Intelligent Design

In my last post, I commended Professor P. Z. Myers for arguing that children with Down syndrome are fully human, and that their lives are worth living, even as I noted that Myers and I disagree on the morality of abortion. In a new post, Myers proposes a thought experiment in support of his pro-choice stance. Astonishingly, he maintains that a pregnant woman has the right to end the life of the embryo or fetus she is carrying, even if (hypothetically) it were as intelligent as you or I. In a previous post, Myers had written: Even if I thought embryos were conscious, aware beings writing poetry in the womb (I don’t, and they’re not), I’d have to bow out Read More ›

In my previous post Synthesis-versus-Analysis I dealt with the distinction between “true whole” and “false whole”. Now let’s see how that had relations with Aquinas and his refutation of biological macroevolution. About the origin of man and the relations between his soul and body, Aquinas was clear: Reply to objection 3: Some have claimed that the [first] man’s body was formed antecedently in time, and that later on God infused a soul into the already formed body. But it is contrary to the nature of the perfection of the first production of beings that God would make either the body without the soul or the soul without the body; for each of them is a part of human nature. It Read More ›

The best arguments for evolution have always been from dysteleology. This world, as evolutionists explain, just does not appear to have been designed. Consider our retina for example. Isn’t it all backwards, with the photocells—which detect the incoming light—pointed toward the rear and behind several layers of cell types and neural processes. Does this make any sense? Surely such a claptrap would offend any “tidy-minded engineer,” as Richard Dawkins put it. But such arguments have never worked and the history of evolutionary thought is full their failures. Aside from the fact they are metaphysical and not open to scientific testing, they inevitably are simply false. The “bad retina design” argument, as discussed here, here, here, here andhere for example  Read more

Following Cracked.com’s six stealthiest disguises in the animal kingdom, (here), see their nine most mind-blowing ones. Here are National Geographic’s most amazing ones. Hat tip: Daniel Quinones

The materialist position is that the mind is an effect of biology and physics. If the materialist appeals to a person’s mind (logic, reason, thoughts, conscience, emotion) to try and get them to change their views/beliefs, they are necessarily assuming that the mind is not limited to being only an effect of biology/physics, because they would be appealing to an effect (the mind) to change itself, or to itself act in a top-down, causal manner, circumventing the physical causes the materialist supposedly believes actually produces the state-of-mind effect. Appealing to the minds of others necessarily means assuming those minds are not caused by biology/physics and that those minds have the causal ability to change themselves based on concepts and arguments.  Read More ›