Intelligent Design

My post intends to be a response to a previous UD article by scordova. Scordova, who asks “should ID include AI as a form of intelligence?” and answers “I think so”, is aware to have put on the table a critical topic because himself writes: I know many of my ID colleagues will disagree or will remain skeptical of adopting such a convention. I am one of his ID colleagues who disagrees and I will explain why. Scordova wrote: So what is the evidence of intelligence? I would suggest the ability to construct artifacts or events with Specified Improbability (the usual term is Specified Complexity, CSI, etc. but those terms are too confusing). This is an extremely reductive way to Read More ›

We’re telling you [i.e., materialists] what the logical ramifications of your premises are, not what your beliefs are. In other words, if you hold premise A, then you must rationally also commit to B. That doesn’t mean you actually believe B; it just means that if you do not, you’re being logically inconsistent with regards to your stated premise. We’re actually, for the most part, assuming you do not believe B, even though it is logically implied by your premise. It’s our hope that once you realize that B is logically [implied by] your premise, you’ll question your premise.

I have already coined the term “Darwinist Derangement Syndrome.” See here.  Closely related to DDS is MDS (“Materialist Derangement Syndrome”), which pathology Mark Frank aptly demonstrates in this exchange: Barry: Here is a self-evident moral truth: “It is evil to torture an infant for personal pleasure.” Mark Frank: Usually you define self-evident as leading to absurdity. What kind of absurdity results from holding it is not evil to torture an infant for personal pleasure? (We must have held this debate over 100 times on UD by now – but I never saw an answer to this). Mark keeps asking over and over for someone to demonstrate to him why a self-evident truth is true, when he has been told over Read More ›

Evolution is unique in that while it is well known amongst evolutionists to be a fact, its predictions often turn out false. Consider this new paper from the Royal Society on “The mystery of extreme non-coding conservation” that has been found across many genomes. Years ago an evolution professor told me, in defending the claim that evolution is falsifiable, that if functionally unconstrained yet highly similar DNA sequences were found in different species, then evolution would be false. A few years later that is exactly what was discovered. In fact, the DNA sequences were extremely similar and even identical in different species, and when they were altogether removed from mice it made no detectable difference. Hundreds of tests showed no significant difference Read More ›

Random Brain Waves Save Free Will? The debate continues with a new publication. But the new study by Han-Gue Jo and colleagues of Freiburg makes a strong case that the “RP” is not really a ‘thing’ at all. They say that, in the two seconds before a button press, you see both negative and positive changes, in roughly equal numbers. There are slightly more negative ones, so on average, there is a small negative “RP”, but only on average. See: Exp Brain Res. 2013 Dec;231(4):495-500. doi: 10.1007/s00221-013-3713-z. Epub 2013 Oct 9. Spontaneous EEG fluctuations determine the readiness potential: is preconscious brain activation a preparation process to move? Jo HG, Hinterberger T, Wittmann M, Borghardt TL, Schmidt S.

So what is the evidence of intelligence? I would suggest the ability to construct artifacts or events with Specified Improbability (the usual term is Specified Complexity, CSI, etc. but those terms are too confusing). Thus factories with robots, smart cruise missiles, genetic algorithms, bacteria, a collective network of ants, etc. can be considered intelligent systems. The problem is that we have no means of distinguishing real from artificial intelligence in any formal way. With no disrespect intended toward those with severe mental handicaps, yes such people are conscious, but there is a point a robotic automaton might be capable of generating more Specified Improbability than such an individual. Thus the line between real and artificial, as far as what is Read More ›

Under moral subjectivism, good and bad are entirely subjective commodities.  This means that if I think a thing is right, it is as right as is possible for moral right to exist.  The principle of subjective morality authorizes an act as “morally good” if the person that performed the act believed it to be the right thing to do; that is the only framework available to moral subjectivism for an evaluation of “moral” and “immoral”.  It is strictly a relationship between the actor/believer and the act. Therefore, as long as Hitler believed his actions right, and those who carried out his orders believed similarly, then to the full extent that the principle of moral subjectivism has to authorize anything as Read More ›

In my previous post on John Jeremiah Sullivan’s essay, One of us, I exposed the numerous factual errors in its depiction of how people’s attitudes to animals have changed over the course of time. My expose stopped at the end of the Middle Ages; today, I’ll be talking about Montaigne, Descartes, Spinoza and the physiologist Haller (who influenced Voltaire’s thinking on animals). A short summary of Sullivan’s errors Sullivan is a great admirer of the humanistic scholar Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592), who argued eloquently for the existence of rationality in animals, in his “Apology for Raymond Sebond”. Sullivan’s essay contains villains too: one of these is the French philosopher Rene Descartes (1596-1650), who described animals as “natural automata”, which Sullivan Read More ›

Theory protectionism comes in many forms. One of the most common protections for the theory of evolution is the so-called God of the gaps warning which casts evolution criticism as an argument for the existence of God that is from ignorance and therefore a danger to one’s faith. This warning appeared again this week when Mark Shea used it against Intelligent Design in the National Catholic Register.  Read more