BCSE’s Roger Stanyard doesn’t hold back in his anger at Richard Dawkins I haven ‘t heard Roger Stanyard of BCSE speak about ID or Creationism in quite such strong tones as he denounces Richard Dawkins and friends. He calls the ‘Why Evolution is True’ blog a ‘kangeroo court baying for blood’ and ‘One of the most frightening things I’ve seen in a long time’ because of the letter’s ‘utter viciousness’ and ‘self-righteousness.’ And that isn’t even the worst of it as he denounces Dawkins, but I will refrain from reprinting more here. Check out the link if you wish to read more, especially posts by Stanyard at 25/4/11 6:43 pm and 26/4/11 8:07 am.
Digital codes can be protected against failure. A variety of options have been explored by computer programmers because it is important to catch malfunctions early and alert the user to a problem. “In digital codes, the bits are usually packed into sets of eight bits called bytes. Normally, seven bits are used to record information and one bit – called the ‘parity bit’ – is used for mutation protection, usually denoted as error protection. The seven-bit string 1000001, for example, codes the letter A and 0110011 codes the number 3. If the number of 1’s in the seven-bit string is even, the parity bit is given the value 1, else the value 0. If one of the seven information bits Read More ›
The contest (Saturday, April 16) asked: What would be acceptable evidence for other universes? And the prize is a copy of The Nature of Nature , which goes to Brent at 16 (see below).
(Next contest still in progress: Is Richard Dawkins or Francis Collins the cuter poster boy for selling Darwinism? Closes April 30.)
Readers may recall Steven Weinberg’s comment, quoted, that Read More ›
GNU in the computer software development community stands for GNU’s Not Unix (a recursive acronym — anyone familiar with computer algorithms understands recursive, or self-referential, self-calling procedures). Unix is the famous computer operating system developed in academia during the early 1970s, for which the nearly universal Kernighan and Ritchie C programming language was invented, once it became obvious that the limitations of assembly languages (which are CPU instruction-set specific and provide no portability or programming structure) were found to be inadequate for the task. The C language was invented as essentially a portable assembler, which provided both low-level CPU access and high-level library capability. GNU/Linux is an open-source operating system which emulates and mirrors Unix capabilities but with the source Read More ›
… here’s Jerry Coyne on Giberson and Collins’ Biologos: Finally, Uncle Karl [Giberson] and Francis Collins have a new book! It’s called The Language of Science and Faith (the subtitle is Straight Answers to Genuine Questions), and appears to be based largely on the “frequently asked questions” section of BioLogos. Now Collins wasn’t supposed to be engaged in this Jebus-proselytizing after he took up the reins of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), but I’ve seen assurances (I can’t find them at the moment) that his contribution to the book preceded his NIH directorship. I doubt, however, whether the volume will do much for his reputation. Whether the volume “does much for his reputation” depends principally on who needs the Read More ›
An open letter, signed by some 42 Nobel Laureates, has been sent to the Louisiana legislature and to Gov. Bobby Jindal regarding the 2008 Louisiana academic freedom bill, which offers protection to teachers who encourage critical thinking and objective discussion about evolution and other scientific topics. The statement reads, in part: Dear Members of the Louisiana Legislature, As Nobel Laureates in various scientific fields, we urge you to repeal the misnamed and misguided Louisiana Science Education Act (LSEA) of 2008. This law creates a pathway for creationism and other forms of non-scientific instruction to be taught in public school science classrooms. The warning flags many of us raised about this law have now been proven justified. Members of the Livingston Read More ›
I wrote the index to Nature of Nature , a multilateral discussion of the issues around intelligent design (which originated in a conference that got Bill Dembski fired from Baylor while back.) Hardest index I ever wrote, and I have written hundreds. What makes it difficult is that – unlike with most books – the authors disagree about just about everything. So one can’t just identify indexable terms, one must actually read. Such a rare practice these days. I ended up just telling the publisher to be patient – as I would have to be – so I could get it right. But that index should be good for the reader, to help identify sources for widely made assumptions. For Read More ›
Trouble in Paradise? Coyne Attacks NCSE and BCSE on his Science Blog – Phrayngula Coyne has launched a response to the NCSE and BCSE – it comes after some complaints from the ‘otherside’ about the indifference of Coyne and Dawkins to the efforts of the BCSE and NCSE who feel they do all the work, and Dawkins and co just rake in the dosh. I will refrain from gloating.
In the controversies around design, How did the term “skeptic” come to mean “people who believe in multiverses, space aliens, and random creation of meaningful information?” How did the term “fundamentalist” come to mean “people who believe based only on evidence”?
In another UD thread I made a passing comment about the fact that I had just read Doug Axe’s essay on protein folds in The Nature of Nature. I commented: Speaking of The Nature of Nature, today I read Doug Axe’s essay, The Nature of Protein Folds: Quantifying the Difficulty of an Unguided Search through Protein Sequence Space on page 412. Anyone who reads this and comes away believing that Darwinian mechanisms can produce this technology is living on another planet than I do, or perhaps in a hyper-version of Alice’s Wonderland where a near infinite number of impossible things are believed before breakfast. You can reference the thread in the link above for comments from Mung, who went to Read More ›
(Photo of Asimo, a humanoid robot created by Honda. Wikipedia photo taken by Gnsin at Expo 2005.)
Over at Why Evolution Is True, Professor Coyne has suddenly woken up to the fact that for many people (including scientists), morality is a powerful reason for believing in God. Coyne thinks this is silly, and that the whole attempt to derive morality from God is doomed. But the arguments he puts forward for his point of view are rather facile, and he fails to address the central problem with his own position.
What might that problem be? Like most atheistic scientists, Professor Jerry Coyne doesn’t believe in free will. As he puts it:
Indeed, studies of the brain are pushing back notions of free will in precisely the way that studies of evolution have pushed back the idea of a creator-god.
We simply don’t like to think that we’re molecular automatons, and so we adopt a definition of free will that makes us think we’re free. But as far as I can see, I, like everyone else, am just a molecular puppet. I don’t like that much, but that’s how it is.
It seems to me that in view of physical determinism (plus fine-scale physical stochasticity involving quantum events), there is no way that we can make decisions that are truly free. Some, like [Humanities professor William] Egginton, simply finesse the question by redefining “free,” but I don’t think that these redefinitions of “free will” comport with how most of us understand the term, or with how it’s been historically (not philosophically) understood.
(Emphases and square brackets mine – VJT.)
So tell me, Professor Coyne: if we are not free, then (a) how are we supposed to be good, (b) why should we bother anyway, and (c) why should we blame those who refuse to make the effort, if their decisions aren’t really free?
Another inconsistency of atheists who share Professor Coyne’s views on freedom is that they are nearly always angry at someone – be it the Pope or former President George W. Bush or global warming deniers. I have to say that makes absolutely no sense to me. Read More ›
(It’s like saying “You can have a life-saving treatment anda 100 kg pile of hardened cement chained to your neck too!”
Way back when, Nancy, you wrote a piece for Christianity Today on design, one of several that set me thinking about all these issues.
But I got the feeling that Christianity Today has now backed off somewhat in favour of “Jesus n’ Darwin n’ us more evolved ones.” Is this fair on my part? If so, what happened?)
Theistic evolution has been around long before Darwin. Once again, the key thinker was Hegel. He taught a kind of progressive pantheism, in which God was the soul of the world, evolving along with it. As a result, many Romantics embraced a spiritualized form of evolution.
This explains, says historian John Herman Randall, why Darwin’s biological evolution was welcomed so quickly when it first appeared in 1859—not so much by scientists but by thinkers in fields like history, philosophy, theology, and the social sciences.
It also explains, Randall adds, “why they pretty uniformly misunderstood him . . . and why they failed to see the real significance of his thought.” That is, they thought they could use Darwin to support their own spiritualized version of evolution, failing to see that what he was proposing was a completely materialist version.
What do we mean by the phrase: the fact/value split? It does not simply mean there is a difference between factual knowledge and moral knowledge. People have always known that. Rather, it is the claim that there is no such thing as moral knowledge at all—that morality and theology are reducible to non-cognitive feelings and personal preferences. Literally, whatever you happen to value.
This affects ID because any view that can be linked to religion is put in the “value” category—where it is reduced to private preferences and prejudices.
The way it works is a bit like the good cop/bad cop strategy. The New Atheists are a good example of the bad cop stance. They assert that science has disproved Christianity, and that those who are mature and courageous will discard the false comforts of religion. Christopher Hitchens has said, “I think religion should be treated with ridicule, hatred, and contempt.”
But when the public protests being treated with ridicule and contempt, then the good cops step forward. They assure everyone that there really is no conflict between science and religion, and that they respect everyone’s “cherished values” or “deeply held beliefs.”
But emotive language like that should be a red flag: It means theological views are being reduced to private feelings instead of objective truths.
Consider an example. Paul Kurtz, the founder of the Council for Secular Humanism, wrote an article in the Skeptical Inquirer denouncing religion as “fantasy and fiction.” Yet at the same time, he urged his fellow skeptics to soften the blow when talking to the public by assuring them that “religion and science are compatible.”
Depending, of course, on how you define religion. Read More ›
Postmodern thinkers reject the ideal of objectivity not only in art but also in science. The roots, once again, are in the philosophy of Hegel. If history was the progressive unfolding of the Absolute Mind, that implied that ideas themselves evolve—law, ethics, philosophy, theology.
Hegel taught that no idea is true in an absolute or timeless sense. What is regarded as true in one stage of history will give way to a “higher” truth at the next stage of the evolution of consciousness. This radical relativism is called historicism because it says there is nothing that stands outside the ever-changing historical process.
In order to make his claims, ironically, Hegel had to presume that he alone had the power to stand above history and see it objectively as it really is. In other words, he had to exempt his own views from the historicist categories that he applied to everyone else’s views—which renders his position self-contradictory.
Nevertheless, Hegel’s concept of cultural evolution—that each culture produces its own “truth”—had enormous influence. It is the origin of postmodernism. Postmodern thinkers decided that not even science uncovers timeless, universal truths. It is just another social construction.
As a result, to sustain the scientific enterprise today, we need to reach back in history ask how science arose in the first place. Most historians agree that the scientific outlook actually rests on fundamental concepts derived from a biblical view of nature.
Consider, for example, the idea of “laws” in nature. Read More ›
O’Leary: What, specifically, do you recommend that people do, to recover art from the fact/value split? We all know about it, but in my experience, one of the effects of such a split is to render such subjects undiscussable. There was a time when, for example, poetry was public to the point that technical or science ideas were advanced therein (cf Hesiod’s Works and Days or Dante’s Paradiso ). Today, it is a purely private affair and almost all evaluation of works of art, literature, or music is experienced as an exercise in prejudice. It must be experienced that way, of course, when all norms are rejected in principle.
For the arts, is there actually a way out of this mess?
Pearcey: The way out is to recognize where those ideas come from. The subjective view you describe so well arose from Romanticism. The key thinker was Hegel, who taught a kind of pantheism—an Absolute Spirit or Mind unfolding dialectically over history. What was important was not the outer realm of physical nature, but the inner realm of the spirit or consciousness. Art was redefined as the expression of the artist’s inner experience.
The contest (Saturday, April 16) asked: 
