Intelligent Design

In my previous post, I focused on the anti-religious slant of Professor Steve Pinker’s best-selling book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (Viking Adult, 2011). In this post, I’d like to critique Pinker’s methodology, his misuse of statistics, and his faulty figures relating to atrocities perpetrated in the past. What Pinker gets right, and what he gets wrong Pinker’s book deserves to be commended for its methodological fairness, in its approach to the historical data relating to violence. Datasets relating to violence are included in their entirety, with no cherry-picking of the historical data. So far, so good. Pinker is right to focus on percentages, rather than absolute numbers, in evaluating the level of violence in Read More ›

About a year and a half ago I wrote a critique of Steve Pinker’s best-seller, The Better Angels of Our Nature, but I didn’t bother tidying it up. And then I forgot about it. I would like to thank Lar Tanner for jogging my memory, with a comment he made on Uncommon Descent yesterday. Professor Steven Pinker’s book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (Viking Adult, 2011) has attracted much attention in the press. But after having perused Professor Pinker’s book, as well as his online lecture, A History of Violence (27 September 2011), as well as his responses to Frequently Asked Questions about The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, I feel Read More ›

I don’t like to accuse two highly respected public figures of lying. Lying, after all, presupposes an intention to deceive the people you are talking to, and not being a mind-reader, I’m loath to ascribe such a wicked intention to two people whom I’ve never met. But when two highly intelligent men make false statements, which they almost certainly know to be false, and they then use these statements for the purpose of scoring cheap points at someone else’s expense, then I think it is fair to say that they are guilty of distorting the truth. And to those who would distort the truth, I say: what you propose to do is bad enough, but if you are going to Read More ›

Some, who are aware of the absurdity of Darwinian macroevolution but, in the same time, dislike intelligent design (ID), believe that a third way is possible between the two, a third way able to explain the origin of living beings. Their position can be expressed in many manners, e.g.: (1) “natural substances have built-in capabilities to produce complexity” or “an intrinsic teleology is built into the universe”; (2) “cells have an internal intelligence, sort of natural internal engineering. […] Evolution by natural genetic engineering has the capacity to generate complex novelties.” (James A. Shapiro, “A Third Way”); (3)”self-assembly to produce complexes which have capabilities far beyond component pieces seems built into creation at multiple levels”. (Loren Haarsma, “Models of evolving Read More ›

“We have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men” (George Orwell). Design is obvious.

Longtime design objector AF has just issued an inadvertently revealing challenge in the Info by accident thread: AF, 224: >> And in the spirit of Carthago delenda est if anyone has a testable hypothesis of “Intelligent Design”, that would be good, too!>> This is brazen, and utterly revealing. Cato’s “Carthage must fall” was a declaration of implacable ruthless enmity that led to the final destruction of Carthage through a third war in a century, on a flimsy excuse. Here is my response at 225 (images added): KF, 225: >> AF has been at UD from the beginning. Eight years. He therefore full well knows — it having been stated in his presence umpteen times — that, for instance, a clear Read More ›

Anyone who has done any serious mathematics needs no introduction to the name Leonhard Euler, one of the all time greats of Mathematics. For those who do, let me simply clip the opening words of the Wiki biographical article: a pioneering Swiss mathematician and physicist. He made important discoveries in fields as diverse as infinitesimal calculus and graph theory. He also introduced much of the modern mathematical terminology and notation, particularly for mathematical analysis, such as the notion of a mathematical function.He is also renowned for his work in mechanics, fluid dynamics, optics, and astronomy. Euler spent most of his adult life in St. Petersburg, Russia, and in Berlin, Prussia. He is considered to be the pre-eminent mathematician of the Read More ›

Recently, I had the privilege of viewing Ray Comfort’s new DVD, Evolution vs. God (which can be viewed online here). The movie made for very interesting viewing, as it provided an excellent snapshot of the different worlds that Darwinists and believers in a designed cosmos inhabit. Let me begin by saying that I was greatly impressed with Ray Comfort’s 2011 pro-life movie, 180. It packed a powerful emotional punch, and it also made you think. The hypothetical question which Comfort posed to the college students he interviewed was simple but stunningly effective, in exposing the intellectual inconsistency of the pro-choice position. Unfortunately, I didn’t feel that Evolution vs. God was in the same league as 180. On an emotional level, Read More ›

“The cosmos is all that is, or ever was, or ever will be.” So begins this new offering. I’ve been away from UD for some time, and there is a very simple reason. Trying to convince people, who choose to believe otherwise, that random errors cannot produce complex computer programs, as in living systems, is a hopeless task. The anti-science materialist is a nearly completely lost cause. (I say “nearly” because I am a rare exception.) However, from time to time I check in on the latest attempts of materialists to peddle their irrational wares to easily seduced victims. By the way, if “the cosmos is all that is, or ever was, or ever will be,” wouldn’t that completely invalidate Read More ›