and let me know what you think of the look etc. either here or on my page. I would appreciate the feedback. Read More ›

Not just dumping on it. We get mail, only some of which we can quote*: At a recent alt-right meet up in Boston, a number of young alt-righters noted how they’ve given up on Christianity and have converted to neo-paganism (Asatru Folk Assembly). Their complaints about Christianity were as follows: … You have literal cuckolds adopting blacks and you have weak girly men crying about the need not to deport 3rd world invaders. This religion, they maintain, is a disgrace for any man with a healthy testosterone level.” … What happened? One professor of evolutionary psychology and religion, in a forthcoming book, argues that mainstream Christianity has been overtaken by girly men. It’s undergone a selection process where more manly Read More ›

At Algemeiner: Question: I’m a little confused here. You have said repeatedly in this lecture and in other lectures, and in your books, that we haven’t the slightest clue how life began. In fact, Christian de Duve himself has stated explicitly that we have no idea how life began. How, then, can he declare that “life is a cosmic imperative?” There is no scientific evidence for that declaration. Answer: Yes, you are correct. However, de Duve and many others like him feel that the odds of life’s starting by chance are so outrageously improbable that it would be irrational even to consider such a possibility. What makes the problem even more difficult is that life would be absurdly improbable even Read More ›

At BioLogos, historian Ted Davis offers: Perhaps the greatest irony about the contemporary religion-science dialogue is the fact that, despite their own strongly articulated denials, many thinkers implicitly accept the “warfare” thesis of A. D. White—that is, they agree with White that traditional theology has proved unable to engage science in fruitful conversation. More than most others, John Polkinghorne understands just how badly White misread the history of Christianity and science, and how much theology has been impoverished by its failure to challenge this core assumption of modernity. … Nothing was more important to many modernists than the God they found within the evolutionary process itself, rather than in putative explanatory gaps in that process. What might be missed, however, Read More ›

From Sedeer El-Showk at Nautilus: From the Muslim perspective, fine-tuning isn’t a problem, but rather an example of the beauty and order of the cosmos. Multiverse proposals seem to willfully undermine this beauty, positing a plethora of universes to account for the observed characteristics of our universe. To Mimouni, the idea is also unscientific. “From an ontological point of view, it’s a catastrophe, because you’re proposing things you can never observe, universes that are causally disconnected from our universe,” he says. “In fact, it’s against the philosophy of science as we understand it because it talks about entities that can never be studied or have their existence proven.” More. Got it in one. The multiverse is not only “not science.” Read More ›

In Snowflake Barbarians, I speculated about what a post-Christian polity looks like.  Here’s another clue from yesterday:

Discovery Institute’s Dr. Jonathan Wells will be presenting to my LIVE “Apologetics Academy” webinar and fielding audience Q&A today, Saturday, at 8pm GMT / 3pm EST / 2pm CST / 12noon PST. He will be speaking on the subject of “Design Beyond DNA”. I hope some of you can join us. Please click the link below to join the webinar at or shortly before the meeting’s start time: https://zoom.us/j/457736238 Doing so will immediately prompt you to download the Zoom webinar platform we use (if you have not already done so). This should only take a minute or two. You will then be automatically connected to our webinar room. Skeptics are welcome, and there will be plenty of opportunity to engage and Read More ›

1. Climate Alarmism – why do Atheists/Materialists think they can recognize and understand true climate facts and extrapolate them into valid theories about the future of Earth’s climate? Do they not realize all of their mental processes have no top-down, supernatural control/override authority? They think whatever happenstance chemical interactions cause them to think, and believe whatever chance forces cause them to believe. Under such a paradigm, they believe what they do about the climate for exactly the same reason non-believers hold their non-alarmist views: chemical interactions have caused such beliefs. “Facts” and “truths” are nothing more than sensations that unintelligent, undirected physical processes cause us to attach to particular thoughts. They might eat some particular ingredient or smell something and Read More ›

From Shannon Hall at New Scientist: So where are these unseen universes in relation to ours? How many are there? What goes on inside them? And can we ever hope to visit one? Such questions might sound daft, particularly given the lack of observational evidence that the multiverse exists. And yet thanks to new ideas on where distant universes might be hiding or how to count them, physicists are beginning to get their bearings. Rather fittingly, though, there is not just one answer – depending on which version of the multiverse you’re navigating, there are many. (paywall) More. [colour emphasis added] Question: “New pics from Pluto, including strange, icy haloes” sounds like science, a matter of public interest. “How far away Read More ›

Obviously, for all to see. A sentence appears in a paywalled article in a peer-reviewed publication (Journal of Molecular Evolution): Since the subject of cellular emergence of life is unusually complicated (we avoid the term ‘complex’ because of its association with ‘biocomplexity’ or ‘irreducible complexity’), it is unlikely that any overall theory of life’s nature, emergence, and evolution can be fully formulated, quantified, and experimentally investigated. But that is not a justified change in terminology and certainly not an improvement. “Complicated” is usually a pejorative term, that is, a term that means something negative. Compare: “The new system is more complicated” [= messy, time-wasting, not ergonomic, typical product of a committee, etc.… ] vs. “The new system is more complex” Read More ›