Religion

Usually this is not a topic I deal with, but an UD commenter gently asked such interesting question in another thread. Theism states a transcendent Principle, which is One and Infinite. This Unity is the First cause of the universal existence, of all beings and all things (for this reason He is also the Great Designer of the universe). This Supreme Principle is the Self “who stays within the heart of any being; who is the principle, the mean and the end of all beings”. Besides, this Self is also absolute Truth and supreme Knowledge. Given this fundamental Unity, this Center, where “all beings are fused but not confused” – as M. Eckart said -, it is straightforward to derive Read More ›

I care about truth if there is a God. But why should I care about truth if there is no God? In fact if there is no God, maybe I shouldn’t care about truth because it would be too sad to know…I’d rather live out my life with the illusion of happily ever after in that case. Two thousand years ago, someone echoed those sentiments: What do I gain if, humanly speaking, I fought with beasts at Ephesus? If the dead are not raised, “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.” Paul of Tarsus 1 Cor 15:32 There was an exchange between KeithS and I in another thread, and he fired off this comment: Your comment epitomizes one Read More ›

Shannon’s legendary paper: Mathematical Theory of Communication unwittingly lends support to the philosophical notion that perfect designs in one dimension must of necessity have imperfection in other dimensions. We intuitively understand that we communicate much better with someone in a quiet room versus a noisy room. But Shannon’s genius was that he quantified this notion by relating maximum data transmission rate to the signal-to-noise ratio. The result of the paper was the now famous Noisy channel coding theorem. To make his argument, he defined measures of information relevant to communication, the famous notion of “bit”. The notion of “bit” plays a central role in ID theories, but ironically, the notion of “bit” wasn’t the focus of Shannon’s legendary paper! How Read More ›

[This is a follow on to a conversation began by RDFish/Aiguy which was crossposted at UD and TSZ: here and here] Perhaps, however, one just really does not want to call intelligent design a scientific theory. Perhaps one prefers the designation “quasi-scientific historical speculation with strong metaphysical overtones.” Fine. Call it what you will, provided the same appellation is applied to other forms of inquiry that have the same methodological and logical character and limitations. In particular, make sure both design and descent are called “quasi-scientific historical speculation with strong metaphysical overtones.” This may seem all very pointless, but that in a way is just the point. As Laudan has argued, the question whether a theory is scientific is really Read More ›

A scandalous documentary about Christian gamblers was released in 2012 with me listed in the credits. 🙂 The documentary is about a group of Christians, the Holy Rollers, that took the casinos for 3.5 million dollars. Myself, by comparison, I’ve accumulated a relatively paltry sum of $30,000 or so over the years. I’ve been tossed out of casinos and abused because I tried to use my brain in the casino. Casinos, like Darwinists, will say: Expelled No Intelligence Allowed!. I took Turtle Creek Casino in Michigan for $6,000 before they illegally backroomed me. Similarly, I was forcibly escorted out of Hollywood Tunica (thankfully Hollywood got sued for $729,000 for pulling such stunts on other honest players like myself in an Read More ›

I found a comment by CLADIVS (Claudius) in Good and bad reasons for rejecting ID that is worth highlighting. But without a testable explanation, ID remains in the realm of metaphysics, philosophy or religion, not science. I responded: ID may not be science, but that does not mean automatically it is religion. If I have a coin in a box and shake it, look at it at 11:27 AM on 6/26/13 and determine it is heads. You have no way of scientifically verifying the claim via a process of repeated experiments 10 years from now. You’ll just have to take my word for it. The fact that a true claim about the history of the physical universe is not accessible Read More ›

Our old friend PZ Myers holds school boards in utter contempt. In a recent blog post at his widely followed Pharyngula blog site, he takes contemptuous pot shots at the Springboro, OH School Board for having the audacity to even consider a “critical thinking” policy in the curriculum. The Springboro Community City School District is considering a so-called “critical thinking” policy that would require teachers to explore “all sides” of controversial issues. The proposed policy change would direct teachers to discuss creation science or intelligent design when teaching about the theory of evolution. <a href=”http://www.rawstory.com/rs/201…..-proposal/ Full story here. PZ can’t restrain his contempt: Please. There is no controversy here. Evolution happened, teach it. The best argument that one student provided Read More ›

A thing that evolutionists wrongly consider a serious problem for the creation/ID worldview is the “multiple acts of creation” or – in ID terms – “multiple insertions of information” in time. Here I will argue to show that this is a false problem, or – better said – is a problem that in no way can undermine the creation/ID explanation. This issue is also related to the question when in the cosmos the information is injected by its Designer: is it fully frontloaded from the beginning or is fractionated in time? My assumption is however that we take for granted that the Designer of the universe is God. I dealt with this issue here. Moreover I consider sound the so-called Read More ›