Intelligent Design

From Ethan Siegel at Starts with a Bang: By finding graphite deposits in zircons that are 4.1 billion years old, graphite deposits that show this carbon-12 enhancement, we now have evidence that life on Earth goes back at least 90% of Earth’s history, and possibly even longer! After all, finding the remnants of organic matter in a certain location means the organic matter is at least as old as the location it’s buried in, but it could still be even older. This is so early that it might make you think that perhaps this life didn’t originate here on Earth, but that Earth was born with life. And this could really, truly be the case. (Extended argument follows, summation:) If Read More ›

  For a materialist the term “ethics” is empty of objective meaning, and in a post from a couple of years ago I pointed out the absurdity of materialist “bioethics.” After all, when pushed to the wall to ground his ethical opinions in anything other than his personal opinion, the materialist ethicist has nothing to say. Why should I pay someone $68,584 to say there is no real ultimate ethical difference between one moral response and another because they must both lead ultimately to the same place – nothingness.  I am not being facetious here. I really do want to know why someone would pay someone to give them the “right answer” when that person asserts that the word “right” Read More ›

At comment 60 in this thread about self-described atheistic materialists who want portray themselves as being moral yet having no basis by which to be moral in any objective sense, Seversky says in response: “However, it is a choice between able to be good in a way that actually means something and actually matters,…” to whom? That’s always the unspoken part of such a claim. Meaning only exists in the mind of the beholder and something or some one only matters to some one. Believers fell better if they believe that their lives have meaning and matter, which means they need a Creator to whom they matter. Notice that, according to Seversky, meaning is an entirely subective pheonomena. IOW, in Read More ›

From Charles Seife at Scientific American: The deal was this: NPR, along with a select group of media outlets, would get a briefing about an upcoming announcement by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration a day before anyone else. But in exchange for the scoop, NPR would have to abandon its reportorial independence. The FDA would dictate whom NPR’s reporter could and couldn’t interview. The government wouldn’t budge on that, and the situation only accidentally came to light. But practically the eintre Who’s Who of big U.S. media science journalism showed up to cover the “story.” This kind of deal offered by the FDA—known as a close-hold embargo—is an increasingly important tool used by scientific and government agencies to control Read More ›

From Moshe Averick, author of The Confused World of Modern Atheism, at Algemeiner: Atheists Still Waiting for the Origin-of-Life Messiah … In other words, despite the prodigious amounts of energy invested by people like Richard Dawkins in spreading propaganda to the contrary, Darwin provided exactly zero evidence to support an atheistic view of biology. Nothing has changed at all; the awe and wonder of the miraculous design and engineering that characterizes every single living creature on earth points as clearly to Divine creation in our day as it did in the period before Charles Darwin published his famous treatise. In their heart of hearts, non-believers like Richard Dawkins understand that the Origin of Life problem means that their so called Read More ›

Here’s a graph from the IPCC. I just happened upon it. Notice that, historically, global temperatures were, cyclically, about 4 degrees warmer than now. Just look at the repeated cycle! It’s been getting warmer for the last 15,000 years plus. AGW is just a farce. And the IPCC itself makes this point.

From ScienceDaily: A person’s DNA sequence can provide a lot of information about how genes are turned on and off, but new research out of Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine suggests the 3-D structure DNA forms as it crams into cells may provide an additional layer of gene control. As long strands of DNA twist and fold, regions far away from each other suddenly find themselves in close proximity. The revolutionary study suggests interactions between distant regions may affect how genes are expressed in certain diseases. … According to Scacheri, “The big surprise was when we crunched the numbers and compared the risk associated with the amount of heritability that could be explained by the outside variants. By Read More ›

Now it’s time for another entertaining controversy, akin to the eye scratcher about whether cats are technically “domestic” animals: This one’s about whether humans evolved from aquatic apes. Nature broadcaster David Attenborough thinks maybe we did, as set out in a recent BBC Radio 4 series The Waterside Ape. By contrast, Alice Roberts (who has herself broadcast for the BBC on human evolution) and Mark Maislin want us to know, in Scientific American, that it isn’t true: Sorry David Attenborough, We Didn’t Evolve from “Aquatic Apes”–Here’s Why These people do not sound very sure of themselves, do they? Anyway, they trace the idea to zoologist Alister Hardy: Hardy put forward all sorts of features which could be explained as “aquatic Read More ›

Our valued contributor Niwrad send in this post, on recent claims that cancer disproves ID: — Evolutionism is systematic negation of reality and inversion of truth. So we must be prepared to listen to ever more unbelievable things from evolutionists. Here I will examine an example that seems particularly meaningful. Cancer has universally been considered to be biological degeneration. Something in the cellular machinery goes wrong, a proliferation of defective cells grows, leading to a destructive dynamic in the diseased organism. It all starts in the genome, so cancer is an issue of bio-informatics, of programming. In fact, we learned recently that “Microsoft will ‘solve’ cancer within 10 years by ‘reprogramming’ diseased cells.” Conceptually, bugs that start the cancer appear Read More ›

Further to Goalposts? What goalposts? From Evolution News & Views: Computer Scientist Joshua Swamidass Argues: Cancer “Casts Serious Doubt” on Intelligent Design In what way does cancer, a destructive disease, have anything to do with evolving new species? Cancer involves single cells, not whole organisms, and it doesn’t build new features, it tears down existing ones. The argument from cancer doesn’t hold up. It doesn’t even make sense. “If many ID arguments in molecular biology were true, then cancer as we know it would be mathematically impossible,” writes Swamidass. Either that or it would “regularly require the direct intervention of God to initiate and be sustained.” Not at all. “Things fall apart.” That is the natural way, which needs no evolutionary Read More ›

I would bet my bottom dollar that most atheists active on or reading this site are very moral, good people. In fact, I would bet that rvb8, Pindi and seversky are better (morally speaking) people than I am. I would further make a bet that part of the very reason they embrace atheism is because they consider the type of “god” they have had exposure to in church or in their community would be, if it actually existed according to what they’ve been exposed to as far as religious teachings, an absurdly evil being not worthy of belief, much less worship. I would agree with them on this point – the god I perceived being taught to me in Sunday Read More ›

So we’d think from science writer K. C. Cole at Quanta: And then physicists began to realize that the dream of one singular theory was an illusion. The complexities of string theory, all the possible permutations, refused to reduce to a single one that described our world. “After a certain point in the early ’90s, people gave up on trying to connect to the real world,” Gross said. “The last 20 years have really been a great extension of theoretical tools, but very little progress on understanding what’s actually out there.” Many, in retrospect, realized they had raised the bar too high. Coming off the momentum of completing the solid and powerful “standard model” of particle physics in the 1970s, Read More ›

As a follow-up to my last post, I think it is only fair for me to highlight all of the Christian gangbangers who renounced their faith in Christ, converted to materialist atheism, and turned from a life of hate and violence to a life of love, mercy and sacrifice for their families. Oh wait, no such person exists.  Never mind.  Carry on with what you were doing.

George Price (1922–1975) From science writer Michael Regnier at Digg: He’d met his wife, Julia, on the Manhattan Project, but as well as being a scientist she was a devout Roman Catholic. The marriage was hard-pressed to survive Price’s scathing views on religion, and after eight years and two daughters – Annamarie and Kathleen – they divorced. Fed up with his job, his life and the distinct lack of recognition in America, Price cut his ties in 1967 and crossed the Atlantic to London, intent on making a great scientific discovery there. He felt he had just a few more years to make his mark, but as it turned out, he needed only one. Price had set himself the ‘problem’ Read More ›

From Lizzie Wade at Science: The “necklaces” are tiny: beads of animal teeth, shells, and ivory no more than a centimeter long. But they provoked an outsized debate that has raged for decades. Found in the Grotte du Renne cave at Arcy-sur-Cure in central France, they accompanied delicate bone tools and were found in the same layers as fossils from Neandertals—our archaic cousins. Some archaeologists credited the artifacts—the so-called Châtelperronian culture—to Neandertals. But others argued that Neandertals were incapable of the kind of symbolic expression reflected in the jewelry and insisted that modern humans must have been the creators. Now, a study uses a new method that relies on ancient proteins to identify and directly date Neandertal bone fragments from Read More ›