Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini, explain, Such cases of elaborate innate behavioural programs (spider webs, bee foraging as we saw above, and many more) cannot be ccounted for by means of optimizing physico-chemical or geometric factors. But they csan hardly be accounted for by gradualistic adaptation either. It’s fair to acknowledge that, although we bet that some naturalistic explanations will one day found, we have no such explanation at present. And if we insist that natural selection is the only way to try, we will never have one. – What Darwin Got Wrong (London: Profile Books, 2010), p. 91

I would like to commend Thomas Cudworth for his latest attempt to engage ID critic Professor Edward Feser in dialogue. Over the past few weeks, I have been greatly heartened by Professor Feser’s clarifications of his position vis-a-vis Intelligent Design. For instance, in a recent post on his blog site, he wrote:

The dispute between Thomism on the one hand and Paley (and ID theory) on the other is not over whether God is in some sense the “designer” of the universe and of living things – both sides agree that He is – but rather over what exactly it means to say that He is, and in particular over the metaphysics of life and of creation.

Moreover, in an email sent to me last month, Professor Feser wrote:

I have never accused any ID defender of heresy, and would never do so. To say to a theological opponent “Your views have implications you may not like, including ones that I believe are hard to reconcile with what we both agree to be definitive of orthodoxy” is simply not the same thing as saying “You are a heretic!” Rather, it’s what theologians do all the time in debate with their fellow orthodox believers.

I welcome Professor Feser’s statements that he regards the Intelligent Design movement as theologically orthodox, and that he believes God is the designer of living things.

In his latest post, Thomas Cudworth put a question to Professor Feser. He asked Professor Feser whether, in his view, God could have possibly planned to create a universe in which intelligent beings could infer His existence from studying nature – in particular, from observing clues such as cosmic fine-tuning and irreducible complexity, which would show that the evolutionary process must have been intelligently planned. I know that Professor Feser is a very busy man with a lot of work on his hands, so I’d like to attempt a reply on his behalf. Read More ›

Bradley Monton, author of Seeking God in Science: An Atheist Defends Intelligent Design (Broadview Press, 2009), has this to say about design theory as a legitimate approach to science:

I’ll start with Ken Miller’s 2008 book Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America’s Soul. In additon to giving straightforward biology-based criticisms of Behe’s irreducible complexity argument … Miller also has a more fundamental critique of intelligent design (the “Battle for America’s Soul” part).

Miller makes the claim that the intelligent design movement doesn’t just want to “win the battle against Darwin”; the intelligent design movement wants to “win the greater war against science itself.”
This claim that the intelligent design movement is anti-science is quite a strong claim. The way intelligent design proponents typically portray their activity is that they are looking for scientific evidence for the existence of a designer. This may be confused science, but it’s not anti-science. Moreover, some Read More ›

Recently, the physicist Sean Carroll, Senior Research Associate in Physics at the California Institute of Technology, composed an article entitled Does the Universe need God? for The Blackwell Companion to Science and Christianity (eds. James B. Stump and Alan G. Padgett, Wiley-Blackwell, due for publication in 2012). There are lots of things I’d like to say in response to Professor Carroll’s article, but instead, I’ve decided to condense my remarks into a set of seven questions, which I hope Professor Carroll will be kind enough to answer.

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?
Read More ›

It’s often said that many European non-Darwinian evolutionists are fans of the Jesuit paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955). Here’s something to know, however: The Catholic thinker most identified with evolution, the French Jesuit paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin … des not loom as large on the Catholic intellectual landscape as he did a generation ago. Teilhard concocted from evolutionary theory a kind of process theology that, among other things, implicitly denies the doctrine of original sin. Pope Pius XII once asked the great French thelogican Etienne Gilson to write a critique of Teilhard’s work. Gilson replied that such a task was impossible because Teilhard’s books were poetry and not philosophy You cannot “refute” a poem. Even Teilhard’s serious defenders, Read More ›

(

Apologies, Reb.)

In “The Language of Science and Faith,” Giberson (soon to be in an online dialogue with Bill Dembski) and Collins argue that God has given nature “freedom”: This is their proposed solution to the problem of evil in nature:

When God, as a loving Creator, withdraws from complete sovereign control over his creatures and grants them freedom, this means – in ways often difficult to understand – that those creatures can now act independently of God. They are free to not be robotic automatons, puppets or trained attack dogs. In the case of the Holocaust – the classic example of human evil – we always do exactly what Dembski says we never do: we shift the responsibility for that evil from God to the Nazis. Such reflections have long characterized Christian thinking about the problem of evi. All we need to do now is enlarge this general concept to include the sorts of things that nature is doing on its own.Not all Christians are comfortable with the idea that nature has freedom, of course. …

Actually, not all Christians can even make rational sense of the these assertions. Read More ›

In “Primordial Weirdness: Did the Early Universe Have One Dimension? Scientists Outline Test for Theory”, at ScienceDaily (Apr. 20, 2011), we re asked to consider whether the universe started out with only one dimension: That’s the mind-boggling concept at the heart of a theory that University at Buffalo physicist Dejan Stojkovic and colleagues proposed in 2010.They suggested that the early universe — which exploded from a single point and was very, very small at first — was one-dimensional (like a straight line) before expanding to include two dimensions (like a plane) and then three (like the world in which we live today). The theory, if valid, would address important problems in particle physics. Now, in a new paper in Physical Read More ›

Over the past several months, Dr. Edward Feser has been engaged in debate with various ID proponents, most recently Jay Richards and Vincent Torley, over the relationship between two types of argument for God’s existence:  on the one hand, arguments from design such as are found in Paley and in the writings of some ID proponents, and on the other hand, philosophical arguments of the sort proposed by Thomas Aquinas.  Whereas ID proponents tend to see Paley-type arguments and Thomistic arguments as different but compatible, Feser sees them as incompatible.  He thinks that the Paley/ID type of argument implies a wrong picture (i.e., a heretical picture) of God, and a wrong understanding (i.e., a heretical understanding) of the relationship between creator and creation.  He thinks that Paley/ID sorts of argument lead to belief in a mere mechanic-God, a God unlike the God of what he calls “classical theism,” and hence a god unworthy of worship by Christians.

I am unconvinced that Paley/ID lines of argument produce a mere “mechanic” God, since I’m unconvinced that arguments that choose to focus on what we might call the mechanics of creation necessarily exclude other (i.e., metaphysical) aspects of creation.  However, in this post I am not going to try to defend Paleyan or ID arguments, or to criticize Feser’s interpretation of Aquinas on creation, or to raise objections to what Feser calls “Thomistic-Aristotelian” thought or “classic theism.”  I leave such detailed arguments to people such as Vincent Torley who have made a special study of Aquinas and of the Aristotelian tradition.  Rather, I want to make sure that I fully understand Feser’s general position regarding design, creation, and the Christian God.  To this end, I am going to ask Professor Feser for clarification by conceding, for the sake of argument, much of what he has said, and then posing a question for him. Read More ›

The way Darwin lobbyists don’t.

California-based Caroline Crocker, Expelled and now the director of an integrity in science institute and author of Free to Think, offers some reflections on how to teach science as if it wasn’t a cult:

…biological systems are a complex mixture of chemical and electrical reactions controlled by application of many levels of information, not to mention the environment, so that predicting the outcome of changing one parameter can be almost impossible. The complexity, and thus the impossibility of drawing absolutely accurate conclusions and predicting the effect of a change in one parameter, further increases as one progresses into psychology, sociology, ecology and the like.To illustrate this principle, we can consider the work of Dr. Carolyn Nersesian of the University of Sydney. This ecologist used a technique from chemistry (titration) to understand the feeding behavior of eight brushtail possums. Basically, she slowly increased the concentration of a poison in the food in a sheltered area (tree) while offering the animals untainted food in a less sheltered area that had been pre-treated with fox urine and feces The goal was to see what concentration of poison would cause the animals to risk exposure to predators by moving from the sheltered to the unsheltered area. Read More ›

Always used to attack any traditional assumption, never used to attack nonsense, no matter how scofffable, talked in Darwin’s name.

Western Michigan University philosopher Tim McGrew offers some thoughts on evidence, forthcoming in an anthology from Routledge: Read More ›

Neuron tangle 1: Okay then, if I don’t have a self, do you have a self? If so, why are you talking to me?

Neuron tangle 2: No, I don’t have a self either. This here prof is quoted in New Scientist (Liz Else, “Your brain creates your sense of self, incognito”, 19 April 2011), and he knows more than the two of us put together: Read More ›

At CNN, we are informed by Biologos vice prez Karl Giberson that a busted Vit C gene in humans, chimps, orangutans, etc., is

… but one of many, many evidences that support the truth of evolution – that make it a “sacred fact” that Christians must embrace in the name of truth. And they should embrace this truth with enthusiasm, for this is the world that God created.

Here’s my problem (Toronto-based Canuck hack): I dunno.

First, the amount of sheer nonsense talked in the name of evolution is appalling, and even a founder of the discipline of evolutionary psychology has just abandoned his big theory (none too soon, I would say).

Second, practically no one who is not on autopilot believes Darwinism any more, and that is the principal theory of evolution. It is the only theory of evolution our culture recognizes, the one courts enforce, for which taxes are collected, on behalf of which inquisitors snoop, sneak, snipe, and snitch.

If all this is “sacred”, everyone who could benefit civilization must prefer the profane. And, historically, everyone who has benefited civilization has, under these circumstances, preferred the profane. That’s why we keep running into non-Darwinian atheists.

For a traditional believer in any type of ethical monotheism, the logic is simple: Read More ›

In “Jesus would believe in evolution and so should you” (CNN, April 10, 2011) Christian Darwinist Karl Giberson, BioLogos vice-prez, enlightens: Science is not a sinister enterprise aimed at destroying faith. It’s an honest exploration of the wonderful world that God created. We are often asked to think about what Jesus would do, if he lived among us today. Who would Jesus vote for? What car would he drive? To these questions we should add “What would Jesus believe about origins?” And the answer? Jesus would believe evolution, of course. He cares for the Truth. Here’s Southern Baptist seminary prez Albert Mohler’s response.

Southern Baptist seminary prez Al Mohler’s response (April 19, 2011) to Giberson’s CNN Belief blog, “Jesus would believe in evolution and so should you” (April 10, 2011) is here:

… he throws the Bible under the bus. In language hauntingly reminiscent of Reverend Clarence Arthur Wilmot [novelist John Updike’s classic liberal reverend], Professor Giberson describes the human authors of the Old Testament as “ancient and uncomprehending scribes.”In his new book, The Language of Science and Faith:, written with Francis S. Collins, readers will find this strange paragraph: Read More ›

Yes, righties predominated overwhelmingly even back then. Or longer? (ScienceDaily, Apr. 19, 2011):

Now, David Frayer, professor of anthropology at the University of Kansas, has used markings on fossilized front teeth to show that right-handedness goes back more than 500,000 years. He is the lead author (with colleagues in Croatia, Italy and Spain) of a paper published this month in the British journal Laterality. His research shows that distinctive markings on fossilized teeth correlate to the right or left-handedness of individual prehistoric humans.

“The patterns seen on the fossil teeth are directly and consistently produced by right or left hand manipulation in experimental work,” Frayer said.

There are some issues around handedness, especially the putative problems of left-handed or ambidextrous people. One difficulty is that because most human are right-handed, “right” tends to mean good or dexterous but “left” tends to mean bad or sinister. And “ambidextrous” easily translates to: ambivalent. Read More ›