Any fair-minded person who read Thomist philosopher Edward Feser’s incisive and crushing refutation of physicist Lawrence Krauss’s article, “Why scientists should be militant atheists,” would have to conclude that New Atheism was on the ropes. But after reading Jerry Coyne’s spirited defense of Krauss, I was reminded of a line from Louisa Alcott’s Little Men: “’Come on, come on, I ain’t thrashed yet!’ cried Emil, who had been down five times, but did not know when he was beaten.” Judging from the comments on his latest post, many of Professor Coyne’s readers seemed to share his view that the cosmological argument for the existence of God, which is based on the contingency of the world, was no better than the Read More ›

In December 2013, I wrote a post on the subject of miracles in response to Professor Robert Greg Cavin and Dr. Carlos A. Colombetti, titled, Cavin and Colombetti, miracle-debunkers, or: Can a Transcendent Designer manipulate the cosmos? Today, I received an email from Professor Cavin, who claimed I had totally misconstrued his (and Colombetti’s) argument. In today’s post, I’d like to take the opportunity to respond. Professor Cavin’s email was courteously worded, so I shall attempt to maintain the same standard of civility in my reply. Cavin’s main complaint is that I presented a straw man caricature of his (and Colombetti’s) argument in my original post. Specifically, he writes that I appear to think that he (and Colombetti) maintain that Read More ›

In the wake of the recent Supreme Court ruling on gay marriage, Professor Jerry Coyne has authored a post in which he offers his thoughts on the ruling. In a telling passage which is remarkable for its myopia, he writes: To those who oppose gay marriage, I say this: Is it really hurting you? What does an opponent have to lose if two homosexuals get married? I suppose they could say it could lead to the dissolution of society, but that’s clearly not the case. Is it really hurting us? Yes, and for a very simple reason: from now on, those who oppose the Supreme Court’s decision will be branded as hateful bigots who are morally on a par with Read More ›

Recently, there has been a lively exchange of views on the subject of animal rationality and animal immortality between Eastern Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart and Thomist philosopher Edward Feser. A fair-minded reader would have to conclude that Feser has gotten the better of Hart in this exchange. (For a handy summary of the arguments put forward on both sides, I would warmly recommend Professor Feser’s latest article; his earlier articles can be found here, here and here. Hart’s articles in First Things can be found here and here.) Nevertheless, I have strong reservations about some of Feser’s arguments. In a nutshell: Feser seems to want to place a period where the available evidence – from both science and philosophy Read More ›

In recent days the issue of the want of rational coherence of evolutionary materialist scientism has become a major focus at UD. For cause. In the most recent thread on it, BA says in the OP: I had an epiphany today. I think, after all this time, I finally get it . . . . Eigenstate intends for us to believe that intentional states do not exist. Eigenstate desires for us to believe that desires do not exist. Eigenstate believes (and asks us to believe) that beliefs do not exist. Eigenstate wants us to know that the word “I” in the sentence he just wrote (i.e. “I encourage any and all . . .”) maps to an illusion – i.e., Read More ›

Philosopher Edward Feser has written a thought-provoking critique of the Turing Test, titled, Accept no limitations. Professor Feser makes several substantive points in his essay. Nevertheless, I believe that the basic thrust of the Turing Test is sound, and in this post, I’d like to explain why. In his 1950 paper, Computing machinery and intelligence (Mind, 59, 433-460), computer scientist Alan Turing argued that the question, “Can machines think?”was a scientifically fruitless one, and that the question we should be asking instead was: would it be possible to construct a digital computer that was capable of fooling blind interrogators into believing that it was a human being, by giving answers to the interrogators’ questions that a human being would naturally Read More ›

Despite my disagreements with Professor Larry Moran over the years, I respect him as a fair-minded, intelligent and generally sensible person. Recently, however, he said something which can only be described as rather silly. In a post titled, Evidence for the existence of god(s), he wrote: I am always on the lookout for evidence that some sort of god actually exists. The reason I’m an atheist is because I’ve never seen any evidence that’s the least bit convincing. I keep asking for evidence but nobody ever supplies any. Now, had Professor Moran merely remarked that he found the evidence for God’s existence less than compelling, or unsatisfactory, he would have had a leg to stand on. But he went much Read More ›

In this short essay, I’d like to address a profound philosophical question: what is the most appropriate metaphor for expressing the relationship between the cosmos and its Designer (whom I shall assume, for the purposes of this essay, to be God the Creator)? From an Intelligent Design standpoint, a suitable metaphor would have to encompass the following facts, at the very least: (a) the objects within our cosmos are not parts of God, but are really distinct from their Creator; (b) the objects within our cosmos are not abstract forms but concrete entities, with their own characteristic causal powers; (c) any object existing within Nature – especially a living thing – possesses immanent finality: that is, its parts have an Read More ›

I have greatly enjoyed reading three recent posts on memory by Professor Michael Egnor, an accomplished neurosurgeon with more than 20 years’ experience. In his first post, Recalling Nana’s Face: Does Your Brain Store Memories?, Professor Egnor criticized what he regards as two pernicious myths regarding memory: first, the popular notion that the brain stores actual memories themselves; and second, the more sophisticated (but equally mistaken) notion that what the brain stores is coded information which enables us to retrieve memories at will. Neurologist and skeptic Dr. Steven Novella, who is an assistant professor at Yale University School of Medicine, published a reply, accusing Dr. Egnor of faulty reasoning – a claim echoed by Dr. P.Z. Myers on his blog. Read More ›

Paula Kirby is one of the more thoughtful contemporary critics of religion. A few years ago, I was much struck by a remark she made in one of her essays, that even Christians don’t all believe in the same God. This, to my mind, is a much more powerful argument against religious faith than the puerile “One God further” objection which is frequently hurled against believers by the New Atheists, and which has been ably refuted by Barry Arrington on Uncommon Descent, and also by the Thomist philosopher (and former atheist), Professor Edward Feser (see here and here). In all fairness, I have to acknowledge that there is some truth to Paula Kirby’s contention: even within a single Christian denomination, Read More ›

Catholic author Mark Shea has recently written two blog articles (see here and here) in which he attempts to clarify what Pope Francis really meant when he addressed the Pontifical Academy of Sciences on creation and evolution, on October 27. Shea claims that the Catholic Church has been evolution-friendly in its thinking since the time of St. Augustine, who “sees creation happening, not by God perpetually applying little fixes and magicking a tyrannosaurus out of thin air, but by Nature unrolling (Latin: evolvere) the potentialities that God placed in it from the start,” while St. Thomas Aquinas sounds “pretty darned evolutionary” to the good Mr. Shea. What the Pope is saying, according to Shea, is that “God is not a Read More ›

The word “tangent” when used in a non-mathematical context means: “diverging from an original purpose or course.” Darwinians love to try to derail debates by latching onto irrelevancies in order to push the discussion away from the issue under review. This is especially true when they are unable to counter a proposition. Rather than admit defeat, they say “let’s talk about something else!” Here are a couple of examples. In this post I put up a string of letters that resulted from my haphazard banging on my keyboard. I then compared that string to the first 12 lines of Hamlet’s soliloquy. The obvious purpose of the post is to demonstrate that there is a clearly perceived difference between a more Read More ›

StephenB takes down a materialist in five words: Feser: Take a few bits of metal, work them into various shapes, and attach them to a piece of wood. Voila! A mousetrap. Attach? Voila? There are millions of ways to attach pieces of metal to wood. Only one of those combinations will trap a mouse. The trick is to arrange those pieces so that they will function as a mousetrap. Or so we call it. But objectively, apart from human interests, the object is “nothing but” a collection of wood and metal parts. Tell that to the mouse . . . Oh my sides . . . gasp . . .

If you had to summarize your reasons for believing in God in ten words or less, how would you do it? Here’s what I’d say: “The world is contingent, complex, fine-tuned, rule-governed, mathematical and beautiful.” For me, these features of the world point towards a Being Who is necessary (or self-explanatory), perfectly integrated, and limitlessly intelligent, creative and bountiful – a Being in Whom we live and move and have our being (Acts 17:28). As you can see, I’ve listed not one but several features of the natural world which (I believe) point to the existence of a Creator. Here’s a question. How would you react if someone told you that you didn’t need to list all these features: just Read More ›

In today’s short post, I shall argue that (a) there are at least some messages which we can identify as the product of an intelligent agent, regardless of their linguistic and social context, and (b) there is no context in which it would be reasonable for us to conclude that a message visible to everyone was a hallucination. What prompted this discussion In a post titled Signature in the cell?, Professor Edward Feser argued that no message, in and of itself, could warrant the inference that it was the product of an intelligent agent, without a knowledge of the context of the message. Referring to the hypothetical scenario in which a “Made by Yahweh” message was discovered in every human Read More ›