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Origin Of Life

Cook the primeval soup for billions of years and Voila!

Check out this video. It’s amazing the confidence Alan Boss has that the primeval soup will generate life. Interesting that he sees the soup needing to simmer for billions of years for life to emerge. It seems to have emerged much faster on the Earth.

Academic freedom for creation explanation

Reuben Kendall, freshman at UT-Martin, has written a thoughtful view point regarding Evolution vs Intelligent Design. He raises important points on metaphysical presumptions vs data. He raises the question of Academic Freedom which incorporates the foundational unalienable freedoms of speech and religion. May I encourage readers to write editorials and viewpoints raising such issues and standing up for our inalienable rights.
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Academic freedom for creation explanation
Reuben Kendall, Issue date: 3/17/09 Section: Viewpoints

As a freshman, I haven’t been at UT-Martin for very long. But some problems are so obvious that they don’t take very long to notice.

In my studies I quickly realized that when it comes to the theory of evolution, Darwin is the only one who gets to answer questions-or ask them.

I want to question this theory-to test it; check its credentials. And I want honest, thoughtful answers to my questions, not pre-formulated quips and deflections.
But I have learned that if I’m not an evolutionist, my questions don’t get credited, or even heard.
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Space Telescope Launches Friday to Find New Earths

Friday , March 06, 2009 By Andrea Thompson If Friday’s launch goes according to plan and successfully lobs NASA’s new Kepler space telescope into orbit, the mission stands to potentially change the way we look at the universe. Kepler is designed to turn its eye on thousands of stars in our own Milky Way galaxy and look for signs of Earth-sized planets orbiting in a region conducive to supporting life. Read more… I wonder if they have dumped the following idea… The Limits of Organic Life in Planetary Systems Executive Summary Reflecting the near inevitability of human missions to Mars and other locales in the solar system where life might exist, and given the interest of the public in the Read More ›

Lay off Graham Lawton (more on the New Scientist “Darwin was wrong” article)

A few relevant facts for those who shoot from the hip, without thinking: 1. Reporters and writers don’t contribute or control article headlines, a privilege their editors reserve to themselves. 2. Nor do reporters and writers have much (or any) say about what goes on the magazine cover. See the editors for that. 3. Graham Lawton was reporting on scientific developments and arguments that have been underway for more than a decade (although accelerating recently). Go here, for instance, for a summary of a recent meeting reviewing those developments. Lawton interviewed some of the participants at this meeting — as a science journalist, not a partisan. The point is, if Lawton didn’t report the story, the story would still be Read More ›

ID and the Science of God: Part III

 

I have been reflecting on the critical responses to my posts, which I appreciate. They mostly centre on the very need for ID to include theodicy as part of its intellectual orientation.

 

The intuitive basis for theodicy is pretty harmless: The presence of design implies a designing intelligence. Moreover, in order to make sense of the exact nature of the design, you need to make hypotheses about the designing intelligence. These hypotheses need to be tested and may or may not be confirmed in the course of further inquiry. Historians and archaeologists reason this way all the time. However, the theodicist applies the argument to nature itself.

 

At that point, theodicy binds science and theology together inextricably — with potentially explosive consequences. After all, if you take theodicy seriously, you may find yourself saying, once you learn more about the character of nature’s design, that science disconfirms certain accounts of God – but not others. Scientific and religious beliefs rise and fall together because, in the end, they are all about the same reality.

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ID and the Science of God: Part I

In response to an earlier post of mine, DaveScot kindly pointed out this website’s definition of ID. The breadth of the definition invites scepticism: ID is defined as the science of design detection — how to recognize patterns arranged by an intelligent cause for a purpose. But is there really some single concept of ‘intelligence’ that informs designs that are generated by biological, human, and possibly even mechanical means? Why would anyone think such a thing in the first place? Yet, it is precisely this prospect that makes ID intellectually challenging – for both supporters and opponents.

It’s interesting that not everything is claimed to be intelligently designed. This keeps the phrase ‘intelligent design’ from simply collapsing into ‘design’ by implying a distinction between the intelligence and that on which it acts to produce design. So, then, what exactly is this ‘intelligence’ that stands apart from matter? Well, the most obvious answer historically is a deity who exists in at least a semi-transcendent state. But how can you get any scientific mileage from that?

Enter theodicy, which literally means (in Greek) ‘divine justice’. It is now a field much reduced from its late 17th century heyday. Theodicy exists today as a boutique topic in philosophy and theology, where it’s limited to asking how God could allow so much evil and suffering in the world. But originally the question was expressed much more broadly to encompass issues that are nowadays more naturally taken up by economics, engineering and systems science – and the areas of biology influenced by them: How does the deity optimise, given what it’s trying to achieve (i.e. ideas) and what it’s got to work with (i.e. matter)? This broader version moves into ID territory, a point that has not escaped the notice of theologians who nowadays talk about theodicy.

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A New Year’s Resolution: Keep Intelligent Design Intelligent

This is not the post I originally expected to make. But in light of the comments both here and on other blogs, I will start with a New Year’s resolution: Keep Intelligent Design Intelligent.     ‘Intelligent design’ is presumably something more than a long-winded way of saying ‘design’. The phrase implies that the design displays signs of intelligence, which in turn means that the nature of the intelligence can be inferred, however fallibly, from the nature of the design. For example, William Paley’s accounts of the design features of life draw conclusions about the divine modus operandi. (I invoke Paley not because I like his version of ID – I don’t — but because both sides of the debate Read More ›

RNA Getting Lengthy

ScienceDaily reports on an interesting experiment relevant to OOL scenarios.

With the aid of a straightforward experiment, researchers have provided some clues to one of biology’s most complex questions: how ancient organic molecules came together to form the basis of life.

Specifically, this study demonstrated how ancient RNA joined together to reach a biologically relevant length. Read More ›

Life From Chiral Crystals . . . Really?

The other day I made an offhand comment that the chirality problem was nowhere being solved. Yellow Shark was nice enough to provide a link to new research published in November, 2008. Now I was referring to scenarios which could occur in nature, not in lab conditions, and so I contacted some friends to see what they thought and to see if the research was indeed relevant to OOL scenarios.
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