At Evolution News & Views (May 31, 2011) science historian Michael Flannery reviews James Hannam’s The Genesis of Science: How the Christian Middle Ages Launched the Scientific Revolution, which mostly tells us what Christians should be ashamed of not knowing:

The standard rendering that the medieval Church stood in the way of scientific advance and spent its time persecuting the leading intellects of the day like Galileo until free and open inquiry was rescued by the Renaissance humanists is shown to be utterly false.

Flannery and Hannam (who ends up falling in later, unfortunately) are quite right to say what they do. But one gets the sense that something is missing from these scholarly discussions. How about the role of, for example, Christian Darwinists in fronting the idea that any Christian who does not believe in the ape Adam and Eve depicted recently in Christianity Today is actually causing the hostility of materialist atheists? That, of course, may be true. But if so, what about it? Why is Karl Giberson allowed to feel humiliated about the Christians he feels superior to, because he is prepared to believe in such disgusting follies? Why are the BioLogians willing to alter any timeless Scriptural teaching in order to cater to them? But more, why tolerate their arrogance?

As a hack, I first smelled a rat a decade ago Read More ›

Senior scientist at the Biologic Institute, Ann Gauger, reflects on “Life, Purpose, Mind: Where the Machine Metaphor Fails”, Evolution News & Views (June 1, 2011):

Up until now, the materialist, reductionist method has been very successful, because cells can be ground up, probed, measured and tested in a way that life forces or agency can’t be. But now molecular, cellular, and developmental biologists are drowning in a flood of data that we don’t know how to interpret. We do not know, for example, how to read a genome from an unknown new species to say what kind of organism it will produce. We can only determine what other genomes it most closely resembles. In order to predict the nature and appearance of the organism with that genome, we would need to know — just for starters — the maternal and paternal contributions to the egg and sperm, the whole of the developmental path from egg to adult, plus the particular effects of any mutations within that genome on its phenotype, not to mention its environmental history. Read More ›

Yesterday, I received a note from a high-ranking editor at Christianity Today who was pretty annoyed at what I wrote about the magazine’s June cover story on BioLogos. He hasn’t replied to my suggestion that I publish his note and my reply. So I will publish my reply here, with a couple of comments, and link to the pieces posted here at UD. Read More ›

Crossing swords with a professional philosopher can be a dangerous thing. I’m not one, of course; I simply happen to have a Ph.D. in philosophy. But Professor Edward Feser is a professional philosopher, and a formidable debating opponent, as one well-known evolutionary biologist is about to find out.

In a recent post of mine, entitled, Minds, brains, computers and skunk butts, I took issue with a recent assertion by Professor Jerry Coyne, that the evolution of human intelligence is no more remarkable than the evolution of skunk butts. (To be fair, Coyne was not trying to be offensive in his comparison: apparently he really did have a pet skunk for several years, and the simile was the first that sprang to mind for him, as a biologist.) In my post, I cited a philosophical argument put forward by Professor Feser, that the intentionality or “meaningfulness” of our thoughts cannot be explained in materialist terms, as thoughts have an inherent meaning, whereas physical states of affairs (such as brain processes) have no inherent meaning as such. However, Professor Coyne was not terribly impressed with this argument. He replied as follows:

I’ll leave this one to the philosophers, except to say that “meaning” seems to pose no problem, either physically or evolutionarily, to me: our brain-modules have evolved to make sense of what we take in from the environment. And that’s not unique to us: primates surely have a sense of “meaning” that they derive from information processed from the environment, and we can extend this all the way back, in ever more rudimentary form, to protozoans.

He shouldn’t have said that.

Professor Edward Feser has just issued a devastating response to Professor Coyne over at his Website. I’d like to invite readers at Uncommon Descent to have a look at it for themselves, here. It’s a very entertaining read. Feser concludes:

… if one is going to aver confidently that “‘meaning’… pose[s] no problem,” he had better give at least some evidence of knowing what the philosophical problem of meaning or intentionality is and what philosophers have said about it.

Wise words, indeed.

Read More ›

An individual who shall most certainly remain nameless insists on foisting on my notice the claim that 60% of up-and-coming new atheist leaders hail from Girth Central and thus demonstrate what happens when you diss the Bread of Life and grab the bread on the side. … Read More ›

Here’s David Tyler at Access Research Network (05/31/11), on “Non-marine life throughout the Neoproterozic”:

What do these findings mean for our understanding of life on the Precambrian Earth? Dr Charles Wellman, an author of the paper, is quoted by ScienceDaily as saying:

“It is generally considered that life originated in the ocean and that the important developments in the early evolution of life took place in the marine environment: the origin of prokaryotes, eukaryotes, sex and multicellularity. During this time the continents are often considered to have been essentially barren of life — or at the most with an insignificant microbial biota dominated by cyanobacteria. We have discovered evidence for complex life on land from 1 billion year old deposits from Scotland. This suggests that life on land at this time was more abundant and complex than anticipated. It also opens the intriguing possibility that some of the major events in the early history of life may have taken place on land and not entirely within the marine realm.” Read More ›

Whatever your theology, notice the significance of the fact that self-identified Christians were shown to be wrong because they made a prediction against God’s design in nature. It’s one thing to be wrong. It’s another to be wrong for discreditable reasons.

Here at Evolution News & Views (June 1, 2011), Casey Luskin reviews Giberson and Collins’ The Language of Science and Faith, a book outlining Christian Darwinism, BioLogos-style. He focuses here on the Christian Darwinist contention that non-coding (“junk”) DNA shows that God didn’t design humans: Read More ›

In “Mind Reading: Technology Turns Thought Into Action,” Jon Hamilton (National Public Radio, May 12, 2011) explains:

the experiment shows how the technology could help a very different sort of patient — someone paralyzed by a spinal injury or Lou Gehrig’s disease. ECoG could allow someone like that to operate a robotic arm with just their thoughts. The experiment also shows how many different areas of the brain get involved in things we take for granted, Schalk says. “Even for simple functions such as opening and closing the hand, there are many, many areas that contribute to the movement,” he says.

But some researchers are more enterprising than that: Read More ›

From G. K. Chesterton, an early twentieth century Catholic writer, both anti-materialist and anti-Dawinist, in his Orthodoxy: (Courtesy Super flumina )

As an explanation of the world, materialism has a sort of insane simplicity. It has just the quality of the madman’s argument; we have at once the sense of it covering everything and the sense of it leaving everything out… You can explain a man’s detention at Hanwell[1] by an indifferent public by saying that it is the crucifixion of a god of whom the world is not worthy. The explanation does explain. Similarly you may explain the order in the universe by saying that all things, even the souls of men, are leaves inevitably unfolding on a utterly unconscious tree—the blind destiny of matter. The explanation does explain, though not, of course, so completely as the madman’s. But the point here is that the normal human mind not only objects to both, but feels to both the same objection. Its approximate statement is that if the man in Hanwell is the real God, he is not much of a god. And, similarly, if the cosmos of the materialist is the real cosmos, it is not much of a cosmos. The thing has shrunk. The deity is less divine than many men… Read More ›

My motorcycle gang (think “Wild Hogs”) planned to ride up to the Black Hills of South Dakota for the Memorial Day weekend, but the forecast was for cold and rain, so we called an audible and headed south through the deserts and mountains of northern New Mexico. On the way down we made a detour to see the motorcycle rally at Red River. Traffic slowed to a crawl as we approached the center of town, which was crammed with literally thousands of motorcycles of every shape and hue and their equally colorful riders. We headed out of Red River along the winding mountain roads towards Taos, and as I glided around a curve a few miles from town I saw Read More ›

From Jason Palmer at BBC News (19 May 2011), we learn, “Protein flaws responsible for complex life, study says.” This time mistakes produce more functional proteins: Tiny structural errors in proteins may have been responsible for changes that sparked complex life, researchers say.A comparison of proteins across 36 modern species suggests that protein flaws called “dehydrons” may have made proteins less stable in water. This would have made them more adhesive and more likely to end up working together, building up complex function. Remarkably, we read, Natural selection is a theory with no equal in terms of its power to explain how organisms and populations survive through the ages; random mutations that are helpful to an organism are maintained while Read More ›

In Scientific American (April 2011), Paul J. Steinhardt asks “The Inflation Debate: Is the theory at the heart of modern cosmology deeply flawed? (April 6, 2011) : Summary Cosmic inflation is so widely accepted that it is often taken as established fact. The idea is that the geometry and uniformity of the cosmos were established during an intense early growth spurt. But some of the theory’s creators, including the author, are having second thoughts. As the original theory has developed, cracks have appeared in its logical foundations. Highly improbable conditions are required to start inflation. Worse, inflation goes on eternally, producing infinitely many outcomes, so the theory makes no firm observational predictions. Scientists debate among (and within) themselves whether these Read More ›

To answer this one, we need to go as far back as Aristotle’s The Rhetoric some 2300 years ago.

In this verbal self-defense classic — as in: “you gotta know what can be done, how, if you are to effectively defend yourself . . . ” —  on what has aptly been called the devilish art of persuasion by any means fair or foul, Aristotle (left, courtesy Wiki, public domain)  found this key answer to the question “How do arguments work to persuade us?” in Book I Ch 2:

“Of the modes of persuasion furnished by the spoken word there are three kinds. The first kind depends on the personal character of the speaker [ethos]; the second on putting the audience into a certain frame of mind [pathos]; the third on the proof, or apparent proof, provided by the words of the speech itself [logos]. Persuasion is achieved by the speaker’s personal character when the speech is so spoken as to make us think him credible . . . Secondly, persuasion may come through the hearers, when the speech stirs their emotions. Our judgements when we are pleased and friendly are not the same as when we are pained and hostile . . . Thirdly, persuasion is effected through the speech itself when we have proved a truth or an apparent truth by means of the persuasive arguments suitable to the case in question . . .”

Now, of course, as clever ad men and smart politicians have long since known, the most persuasive form of argument is the appeal to our emotions and underlying perceptions. Unfortunately, how we feel about something or someone is no more reasonable or accurate than the quality of the facts beneath our perceptions.

But, what does this dusty quip by a long since dead philosopher have to do with science and getting rid of creationists and their dishonest attempts to push in the supernatural into science by the back door?

A lot, and indeed that artfully cultivated and widely spread perception that we are dealing with “a war between religion and science” is at the heart of the problem.

“Seriously, aren’t atheists ashamed of P.Z. Myers, asks Reb Moshe Averick (the “maverick”rabbi and author of The Confused, Illusory World of the Atheist), for The Allgemeiner (May 29, 2011):

One of my mentors, Rabbi Yaakov Weinberg, (of blessed memory), made the following, rather sobering, observation about human nature: “Nobody ever allowed something as trivial as facts and logic to interfere with their agenda. If the facts and logic don’t fit, then the facts and logic will just have to fend for themselves.” Nowhere do we find more glaring examples of the human predilection for intellectual corruption than when we examine the writings and lectures of an ideologue who is driven, not by a burning desire for truth, but by a burning desire to further his or her own agenda.

Having said that, we are now ready to introduce one of the more zealous and outspoken (read: tiresome and obnoxious) advocates of the Darwinian/atheist worldview, P.Z. Myers. Read More ›

Evolutionists say undirected, random events, such as mutations, accumulated to create the entire biological world. An analogy once used for this claim is that of a room full of monkeys pounding away at typewriters and producing Hamlet. Today the analogy needs to be updated from typewriters to computer keyboards, but otherwise remains apropos. When the letters are selected at random, a page (or screen) full of text is going to be meaningless. And the problem is no easier in the biological world. Whether English prose or molecular sequences, the problem is that there are relatively few meaningful sequences in an astronomically large volume of possibilities. Nor does selection help because the smallest sequence that could be selected—such as a small Read More ›