The changes are happening under the radar:
This past June, the Center for Science & Culture hosted the Conference on Engineering in Living Systems (CELS). The presenters demonstrated how applying engineering principles and tools to biological research yields profound insights into the operations of living systems and the logic behind their design. This content was fully anticipated by the attendees. The presentation that came as somewhat of a surprise showcased the extent to which the subdiscipline of systems biology has for the last few decades often operated within what is almost indistinguishable from a fully design-based framework. Much of the research within the field has effectively replaced evolutionary assumptions with design-based assumptions, language, and tools of investigation. This scientific revolution, which has only just begun, raises the question of whether the debate over intelligent design has come to an end.
Changing Assumptions
At a philosophical level, the answer to this question is clearly no. The proponents of scientific materialism still maintain a stranglehold over researchers, so those who openly question the official orthodoxy face the constant threat of secular inquisitors undermining their reputations and careers. In addition, official media outlets and educational institutions continue to feed the public a steady diet of disinformation directed against anyone who speaks honestly about the clear evidence for design in biology. And any material put out by design proponents is immediately met by critics who consistently misrepresent the material’s content and the related science to undermine the authors’ credibility. This practice was well demonstrated by a recent critique of Stephen Meyer’s latest book (here, here, here, here).
The Tide Shifts
Yet, at a practical level, the tide of the debate appears to be decisively shifting…
Brian Miller, “End of the Road for the Intelligent Design Debate?” at Evolution News and Science Today(August 23, 2021)
A quibble with Brian Miller’s analysis above: It’s not “philosophy” as such that fronts Darwin’s stranglehold on the discussion of evolution. It’s the power to cause career ruin. That’s the stick end of politics, not of philosophy.
Many Darwinians may be calculating enough to want to see out their careers to emeritus even if they know that the tide of evidence is against them — ruining others along the way.
You may also wish to read: Researchers: Blind mouse pups prepared for sight. Researcher: “I love this paper. It blew my mind,” says David Berson, who studies the visual system at Brown University and was not involved in the research. “What it implies is that evolution has built a visual system that can simulate the patterns of activity that it will see later when it’s fully mature and the eyes are open, and that [the simulated pattern] in turn shapes the development of the nervous system in a way that makes it better adapted to seeing those patterns. . . . That’s staggering.”
“Materialism” defined as what, exactly? Designers work with entirely materialistic assumptions. Aircraft designers do not assume angels or fairies will keep their machines in the air, they rely on good old materials physics and aerodynamics.
It’s interesting, too, that the only alternative explanation on offer for the prevalence of evolutionary theory in academia is a conspiracy theory.
The alternative explanation for the prevalence of Evolutionary theory resides in Romans Chapter 1…this is no conspiracy but rather prescribed by God some 1800 years before Darwin made his claims:
18 For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. 19 For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. 20 For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world,[g] in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. 21 For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. 22 Claiming to be wise, they became fools, 23 and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.
Darwinistic evolution is the foundation for the atheistic worldview. That’s why people hang onto it when given contrary evidence and then the atheist says “we just don’t know yet.” They make faith statements all the time like that.
Consensus has never equated to the truth. Sometimes the two line up, but this is not one of those. Darkness hates the light.
And to those theistic evolutionists out there, I think they just hate being reviled by the atheist community and labeled as “non-science.” They have been shouted down by consensus and materialism. They just want to look more palatable to those outside the faith, regardless of the objective facts.
Science is limited to facts, and therefore limited to material. Ordinary subjective statements about beauty and such, are outside of science.
The people who assert every statement is objective, like asserting beauty is objective, should be thrown out.
Debate always gets screechier just before the Kuhn shift, like a car revving to the redline before dropping into the next gear.
I think the scientific community would like to pivot, but they can’t do it until they have a viable theory to replace it that supports materialism. So, they will keep saying it’s true until they can spitball some new idea.
I don’t have faith that materialism will die as a result of Darwin’s theory dying, but it sure would shake a lot of people up and red-pill some hopefully.
Zweston @6,
Exactly! Great observation!
I noticed that amazing pivot on the once-ridiculed idea of continental drift.
-Q
Dear Mr. Zweston
Atheist Materialism wont die “as a result of Darwin’s theory dying”.
It is already dead.
Its dead because all Science supports the Creationist Law of Biogenesis:
“Absent Divine interention life comes only from life.
I mean, God’s making the first life kills Atheism, one and for all.
Materialists haven’t been unable to get to step one (out of about 100 steps) in abiogenesis. They’ve been trying to find a materialist explanation for abiogenesis for 100 years, with a huge international effort spearheaded by Nobel prize winners, and they’ve struck out. They cant even account for the origin of the “chirality” of the amino acids that are found in living thing. Atheist Materials have lied to billions of people on this issue. but now their game is unraveling.
TLH, no disputing the problems, but there are still people that believe lots of philosophies that are bankrupt, all I meant (and you probably caught too). People will continue to fight tooth and nail for it because as Jordan Peterson said to the effect, “if Christianity is true, it’s terrifying and I don’t know what would happen if I truly fully believed it.” not quite the direct quote, but similar.
To me, knowing there is a merciful, masterful creator who wants to walk in fellowship with me and demonstrate his love, that’s far less terrifying than uncertainty or the idea of non-existence.
Seversky
Biology is “life science”. In this case, living organisms are being compared with non-living objects and machines. But scientists have not yet been able to explain even what the subject of their study is: “life”. They can’t create it. They can’t explain the difference between a live cat and a dead one – except the dead one is not living.
People recognize what the term “spirit” means. When someone says that a living person has died and the spirit has left them, we know what that means. Materialism pretends that there is nothing to say about that.
A conspiracy usually requires some sophistication, intelligence, planning and implementation.
We know that evolutionists are not capable of that. So, there is another alternative explanation: Stupidity, group-think and blindness and a few revolutionaries with malevolent marketing. That can create the same result as a conspiracy.
Seversky falsely claims that “Designers work with entirely materialistic assumptions.”
And please pray tell Seversky, ‘from what exact material basis do the mathematics arise from with which the Designer designs things with?’
Shoot, Alfred Wallace himself, co-discoverer of Natural Selection, considered our ability to do mathematics to be evidence, in and of itself, for the existence of the human soul.
So thus, since mathematics is a vital and indispensable part of designing things, and yet mathematics is obviously immaterial in its foundational essence, then clearly Seversky is completely wrong in his claim that “Designers work with entirely materialistic assumptions.”
It would be nice to see Seversky honestly admit, just once, such an obvious truth. But alas, I guess his dogmatic adherence to atheistic/Darwinian materialism allows no such honest concessions on his part.
Sad,,,,,, if your worldview forces you to, repeatedly, be intellectually dishonest with yourself, and with others, don’t you think it is far past time for you to find another worldview Seversky?
adding …
I mean logistically – not meant as an insult to capabilities, which are certainly present.
Seversky are you convinced of your worldview due to choice or is it the random coddling of your atoms that has led you to your desired faith.
Ba77 you are like a online encyclopaedia, your posts are like multiple articles in and of themselves. (Thats a compliment by the way).
Zweston/2
What truth?
The truth that mankind was created by your God? The truth that your God is all-knowing and all-powerful? The truth, therefore, that if mankind is capable of behaving in ways that displeases Him then they do so by His will, since nothing happens but by His will. The truth that there is no justice in a God punishing His creations for behaving as He designed them to behave?
Yes, He has but his followers choose to avert their eyes from the evidence given in their Bible of His true nature.
Many things are claimed about this God in the Bible, The evidence for such a being is remarkably lacking.
So your God has such a fragile ego that He inflicted all this pain and suffering on mankind because they did not grovel before Him and express proper gratitude for what He has done to them?
Where is the wisdom in not knowing the difference between good and evil until told by your God?
And why shouldn’t we make images of men or birds or other animals. Why are we not told why not? Do you ever even wonder? Would you not want to ask that if you ever stood before Him? Or have Christians finally learnt the lesson of the Fall that curiosity is to be discouraged?
How does one believe in materialism, isn’t it impossible under their religion?
Zweston/3
In 1697, Thomas Aikenhead, a student at the University of Edinburgh was executed for blasphemy. He had been incautious enough to express atheistic sentiments to some Christian friends. Some of these “friends” reported him to the authorities and he was tried and executed in short order.
Atheism had existed long before 1859 although you clearly risked your life by admitting to it. All Darwin’s theory offered was a naturalistic alternative to creationist explanations.
No, consensus is not necessarily a guide to truth but it is a guide to what the majority of experts in a field believe to be the better of two alternative explanations for an issue in question.
It’s been my observation that theistic evolutionists are reviled far more by their own Christian brethren than they are by atheists.
TAMMIE LEE HAYNES/8
If the decline in membership of Christian churches and the very slow trend towards non-belief is true then atheistic materialism is thriving although not necessarily by that name.
It’s a touch ironic that creationists attack science for what is, to them, the absurd hypothesis that life may have come from non-life through naturalistic processes while offering, as an alternative, a conjecture that life came from non-life just through their God’s hand. No evidence required.
Science has been working on the problem of abiogenesis for perhaps 100 years. Nature apparently took between 3-4 billion years to get where we are now. I see no reason why we can’t give science more time to work on the problem, unless you’re afraid of what they might actually find if given enough time.
Atheist materialists acknowledge we don’t yet have anything like a complete theory of abiogenesis. Where’s the lie in that?
Silver Asiatic/10
A live cat breathes, its heart beats, it eats and drinks, it moves around, it reproduces, it meows. A dead cat does none of these things, all it does is decompose.
We may not be able to draw a bright line between life and non-life, perhaps there isn’t one, but as the Irish statesman Edmund Burke wrote,
We cannot see “spirit”. We cannot touch “spirit”. We cannot weigh “spirit”. We cannot measure “spirit”. In fact, we have no senses nor any other means that can determine if it exists at all. So why should we think that it does, other than it offers hope of survival after death?
seversky:
There aren’t any experts when it comes to a naturalistic origin of life. There aren’t any experts when it comes to universal common descent. Evolutionary biologists can’t even tell us what determines biological form. They are experts in story telling. And hopefully they are experts in their very narrow field.
We cannot see materialistic processes producing life from non-life. We cannot touch it. We cannot weigh it. We cannot measure it. In fact, it goes against everything that we know to say that such processes produced coded information processing systems. So why would anyone believe such garbage?
TLH @8
in regards to Nobel prize winners in OOL-research, let me mention a guy, perhaps the most famous OOL-researcher today, lots of youtube lectures, Harvard professor Jack Szostak.
In a 2014 interview Nobel prize winner Jack Szostak said:
“Life in lab in 3-5 years, more likely in 3 years”
Today, in 2021, all what he got is a huge zero … nothing … just dreams and story-telling … Darwinists are the most talented story-tellers … perhaps some Hollywood-producer can hire a few of them to shoot some nice fantasy movie about the origin-of-life …
Here is the interview:
https://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL1406/S00007/jack-szostak-life-in-lab-in-3-5-years.htm
ET@17: “ We cannot see materialistic processes producing life from non-life. We cannot touch it. We cannot weigh it. We cannot measure it. In fact, it goes against everything that we know to say that such processes produced coded information processing systems. So why would anyone believe such garbage?”
Exactly!
There is no good reason to believe that materialistic processes can produce life from non-life, yet Seversky has FAITH (and apparently hope) that such a thing could happen. He is a devoutly committed atheist with a tremendous amount of FAITH in atheistic miracles.
Seversky said:
I mean, if you ignore the mountains of evidence, including scientific, of seeing, touching and measuring these very things you claim “we” cannot see, touch or measure, okay.
Seversky at 13, via Zweston, quotes Romans1:18 from the Bible.
Seversky then asks,
That is a good question for someone to ask. Too bad Seversky is not honestly asking the question in regards to him personally finding out the answer to that question, but is only asking that question as a rhetorical devise in order for him to be able to attack Christianity.
Yet, if we honestly ask the question “What Truth?”, or more specifically, if we honestly ask the question “What is Truth?”, then we would find that, If Seversky’s Darwinian materialism were actually true, then there could be no objective truth that is true for all people.
To an atheistic materialist, truth is primarily arrived at by pure chance and/or randomness and not by reason. The atheistic materialist, and all the thoughts that he or she may have, is/are simply a ‘victim’ of whatever state the material particles of his brain may randomly take.
Why the state of material particles in one person’s brain may randomly coincide to be in agreement with the state of material particles in another person’s brain, in order to produce an agreement between the two people that something/anything, say evolution, may be true, is, apparently, one of those ‘miracles’ of Darwinian evolution that we are not to examine too closely lest we become heretics of the Darwinian faith.
Simply put, truth, like mathematics and logic, is immaterial in its foundational essence,
The entire concept of Truth is an abstract property and/or definition of the immaterial mind that cannot possibly be reduced to any possible materialistic explanations. i.e. How much does the concept of Truth weigh? Does the concept of Truth weigh more in English or in Chinese? How long is the concept of Truth in millimeters? How fast does the concept of Truth go? Is the concept of Truth faster or slower than the speed of light? Is the concept of Truth positively or negatively charged? Or etc.. etc.. ?..
As John_a_designer explains, “Obviously, these questions are absurd because propositions, (truth claims), are not physical. But if the physical or material is all that exists as the materialist claims, which is by the way a propositional truth claim, how can such a proposition be true? How can something that doesn’t really exist, as the materialist claims, be true? Obviously that is self-refuting.”
And since Truth is obviously immaterial in its foundational essence then, as John_a_designer pointed out, it necessarily follows that Darwinian materialism can never possibly be true., (And this falsification of Darwinian evolution as being true comes way before we even start evaluating the myriad of falsifications of Darwin’s theory from empirical science).
You don’t have to take my, (or John_a_designer’s), word for the fact that Darwinian evolution undercuts itself with its implicit claim that objective truth does not actually exist.. Postmodern pragmatists, via their Darwinian presuppositions, have been, basically, claiming that objective truth does not actually exist for over a century now, ever since Darwin’s theory first made it to the shores of America.
As Professor Nancy Pearcey explains in this following excellent article, (an article which traced the progression from Darwinism to postmodern pragmatism), “If all ideas are products of evolution, and thus not really true but only useful for survival, then evolution itself is not true either,,,, In short, naturalistic evolution is self-refuting.”
The denial of the existence of objective truth, as is implicit in the materialism of Darwinian evolution, (besides undercutting any claim that Darwinian evolution itself can be true), also undercuts rationality altogether. As John C Wright succinctly explained, “A statement that there is no truth, if true, is false. We know this truth is basic because without it, no question can be answered, not even the question of whether or not truth is true.”
Thus in conclusion, too bad Seversky was not honestly asking the question ‘What Truth?”, but was only asking the question a rhetorical device in order for him to attack Christianity.
If Seversky were to have honestly asked the question “What is Truth?” then he would have quickly seen that his own atheistic worldview of Darwinian materialism cannot possibly be true, and even, inevitably, been led to Christianity, (and maybe even been led to a personal relationship with Jesus).
Quote, video, and verse
Of supplemental note, an excellent book on this overall topic is Nancy Pearcey’s book “Finding Truth”
Seversky
Right. A live cat has the immaterial, animating power called “life” – something that science cannot weigh, measure or see. That’s why the live cat breathes. Life animates the heart and is the principle of movement and reproduction. The same immaterial entity exists in living things – that’s why we have the science of biology which can study diverse plant, animal, insect, bird and bacterial life forms, but not study metals, rocks or minerals. That’s why a comparison of aircraft with, for example, human beings falls short. It is also why one can accept an understanding of immaterial essences when talking about life – since life itself is an immaterial essence.
Through inference, as I gave. We see the effects. The live cat is different from the dead cat. The heart beats in one but not the other. It’s not the heart that is the life principle, but that which animates the heart and make it alive.
I can’t see, measure, touch or weigh you. I don’t know how tall you are, where you live, what you look like – I have no physical information about you at all. The only thing I see is some communication issued on this screen. Everything else is an inference – and from that, I conclude you exist.
William J Murray/20
What evidence did you have in mind?
Seversky,
First, I want to remind you of what you said:
By “spirit,” I’m assuming you mean whatever people exist as, supposedly, after they die, and the conditions of “where they exist.” By “we,” I’m assuming you mean that generally – as in, “everyone.”
Some of this evidence has been given in depth over the past year or so, primarily by BA77 and myself. I’ll summarize the state of the evidence for such contact, communication and interactions with whatever people are after they die, and “where” they exist.
1. Decades of ITC (Instrumental Trans-Communication) and EVP (Electronic Voice Phenomena) interactive contact with the dead. Here is a brief history that represents the tip of the iceberg of this form of evidence. https://www.mikepettigrew.com/afterlife/html/evp___itc_history.html
2. The Scole Experiments, conducted in tightly controlled, observed and recorded environment, producing a ton of physical, recorded evidence observed by multiple parties, including professional skeptics/debunkers and scientists.
3. 50+ years of ongoing scientific research conducted by the University of Virginia Division of Perceptual Studies, the conclusion of which is that we in fact survive death.
4. Scientific research into reincarnation.
5. Scientific research into NDEs (more detailed information and links provided recently in prior posts here) that indicate that consciousness not only survives death, but that dead people find themselves in a very real environment.
6. The personal experiences of countless people using AP (astral projection) techniques to regularly visit the dead and what we call “the afterlife.”
7. Physical and evidential mediumship research, beginning back in the late 1800’s/early 1900’s by William Crooks, who set out to debunk it and afterward published a paper in his scientific journal basically stating that the afterlife had been proven.
And all of that is just the tip of the iceberg, a basic and very incomplete overview.
It’s one thing to be unconvinced by or largely unfamiliar with that evidence; it’s another to claim “we” have “no means” of touching, sensing, interacting or communicating with the dead or the world they exist in. I have personally done so via the AP process. Your “we” doesn’t include me, and literally hundreds of people I personally know who have done the same via various methods and techniques.