Intelligent Design

Then get a load of the psychiatrists! The Copernican Principle, the idea that there is nothing special about Earth, has been a guiding principle of the search for extraterrestrial life. It’s a poor principle because there is lots that is special about Earth, and the general absence of space aliens is not likely an accident. Not to say we shouldn’t look, but looking with the wrong assumptions and for the wrong reasons will likely result in much frustration. That said, some make the case that Earth is the literal centre of the universe, in a detectible sense. So if there is no longer any place to put the newly fallen snow, we can excuse ourselves from shovelling, put up our Read More ›

As we have discussed many times, evolution is the most influential scientific theory in areas outside of science, for evolution carries a message that goes far beyond biology. And what is that message?  Read more

Every year, around five people in the United States die from snakebite. More than 38,000 Americans die from suicide every year – and the true figure is far higher, according to Julie Phillips, an associate professor of sociology at Rutgers University, whose research on rising suicide rates has led her to conclude that suicide in the United States is “vastly underreported“. Over the pascouple of days, there has been a veritable deluge of news reports (see here, here, here, here and here ) about a “snake-handling preacher,” Jamie Coots, who was bitten by a rattlesnake last Saturday in Middlesboro, Kentucky, and who died an hour later, after refusing medical treatment. It’s estimated that no more than 125 churches in the Read More ›

Nullasalus writes here: By the way – does anyone else notice that when it comes to evolution, disagreement is always translated as ‘You don’t understand evolution!’? Larry Moran plays the card in the link I give. Everyone’s playing the card with Kaz. Dawkins and company played the card with EO Wilson. EO Wilson arguably played it right back. Jerry Fodor got the same treatment for writing What Darwin Got Wrong. Thomas Nagel got the same. It’s as if disagreement is literally unthinkable. You’re either all on the same page or you just don’t get evolution fundamentally. That seems about right based on my experience.

When it comes to faith there are two kinds of people – those who understand and embrace the fact that faith of some kind is inevitable and those who try to dodge this ineluctable primordial datum. We cannot know completely. Kurt Gödel demonstrated that even the basic principles of a mathematical system while true cannot be proved to be true. This is his incompleteness theorem. Gödel exploded the myth of the possibility of perfect knowledge about anything. If even a mathematical system must be taken on faith at certain level, is there anything we can know completely? No there is not. Faith is inevitable. Deny that fact and live a life of blinkered illusion, or embrace it and live in Read More ›

This is UD’s 12,000th post. Thank you to all of our tireless writers and readers.

Commenter Seqenenre writes: Me, my mother, her mother, her mother etc 110 million times. Each and every mother and daughter are of the same species. Yet number 50 million and 49.999.999 certainly are not human. I find this puzzling. We can deduce two things from this comment. First, Seqenenre is not a native English speaker. I deduce this from the fact that he uses a period instead of a comma as a digit group separator. It is neither here nor there, but I am guessing German. The second thing I deduce is that Seqenenre has drunk deeply from the well of Darwinist gradualism. Yet there is simply no evidence that gradualism in the way Darwin expected ever happened. Indeed, the Read More ›