Apparently so. And not what was predicted. t Access Research Network, British physicist David Tyler reflects on new atheist claims about how beliefs arise, as opposed to verifiable facts on the same subject (“Science as the saviour of humanity” 06/27/11):

Here are some data of relevance to these questions. We have a trend of increasing secularism in the UK and in the US. Are there discernible trends relating to superstitions? In the UK, during the National Science Week in 2003, a survey was undertaken of superstitious behaviour. The first two findings are as follows:”* The current levels of superstitious behaviour and beliefs in the UK are surprisingly high, even among those with a scientific background. Touching wood is the most popular UK superstition, followed by crossing fingers, avoiding ladders, not smashing mirrors, carrying a lucky charm and having superstitious beliefs about the number 13.” Read More ›

That their existence is part of the foundation of Christianity. Anglican Curmudgeon usefully points out the reasons that an “evolutionary” interpretation of Christianity is impossible, citing atheist (and former Christian) Michael Ruse’s arguments in From Monad to Man: Let me be open. I think that evolution is a fact and that Darwinism rules triumphant. Natural selection is not simply an important mechanism. It is the only significant cause of permanent organic change. And that bias permeates his subsequent investigation into the conflicts, particularly when it comes to considering monogenism, the idea that current humans are the descendants of a single set of original parents. Citing the work of evolutionary biologist and Dominican priest Francisco Ayala, Ruse writes (pp. 75-76): Francisco Read More ›

According to a Reuters story published by The Guardian (27 June 2011), we may expect to encounter alien civilisations within twenty years: Russian scientists expect humanity to encounter alien civilisations within the next two decades, a top Russian astronomer said on Monday.”The genesis of life is as inevitable as the formation of atoms … Life exists on other planets and we will find it within 20 years,” said Andrei Finkelstein, director of the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Applied Astronomy Institute, according to the Interfax news agency. Speaking at an international forum dedicated to the search for extraterrestrial life, Finkelstein said 10% of the known planets circling suns in the galaxy resemble Earth. If water can be found there, then so Read More ›

In “Quantum Magic’ Without Any ‘Spooky Action at a Distance” (ScienceDaily, June 25, 2011), we learn:

Quantum mechanical entanglement is at the heart of the famous quantum teleportation experiment and was referred to by Albert Einstein as “spooky action at a distance.” A team of researchers led by Anton Zeilinger at the University of Vienna and the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information of the Austrian Academy of Sciences used a system which does not allow for entanglement, and still found results which cannot be interpreted classically.

Gets better: Read More ›

While many people today think that “purpose” is an ill-founded biological category, most people aren’t aware of its historical significance in the history of biology. The “doctrine of creation” has been a formalized version of the idea of purpose in biology, and is at least in name still adhered to by theistic evolutionists (hence why they are now calling themselves “evolutionary creationists”). In the case of the evolutionary creationists, their use of the doctrine of creation is primarily a post-hoc mode of storytelling. However, historically, the doctrine of creation has been foundational to the making of modern biology. It is difficult to see, given its historical pedigree, why all-of-a-sudden trying to use the idea of purpose within biology is somehow Read More ›

Yesterday, one of our top stories was “William Lane Craig is disingenuous, and he ‘shocked’ Larry Krauss” [his materialist atheist opponent].

The oddest thing about the story is that Krauss is, as it happens, a multi-awarded physicist, hailed by Scientific American as “one of the few top physicists who is also known as a “public intellectual.” Yet his post-debate comments sound like the circular rants of a sore loser.

The really interesting question is why such behaviour is so widely admired. Why do Krauss’s friends not discreetly suggest he quit talking like this? Read More ›

Francisco Ayala, the 2010 Templeton winner known for the view that intelligent design is blasphemy and an “atrocity”*, has a new book out, Am I a Monkey? Six Big Questions about Evolution (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010). Here’s an excerpt.

Defending the view that you are something along the same lines as a monkey but not to worry, he writes, curiously,

Those things that count most remain shrouded in mystery: How physical phenomena become mental experiences (the feelings and sensations called “qualia” by philosophers, that contribute the elements of consciousness) and how out of the diversity of these experiences emerges the mind, a reality with unitary properties such as free will and the awareness of the self that persist throughout an individual’s life. (P. 11)Ayala sounds here as if he believes the mind exists, but he goes on to say Read More ›

In “A Home Before the End of the World” (Design Observer Group, 06.09.11), Adelheid Fischer reminds us,

To date, only about two million species of plants and animals have been identified and described. An estimated 10 million species still await discovery, description and naming. But this taxonomic handshake is just the beginning and tells us little about how organisms actually make their day-to-day living in the world — and therefore how they might also be of use to us.Our ignorance is truly staggering. According to some estimates, 95 percent of organisms in the soil alone are unknown to science. Read More ›

Umberto “Name of the Rose“ Eco (not the person you’d immediately expect to not like Stephen Hawking’s latest effort, The Grand Design) apparently doesn’t like it. That’s according to Vox Day’s translation from the Italian.

Yes, for one  thing, Eco thinks the book was mostly written by co-author Cal Tech physicist Leonard Mlodinow:

the book is fundamentally a work of the second author, whose qualifications are described on the cover as having written some episodes of “Star Trek”.UD News would pay no attention to such speculations, but for the fact that Eco is a writer by trade (and a very accomplished one), and writers excel at picking apart different voices in a multi-authored work.

Anyway, Eco has a number of more germane beefs:  Read More ›

The atheist blog Ungodly News has just released a Periodic Table of Atheists and Antitheists. While I admire its artistry, I deplore its lack of accuracy. At least three of the people listed as atheists or anti-theists were nothing of the sort: Albert Einstein, Mark Twain and (in his final days) Jean-Paul Sartre. I realize that the last name will shock many readers. I’ll say more about Sartre anon.

I’m a great admirer of Einstein (who isn’t?) and a fan of Mark Twain, whose house I visited in December 1994. And I thoroughly enjoyed reading Sartre’s Les Mains Sales (Dirty Hands) in high school. When he wrote that play in 1948, Sartre was a militant atheist, but as we’ll see, Sartre’s views changed in his final years. These three authors I treasure, so I say to the atheists: you can’t have them!

There are three more people on Ungodly News’ periodic table who, in the interests of historical accuracy, I have to say don’t belong there either: Charles Darwin, Thomas Henry Huxley and Bill Gates. All three are (or were) agnostics, not atheists, and as I’ll argue below, while these thinkers all reject the claims of revealed religion, none of them deserves to be called an anti-theist. It is an undeniable historical fact, however, that the ideas disseminated by Darwin and Huxley have caused many people to lose their faith in God.

Atheists love to claim Albert Einstein as one of their own, but he was nothing of the sort.

[This post will remain at the top of the page until 6:00 am EST tomorrow, June 28. For reader convenience, other coverage continues below. – UD News]

Read More ›

At Creation-Evolution headlines, Dave Coppedge asks, “If This Is Evolution, What Is Trivia?” (June 24, 2011): New Scientist printed a dramatic headline, “Lab yeast make evolutionary leap to multicellularity.” A leap of the imagination, as it happens. This challenge to Darwinian evolution turned out to be a cinch, it went on to claim: “In just a few weeks single-celled yeast have evolved into a multicellular organism, complete with division of labour between cells,” reporter Bob Holmes announced. “This suggests that the evolutionary leap to multicellularity may be a surprisingly small hurdle.” Trouble is, other evolutionists aren’t buying it. For one thing, William Ratcliff and colleagues at the University of Minnesota “set out to evolve multicellularity” in yeast cells by centrifuging Read More ›

In “Who needs Darwin? (22 June 2011), a New Statesman review of George Levine’s The Joy of Secularism: 11 Essays for How We Live Now, Terry Eagleton gets it mostly right about Darwinism’s take on religion:

None of these writers points out that if Christianity is true, then it is all up with us. We would then have to face the deeply disagreeable truth that the only authentic life is one that springs from a self-dispossession so extreme that it is probably beyond our power. Instead, the volume chatters away about spirits and Darwinian earthworms, animal empathy and the sources of morality.

But earthworms is precisely what the Darwinists have got. And the humble earthworm still believes Darwinism. Read More ›

P. Z. Myers, writing over at Pharyngula: Neo-Darwinism does not predict that early development will be conserved. Neo-Darwinism does not predict that early development will be conserved. Neo-Darwinism does not predict that early development will be conserved. …That early stages should be more resistant to change is not a prediction of evolutionary theory; it’s an inference from molecular genetics, that genes at the base of a long chain of essential interactions ought to be less likely to vary between species. What that doesn’t take into account is that genes are part of the great cloud of environmental interactions that go on to generate a selectable function, and that if the environment in which the gene is expressed changes, it can Read More ›

Paul Lucas offers atheist physicist Lawrence Krauss’s reflections on his debate with William Lane Craig (June 23, 2011), in interview with Michael Payton and Theo Warner. Krauss seems to regret it now and has nasty things to say about sponsor Campus Crusade for Christ, as well as Craig:

PM: … Craig draws a distinction between “Is there evidence..?” and “Is there compelling or good evidence?”. So it appears that he was under the impression that his only burden in the debate was to say that there was some evidence for God. I think that was evident in his equation, sort of meaningless equation that he put on…

LK: Yeah absolutely meaningless and disingenuous in the extreme. The use of those pseudo-equations at the beginning shocked me and it was only after the fact that it really upset me because it really indicated that he had no interest in explaining anything but rather hoodwinkin the students who were there.

Is Craig disingenuous? A hoodwinker? Is Krauss, called by Scientific American “one of the few top physicists who is also known as a “public intellectual“, a sore loser?

Read More ›

In “Finches tweet using grammar,” Clare Pain (ABC , 27 June 2011) reports The scientists played jumbled-up birdsongs to individual finches to see whether the birds responded with the usual burst of calls to the jumbled songs. To their surprise they found that there were some jumbled songs that elicited a call-burst response and some that did not. Even more surprising: all the birds responded in the same way. If one bird ignored a jumbled call, all the other birds ignored that call too. It seems that the order of syllables matters to the birds, and that suggests grammar in action. The birds, the researchers say, do better than monkeys would. “Our results indicate that syllable sequences in birdsongs convey Read More ›