Did you think that University of Minnesota professor’s blunder about probability was a one-off? Laplace didn’t rebuke this argument two centuries ago for no good reason—the fallacy has been around forever and evolutionists continue to employ it. The argument’s next appearance is in a forthcoming journal article and the evolutionist doesn’t even try to clean it up. It’s the same old argument that if you toss a coin 500 times there are 2^500, or a one with about 150 zeros after it, different possible sequences of heads and tails. Therefore whatever sequence of heads and tails you end up with had an astronomically tiny—one in 2^500—chance of happening. Such a tiny probability is usually considered to be impossible, and yet it happened. Read More ›

[As I recall, Jason Rosenhouse objected that Bill Dembski’s notion of specification cannot be applied to biology. This essay is written to challenge some of the objections think I’ve heard him raise informally over the years at my ID talks at his school and our discussion at ID and creation conferences. He’s one of the brightest critics of ID that I know, and thus I think objections he might raise should be addressed.] The opponents of ID argue something along the lines: “take a deck of cards, randomly shuffle it, the probability of any given sequence occurring is 1 out of 52 factorial or about 8×10^67 — Improbable things happen all the time, it doesn’t imply intelligent design.” In fact, Read More ›

Fascinating stuff unfolding at Telic Thoughts (an independent ID blog)*: Kornbelt 888 asks Isn’t it about time someone created a junk yard dog style outfit like Eugenie Scott’s racket, except on the other side, to be a continuous hammer on the heads of the Darwinista liars, deceivers, and disinformationists with respect to public schools? I say yes.” To which chunkdz replies, I respond: What possible good could come from that? Kornbelt, you might just as well start a watchdog organization that debunks and exposes the failings of the Taliban. And for all your hard work, the next time they behead some woman in a soccer stadium they will blame your organization for corrupting her. It’s not like you’re dealing with Read More ›

Surfing the internet last night I ran across Why Minds Are Not Like Computers, a very interesting 2009 article by Ari N. Schulman in The New Atlantis. Schulman describes the way computers work by running algorithms, and he explores the question of whether the human mind can be reduced to similar computational terms. Of course, most materialists are philosophically committed to a positive answer to that question, and Schulman quotes Rodney Brooks from his 2002 book Flesh and Machines: How Robots Will Change Us,  where Brooks asserts that “the body, this mass of biomolecules, is a machine that acts according to a set of specifiable rules,” and hence that “we, all of us, overanthropomorphize humans, who are after all mere machines.” Has Read More ›

I’ve publicly said, I’m generally ambivalent to negative on teaching ID and creation in the public schools. However, I am for teaching good science in the public schools. Here is a video that does just that. http://programmingoflife.com/watch-the-video The video has been for sale at Amazon, but it can be watched from the website, now.