Intelligent Design

A battle royal over split-brain patients has been raging on a post at Uncommon Descent for the past four weeks. I was unaware of this vigorous debate until a couple of days ago, as I’ve been working on several posts of my own, which will (hopefully) be up soon. However, after having viewed the comments on the split brain thread, I’ve decided to make my own contribution to the debate, as someone who has a long-standing interest in the mind-body problem. How it all started Over at The Skeptical Zone, KeithS threw down the gauntlet in a post titled, Split-brain patients and the dire implications for the soul (June 22, 2013). I’ll quote a brief excerpt here: There is a Read More ›

We live in an intellectually impoverished and too often uncivil era, with the rise of evolutionary materialist scientism (as in: a priori evolutionary materialist “Science” is all of ‘real’ knowledge) having no small part of the responsibility. So, it is no real surprise to see one KeithS, one of the Darwinist anti-UD web patrol doubling down and trying to escape behind a squid-ink cloud of polarising and poisonous rhetoric,  in response to my expose of his fallacies over the past few days, and resorting to false, turnabout accusations of lying and hypocrisy to try to trumpet the pretence that he has “won” a ‘debate.” bearing in mind that earlier expose of the many errors and absurdities in KeithS’ reasoning, let Read More ›

Our colleague Elizabeth Liddle has described the process of human design as trial and error, tinkering and iteration. Like Dawkins, she has argued nature (like human designers) is able to construct biological designs via trial and error, tinkering and iteration. However, when nature is properly compared and contrasted with the way humans go about creating designs, it is apparent Dawkins’ claim of a blind watchmaker is false. I refer to Elizabeth’s description because she articulated some aspects of the blind watchmaker hypothesis better than Dawkins, but in so doing actually helped highlight why Dawkins’ blind watchmaker is refuted by the evidence. [this is a follow up post to Selection falsely called a mechanism when it should be called an outcome] Read More ›

It was not news this week when evolutionist Andreas Wagnerexplained that “we know very little about how they [evolutionary innovations] originate.” The origin of evolutionary innovations is largely unexplained and that gap is well known. No one would deny this. Even Wagner’s own press release begins with the same admission: “Exactly how new traits emerge is a question that has long puzzled evolutionary biologists.” But this admission, while uncontroversial, is not well advertised. It is not typically found in textbooks or popular books. Evolutionists do not often discuss this shortcoming in their class lectures or public talks.  For this shortcoming is rather embarrassing. In order to be taken seriously evolution must be able to explain how life’s various and incredible innovations arose, and Read More ›