It would be useful to know, in light of the recent Christianity Today cover story on Christian Darwinism in general and Francis’ Collins’s BioLogosin particular. Here, for example, in Karl Giberson and Francis Collins’s The Language of Science and Faith, they inform us,

We suggest that Darwin’s theory of evolution, now that it has been confirmed beyond a reasonable doubt by science, offers the sane sort of help in understanding the Genesis creation story as Galileo’s work helped his generation to better understand the psalmist’s references to the mobility of the earth. (p. 89)

Are the following not reasonable doubt? Read More ›

Recently, Uncommon Descent’s vjtorley posed seven questions to physicist Sean Carroll, Senior Research Associate in Physics at the California Institute of Technology. Carroll had written an article, “Does the Universe need God?” for The Blackwell Companion to Science and Christianity. Now Carroll has answered the questions, and given us permission to post his response here:

1. In your article, you’ve argued that the ultimate explanation of why events happen is that things are simply obeying the laws of nature – in particular, the laws of physics. What do you mean by the term “law of nature”? Specifically, are the laws of nature (a) rules which prescribe the behavior of objects, or (b) mere regularities which describe the behavior of objects?

To this and the other questions, Carroll responds:

I wanted to thank Vincent Torley and Denyse O’Leary for the opportunity to write a guest blog post, and apologize for how long it’s taken me to do so. I’ve written an article for the forthcoming Blackwell Companion to Science and Christianity, entitled Does the Universe Need God?, in which I argued that the answer is “no.” Vincent posed a list of questions in response. After thinking about it, I decided that my answers would be more clear if I simply wrote a coherent argument, rather than addressing the questions individually. Read More ›

Noticing what Steno did here, that animal rights activist philosopher Peter Singer is moving toward the idea that morality has an objective basis, anti-ID Catholic philosopher Ed Feser responds. Noting that Singer is looking for an “intuitive” basis for morality, he writes,

Moral intuitions track objective moral truth in only a very rough, general, and mutable way. Practically they are useful – that is why nature put them into us – and they might provide a useful heuristic when philosophically investigating this or that specific moral question. But intuition does not ground moral truth, it is not an infallible guide to moral truth, and it should never form the basis of a philosophical argument for a controversial moral position.

But that won’t work. Read More ›

How common is common descent?A question worth asking, in light of a new paper: Casey Luskin advises (Evolution News & Views, June 3, 2011) that “Study Reports a Whopping “23% of Our Genome” Contradicts Standard Human-Ape Evolutionary Phylogeny”:

We’ve recently discussed different genetic studies on primate relationships were finding contradictory evolutionary trees. As discussed, one recent study found data that conflicted with the standard primate phylogenetic tree, reporting that “for ~0.8% of our genome, humans are more closely related to orangutans than to chimpanzees.” We then commented: 

0.8% of our genome might not sound like a lot, but that equates to over 20 million base pairs. That’s means that over 500 times more raw genetic information than was used in the PLoS Genetics paper (to purportedly create a “robust new phylogenetic tree”) is supposedly pointing in the wrong phylogenetic direction. Read More ›

In Probability’s Nature and the Nature of Probability, Don Johnson discusses the trilobite eye:

Physicist Riccardo Levi-Setti observes, “In fact, this optical doublet is a device so typically associated with human invention that its discovery in trilobites comes as something of a shock. The realization that trilobites developed and used such devices half a billion years ago makes the shock even greater. ” Read More ›

Expelled’s Caroline Crocker, now executive director of AITSE, and author of Free to Think, describes how she first began to get hints that she was decidedly not free to think, in biology. She asked,

Control mechanisms in cells are like intricate circuit boards; how could something like this evolve through random mutation? Read More ›

In “Antimatter atoms trapped for 16 minutes” Emily Chung reports (CBC News, June 6, 2011),

The scientists’ recent achievement has extended the experimental lifetime of antihydrogen atoms 5,000-fold since the ALPHA experiment — an international collaboration Fujiwara is part of — first figured out how to trap them at all.

This is, scientists say, enough time to make serious study feasible. When antimatter was first trapped, it could be held for less than one-fifth of a second. One proposal: Read More ›

In “Going ape: Ultraviolence and our primate cousins,” New Scientist’s News Editor, Rowan Hooper, reviewing a book on ape violence, riffs,

Josephine Head, also of the Max Planck Institute, describes how she tracked a trail of blood from where chimps had been vocalising loudly the night before, and made a horrible discovery: the spread-eagled body of an adult male chimp, his face battered and bruised, throat torn open and intestines dragged out. Read More ›

In Ferris Jabr’s “Early mammals were brainy and nosy,” (New Scientist, 19 May 2011), we learn:

The evident importance of smell and touch to these tiny proto-mammals hints at their lifestyle. The 190-million–year-old animals probably navigated dark burrows and skittered through leaf litter hunting insects – activities greatly helped by sensitive smell and touch. 

And thus they avoided dinosaurs, except that Read More ›

… when he said, “We need to use the effective theory of Darwinian natural selection of those Societies most likely to survive. We assign them a higher value.” Even the interviewer, it turns out, didn’t know what he meant, and has been trying to find out.

Read More ›

My article “A Second Look at the Second Law,” accepted by Applied Mathematics Letters in January, was, as some of you know, withdrawn at the last moment by the editor, not because of any alleged errors, but because “our editors simply found that it does not consist of the kind of content that we are interested in publishing.” I have now created a 22 minute video which presents the contents of this paper, at the end there is some additional information regarding the fate of the paper.

From a recent study: “More Americans Praying About Health, Study Says; No Correlation Found Between Prayer for Health and Lack of Health Insurance ScienceDaily, May 23, 2011)”:

While prayer about health issues increased across all groups, from 43 percent in 2002 to 49 percent in 2007, the data indicated that people with the highest incomes were 15 percent less likely to pray than those with the lowest incomes, and people who exercised regularly were 25 percent less likely to pray those who didn’t exercise. Women, African-Americans and the well-educated were most likely to pray about their health. Read More ›

Fox news reports that an armchair astronomer, David Martine, claims that he’s discovered evidence of intelligent life on Mars. In this YouTube video Martine speculates that it could be a bio lab, or a dwelling or garage (he hope’s its not a weapon. NASA is investigating. So, is this evidence of intelligent design? Is it a natural phenomenon of some sort? Or is it a hoax (albeit an intelligently designed one)? And how might one go about making the determination? Thoughts anyone?

Over the weekend, we’ve been discussing the Kentucky government offering tax incentives to the Ark Encounter theme park, as a job creation boost. Some oppose it on the grounds that it “establishes religion.” Others say that doesn’t matter if it creates jobs. A third group has pointed out that a tax incentive is not a gift, unless you think the government owns everyone’s labor. Here, the Kentucky government offers tax advantages relevant only if the Ark floats, so to speak. In which case, the job creation scheme will work.

Joshua Youngkin, a lawyer for Discovery Institute, offers us a legal comment: Read More ›

Some were surprised when I linked Christianity Today’s new semi-simian Adam and Eve with involuntary euthanasia. But the link is much more direct than some suppose.

There is, first, the whole, huge question of adjusting our thinking from the idea that we are descended from Adam and Eve to the idea that we are ascended from them. That is essentially a different religion from Christianity, and I was indeed surprised that Christianity Today failed to observe the fact. Would they have given over their pages to the proposition that perhaps Christians should be Buddhists? It would make more sense. Buddhism is not a dishonorable creed; far from it. Christians don’t think that Buddhism reflects ultimate reality. But there is world of difference between, say, Buddhism and Darwinism. Darwinism not only doesn’t reflect ultimate reality, it defaces it.

But here I want to focus on the argument for euthanasia. It was succinctly captured in the title of a movie some years back: They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?

I rarely meet a convinced Darwinist who does not support euthanasia (and abortion, and human embryonic stem cell research).

I rarely meet Read More ›