Because there is something fundamentally wrong with its typical view of life. Life forms are not merely matter in motion. From Jonathan Wells at Evolution News & Views on Third Way (for evolution) thinker Stephen L. Talbott: According to his profile at The Third Way of Evolution, Talbott spent many years working in the engineering organizations of computer manufacturers before he joined the Nature Institute in 1998 (the same year I joined Discovery Institute). He “attempts to show how our understanding of the organism and its evolution is transformed once we recognize and take seriously the organism as an intelligent agent meaningfully (though not necessarily consciously) pursuing its own way of life.” In his most recent article (the first in Read More ›

John Farrell’s article, It’s Time To Retire ‘Theistic Evolution’ (Forbes magazine, March 19, 2016), cites three prominent Catholic thinkers who reject the term “theistic evolution.” But what Farrell overlooks is that these Catholics hold wildly divergent views on the simple question of whether living things were designed by God. Edward Feser insists that they were, and Stacy Trasancos apparently agrees; Ken Miller says they were not – which puts him in the same camp as Jesuit astronomer George Coyne and Catholic theologian John Haught, two outspoken defenders of evolution who were not cited in Farrell’s article. However, the clear teaching of the Catholic Church is that humans and other living things were designed by God. What I find astonishing is Read More ›

Stacy Trasancos, a homeschooling mother of seven with a Ph.D. in chemistry and an M.A. in Dogmatic Theology who is an Adjunct Professor at Holy Apostles College and Seminary, has penned a thoughtful essay over at the Catholic One Faith blog titled, Does Science Prove God Exists? Her answer, in a nutshell, is that while science can provide inductive support for the existence of a Creator, only theology can provide deductive arguments for God’s existence. In any case, we shouldn’t need to prop up our belief in God with scientific arguments. Dr. Trasancos rejects the view that some scientific conclusions are compatible with God’s existence, while others are not. Christians, she says, should start from the fundamental notion that God Read More ›

It’s no surprise that Coyne’s book is getting hostile reviews outside the new atheist community.  Closing off our religion coverage for the week, we note that prominent Darwinian evolutionist Jerry Coyne’s Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible is, unsurprisingly, receiving hostile reviews outside the new atheist community. But what’s curious is their focus. From Austin L. Hughes at New Atlantis: Coyne’s basic strategy is to contrast two monolithic entities that he calls “religion” and “science.” But he constructs his two monoliths in diametrically opposite ways. The “religion” monolith consists of everything that has ever been said by any person belonging to any religion whatever, lumping together official dogma, theological speculation, and popular belief… Coyne’s procedure for describing Read More ›

I had intended to write a post on whales as products of Intelligent Design. But the whales will have to wait. In the space of just three hours, Professor Larry Moran has put up two remarkably silly posts. And in both cases, Professor Moran could have spared himself the embarrassment if he had done just a little more reading. The first post, titled, Can theology produce true knowledge?, critiques Dr. Denis Alexander’s claim that there are other, equally valid, ways of knowing besides science. Professor Moran thinks this is flawed on three counts: first, natural theology is question-begging because “you have to assume the existence of a creator god before you would even think of interpreting the natural world as Read More ›

Teleology in biology is unavoidable.  Dawkins was surely correct when he wrote that “Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.”  He even characterized that appearance as “overwhelming.”  Of course, Dawkins does not believe living things were designed, and his entire project has been to convince his readers that the overwhelming appearance of design is an illusion. The problem with the “it is all a grand illusion” position is that as science has progressed – even in the relatively short time since Dawkins wrote those words in 1987 – it has become increasingly more difficult to believe.  Advances in our understanding of genetics have revealed a semiotic code of staggering Read More ›

Highlights: Methodological naturalism is widely regarded as a cardinal rule of scientific methodology. This methodological principle excludes all references to the supernatural from scientific discourse: it says that God-talk has no place in science. In Part One of this series, after carefully distinguishing methodological naturalism from six other principles, I argue that methodological naturalism is properly defined as an injunction: when doing science, we should assume that natural causes are sufficient to account for all observed phenomena, and for precisely this reason, all talk of the supernatural is banished from science. The Intelligent Design movement makes no pronouncements about who the Designer of Nature is, but deliberately leaves open the possibility that the Designer is a supernatural Being (i.e. God). Read More ›

Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry offers an example, using Larry Krauss as a springboard: Metaphysical claims are claims based on a certain type of logic — metaphysical logic. For example, the claim that a universe of finite causes cannot explain its own existence and so must find its source in some infinite ground of existence, an uncaused cause, is a logical claim, which can be debated using a specific set of logical tools, just like mathematical claims. Maybe it’s wrong. But it’s a logical claim, not a scientific claim. I point this out because, circling back to Krauss, this sort of confusion is endemic. Krauss in fact wrote a whole book-length non-sequitur about this: a book titled A Universe from Nothing, which became Read More ›

Someone reminds us of Lawrence Krauss’ claims that quantum mechanics makes it inevitable that something comes out of nothing just by random processes and that our existence is random and inevitable because of quantum mechanics. See here at BBC News (2014): Their admittedly controversial answer is that the entire universe, from the fireball of the Big Bang to the star-studded cosmos we now inhabit, popped into existence from nothing at all. It had to happen, they say, because “nothing” is inherently unstable. This idea may sound bizarre, or just another fanciful creation story. But the physicists argue that it follows naturally from science’s two most powerful and successful theories: quantum mechanics and general relativity. Here, then, is how everything could have come Read More ›

With Bobby Conway. A friend has written me (O’Leary for News) to complain that the question is a dud. Friend, I sort of see what you mean. Putting it that way (is ID “science”?) reifies science in a way that distorts both the question and any possible answer. The question should be, Does ID provide accurate accounts of the origin and nature of life forms? Does it answer questions in a way that leads to greater knowledge and more avenues for exploration? If it does, but still isn’t considered “science,” well, so much the worse for science. Science is first and foremost a methodology for discovering accurate information about our world. It is not supposed to be a philosophy in Read More ›

  Question: Isn’t most scientism just popular culture in a lab coat? That is, would one find a greater proportion of true believers in scientism at a meeting of Nobelists or at a science media writers convention? Worth someone’s while finding out, surely. From Evolution News & Views, quoting Oxford philosopher Roger Trigg’s forthcoming “Why Science Needs Metaphysics,” There is such a thing as scientific progress, and it happens through systematic trial and error or, in Karl Popper’s terminology, conjecture and refutation. A “scientific realist” has to be wary, though, about how such realism is defined. A realism that makes reality what contemporary science says it is links reality logically to the human minds of the present day. Science is Read More ›

The philosopher Edward Feser surely needs no introduction here. In today’s short post, I’d like to address, in a non-polemical fashion, one of Professor Feser’s longstanding objections to Intelligent Design: that it is tied to an anthropomorphic conception of the Designer’s Mind, because the intelligence it attributes to this Being is fundamentally no different to our own. Such a Being, argues Feser, could not possibly be the absolutely simple God of classical theism: it is, at best, a mere Demiurge. Feser stated his argument succinctly in a 2014 post titled, Miracles, ID, and classical theism: Paley and ID theory predicate attributes of God and of creatures univocally, whereas for Thomists these predications are to be understood analogously. The problem here Read More ›

Over at RealClearScience, biologist Steven “Ross” Pomeroy has written an interesting piece titled, Why God Cannot Be Proven: A Star Trek Argument. Pomeroy contends that since aliens could duplicate anything that a Deity could do, author Eric Metaxas was wrong to claim that science could make a case for God, as he did an a Wall Street Journal article last Christmas. It strikes me that there are several things wrong with Pomeroy’s argument. I’d like to point out four major flaws before I go on to discuss what I see as a paradox for naturalism which is implied by his argument: if it is correct, then our own species (Homo sapiens) was almost certainly produced by intelligent designers (aliens) who Read More ›

Some Aristotelian Neo-Thomists (E. Feser call them “A-T philosophers”) accuse intelligent design (ID) of being an expression of the modern mechanistic reductionist quantificationist mindset, and of denying an immanent teleology in nature. I would argue that the difference between internal and external teleology shouldn’t divide ID and A-T. ID doesn’t deny immanent teleology in nature, and has no specific commitment to external teleology or mechanistic thinking. Teleology is synonymous with function, end, purpose, or goal. Design means conceiving hierarchies of functions. Therefore design and teleology are but the two faces of the same coin. So why can one say with confidence that a living being has internal teleology and a machine has only external teleology? Because the living, manifested beings Read More ›

Professor Jerry Coyne’s credibility as a New Atheist is now in tatters, after the publication of yesterday’s devastating rebuttal by philosopher Edward Feser, on top of the one he wrote last week. Additionally, Coyne has undermined his scientific credibility by declaring that “it’s simply wrong to suggest that there’s any real scientific ‘debate’ about macroevolution.” (Coyne made this comment in a post which took a gratuitous swipe at a Canadian science text titled, Human Biology, Anatomy and Physiology for the Health Sciences by Wendi Roscoe, Professor in the Health Science department at Fanshawe College, London, Ontario. Professor Roscoe’s ratings are stellar and as far as I can ascertain, she is a convinced evolutionist. Roscoe’s “crime,” in Coyne’s eyes, was to Read More ›