Intelligent Design

Here: (10) The Church does not presume to settle scientific questions, and we need an honest and open debate: (60) Finally, we need to acknowledge that different approaches and lines of thought have emerged regarding this situation and its possible solutions. At one extreme, we find those who doggedly uphold the myth of progress and tell us that ecological problems will solve themselves simply with the application of new technology and without any need for ethical considerations or deep change. At the other extreme are those who view men and women and all their interventions as no more than a threat, jeopardizing the global ecosystem, and consequently the presence of human beings on the planet should be reduced and all Read More ›

From the BBC: Few people have saved more lives than Louis Pasteur. The vaccines he developed have protected millions. His insight that germs cause disease revolutionised healthcare. He found new ways to make our food safe to eat. Pasteur was the chemist who fundamentally changed our understanding of biology. By looking closely at the building blocks of life, he was at the forefront of a new branch of science: microbiology. Here, from a letter to an atheist: Science brings men nearer to God. Posterity will one day laugh at the foolishness of modern materialistic philosophers. The more I study nature, the more I stand amazed at the work of the Creator. I pray while I am engaged at my work Read More ›

Is this a fair assessment? From City Journal: Shortly after the Argentinian cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio was consecrated Pope Francis in 2013, news stories reported that the new pontiff wanted to build a stronger relationship between the Catholic Church and science—one that saw science not in opposition to, but compatible with, religious belief. Some months later, the pope declared that evolution and the Big Bang theory of creation are real and don’t conflict with belief in God. Now, in the wake of the pope’s encyclical on climate change and the environment, Laudato Si (or, Be Praised), the press has exulted in the pope’s apparent effort to find even more “common ground” with science. Nothing could be further from the truth. Read More ›

Celebrating Charles Darwin’s genius as the undetected and unsung father of modern science fiction. Follow UD News at Twitter!

Readers may remember Misshelver and her new man, who take it upon themselves to move design-related science books to the “religion” section, inconveniencing staff and customers alike. Well. At Barnes and Noble, where misshelving Steve Meyer’s Darwin’s Doubt is corporate policy (amid a continuing financial slump), a friend write to complain, I was at a Barnes & Noble in my neighborhood today and noticed that they are still shelving Meyer’s book in the Christian section of the store. It wouldn’t be so bad except when we consider all the ideological rubbish that inhabits the science section, turning it into some kind of naturalist fantasyland. Have a look at today’s Top 10 in evolution. At this point, when we are learning Read More ›

What inclines me now to think that you may be right in regarding it as the central and radical lie in the whole web of falsehood that now governs our lives, is not so much your arguments against it as the fanatical and twisted attitudes of its defenders. C.S. Lewis The “it” to which Lewis was referring was evolution. Today, “it” could well be climate alarmists. According to this paper the climate alarmists are undermining science itself: Scientists don’t like this lèse majesté, of course. But it’s the citizen science that the internet has long promised. This is what eavesdropping on science should be like—following the twists and turns of each story, the ripostes and counter-ripostes, making up your own mind Read More ›

See here. It seems to me that that a news organization’s reputation for veracity is its most critical asset, without which it is literally nothing. And it is not as if there isn’t an oversupply of pretty boys who can read the news. It’s as if they don’t care that they are throwing away what little credibility they had left. Can someone please help me make sense of this seemingly senseless decision?

I have been spending the past few hours reading Pope Francis’ latest encyclical, Laudato si’, alongside a document called An Ecomodernist Manifesto (sympathetically reviewed here), which was written by a group of prominent environmental thinkers and development specialists such as Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, many of whom are affiliated with a think-tank called The Breakthrough Institute. Both documents make for fascinating reading. I had expected the encyclical to be written in that very high-flown, profound but impenetrable style that some wags have dubbed “Vaticanese” – which is the main reason by most Catholics never read papal encyclicals: they just can’t get through them. But I was pleasantly surprised to find that the Pope’s encyclical actually reads quite well. I Read More ›

Chicken Little must be on vacay. From New Scientist: While greater bleaching is undoubtedly on the list of things that are threatening coral reefs (see “Reefs at risk”), this is a rare instance of where the climate pudding may have been over-egged. New research is painting a very different portrait of corals, one that casts them in the light … [of buy a subscription] Over-egging the pudding is not rare, it is the usual practice in Acrockalypse Kitchens, Inc. Indeed, if there is truly a worldwide shortage of eggs, consider that source of overeggage first. Life forms that have lasted as long as corals (500 mya) probably have many built-in mechanisms for resisting unfavourable changes, as they must surely have Read More ›

From Jewish World Review: Jewish guilt’ may be inherited … “We certainly know that human experiences affect how our genes are expressed,” says Rachel Yehuda, a professor of psychiatry and neuroscience at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, who has performed epigenetic studies on Holocaust survivors. “But we don’t know for sure how this process works and how strong a contributor epigenetics really is compared to other things like genes.” Life experience capable of shaping perceptions and reactions even without touching DNA. In studies published over the past decade, Yehuda has found that children of Holocaust survivors have altered stress response systems and differences in methylation on the gene that regulates the number of Read More ›

No, according to this article, which states that “the aether was a theoretical idea that never found experimental support.”  It goes on to state: Aether was a concept introduced by physicists for theoretical reasons, which died because its experimental predictions were ruled out by observation. Dark matter and dark energy are the opposite: they are concepts that theoretical physicists never wanted, but which are forced on us by the observations. This seems to be exactly wrong.  The aether (or the “luminous aether” as it is sometimes called), was, of course, never observed.  Why then was its existence presumed?  Simple.  Certain observations (the wave-like properties of electro-magnetic radiation in particular) seemed to demand its existence.  The reasoning went like this:  Waves Read More ›

It might be. Further to Blasphemy about dark matter: A second career for Torquemada? Or is the whole “denialism” sturm-und-flapdoodle beginning to attract well-deserved mockery?: Note this from the paywalled article: If dark matter is responsible for such uniform rotation speeds, it would require an extraordinarily precise distribution of the invisible stuff – “fine-tuning in the extreme,” as Milgrom calls it. “It’s like taking 100 building blocks and throwing them on the floor, and lo and behold, I see a castle.” MOND offers an explanation he finds more plausible: “You don’t need the hidden mass.” The desired effects can be explained by modifying our understanding of gravity. The two scientists who propose tweaking Newton’s laws of gravity to eliminate the Read More ›

Since several of the chapters and sections of my new Discovery Institute Press book “In the Beginning and Other Essays on Intelligent Design, 2nd edition” have previously appeared elsewhere, you can read much of it for free using the following links: Chapter 1 – What is Intelligent Design? (also published by the El Paso Times and Human Events, Dec 2013) Chapter 2 – A Mathematician’s View of Evolution published by The Mathematical Intelligencer, 2000. Chapter 3 – How the Scientific Consensus is Maintained (also published by Human Events, July 2014) Chapter 4 – Entropy and Evolution published by Bio-Complexity, June 2013. Section 5.1 – Why Evolution is Different excerpt from Section 5.3 – Similarities Do Not Prove the Absence of Read More ›

The recent discovery of dinosaur blood cells in a 75-million-year-old fossil may shed new light on an old controversy: Although the cells are unlikely to contain DNA, those extracted from better preserved fossils using the same technique may do so, she says. And even without DNA, soft tissue cells and molecules could help us learn much more about dinosaur physiology and behaviour, the team says. For example, the physical size of blood cells can reveal insights into metabolism, and the possible transition from a cold to warm-blooded existence. – from New Scientist But were dinos always warm-blooded? From ScienceDaily: “Upon re-analysis, it was apparent that dinosaurs weren’t just somewhat like living mammals in their physiology — they fit right within Read More ›

An essay contest from the Royal Institute of Philosophy and Cambridge University Press Entrants could win £2,500, publication in Philosophy, and a half hour of fame. No, but seriously, they could contribute to an increasingly significant discussion. Old style vitalism, attributing an internal animating substance or force to living things gave way to the idea that life may yet be a property over and above physical and chemical ones. Subsequent to that it was widely thought that life is an organisational or functional feature of bodies instantiated by their physical properties. With ongoing debates about analogous issues relating to mind (especially consciousness and intentionality) still running, and renewed interest in anti-reductionist interpretations of emergence and of teleological description and explanation Read More ›