From ScienceDaily: One of the candidates for ‘dark energy’ is the symmetron field. Researchers have developed an experiment capable of measuring extremely small forces with the help of neutrons. The measurements could have provided pointers to the mysterious symmetrons, but the particles didn’t show up. This excludes the possibility of symmetrons in a broad parameter range. ‘Dark energy’ is going to have to be explained differently. One thing is certain: there’s something out there we don’t yet know. For years now scientists have been looking for “dark matter” or “dark energy” — with our current inventory of particles and forces in nature we just can’t explain major cosmological phenomena, such as why the universe is expanding at an ever faster Read More ›

Readers will recall Sam Harris, an atheist who tried thinking for himself and ended up on the dark internet with Jordan Peterson. A meltdown is happening among materialist atheists, mainly over progressivism, and some of the fallout is quite revealing. From Samuel Buntz at The Federalist: Atheists are divided against each other. This is not surprising when you consider that a negative principle like “God does not exist” fails to provide a unifying force or center of meaning capable of organizing one’s life. … Yet, after more than a decade of New Atheist polemics, it is clear that Harris is the only New Atheist who still matters. He just wrapped up a blockbuster series of debates with Canadian psychologist Jordan Read More ›

Francis Crick and Leslie Orgel co-authored an article entitled “Directed Pansmermia” in which they advocated consideration of infective* theories for the origin of life on earth in addition to the moribund (then and now) search for a materialist terrestrial origin.  In that article the following sentence stands out: It has also been argued that ‘infective’ theories of the origins of terrestrial life should be rejected because they do no more than transfer the problem of origins to another planet. ID proponents frequently get similar push back.  Indeed, Crick and Orgel’s sentence could be modified only slightly to reflect that materialist objection: It has also been argued that ID theories of the origins of terrestrial life should be rejected because they Read More ›

Fideism is the idea that sometimes you just have to grit your teeth and believe, because faith is independent of, or even in opposition to, reason.  Theists are often accused of fideism.  Every time you hear someone say, “your belief in God is based on nothing but blind, unreasoning faith” the speaker is accusing his target of fideism.  Theists respond to the “blind faith” attack by pointing out that their beliefs are evidence-based, reasoned, and reasonable.  See here for an example. But this post is not about responding to materialist accusations of fideism against theists.  It is about the irony of such attacks coming from any materialist who has ever cited Orgel’s Second Rule of Evolution.  Orgel’s Second Rule, named Read More ›

Wayne Rossiter, author of Shadow of Oz: Theistic Evolution and the Absent God, responds at his blog to a claim by Paul Thagard at Psychology Today that science and philosophy offer more for grief than religion does: Thagard’s view is that religion is false comfort, and that science (and philosophy) can do better. He begins by outlining four major problems with Asma’s view [NYT article “which advanced the utility of religion in personal and societal spheres, even for the secular,” irrespective of the fact base]: – “It depends on a view of how emotion works in the brain that has been rendered obsolete by advances in neuroscience.” – It underestimates how much science can help to understand the nature of Read More ›

From Rabbi Moshe Averick, author of author of  The Confused World of Modern Atheism (Mosaica Press, 2016), at Times of Israel: Dr. Leonard Susskind is a renowned professor of theoretical physics at Stanford University and is credited as being one of the fathers of string theory. He was asked to comment at a NASA panel discussion on the lack of design in the universe, and replied: Dr. Susskind responded by saying: “I don’t believe the universe was designed by an intelligence. I believe the universe was designed the same way the incredible human being was designed. It certainly looks – and before Darwin – it looked like some designer must have, what else could possibly account for the complexity of a Read More ›

An open letter to William Lane Craig and the proponents of theistic evolution from Karsten Pultz,: author of Exit Evolution, in response to William Lane Craig’s questions around whether Adam and Eve really existed. For 30 years I didn’t believe in a personal God. I was not an outright atheist but was an agnostic leaning just a little towards new age explanations and interpretations of the reality we experience. I had the greatest mistrust in the Bible although I found the New Testament important as a philosophical text. I considered the Bible a collection of myths rather than historical facts. I was raised with a materialistic worldview but happened to experience so much spiritual richness in music, that it made Read More ›

Recently, President Duterte of the Philippines issued a challenge to prove the existence of God. About a week ago, I showed that to believe in God is reasonable and responsible; indeed, he credibly exists.  (BTW, the hits:comments ratio was interesting.) Today, I will explore a bit on what it means for God to be the necessary being at the root of reality. Classically, a necessary being would exist in any possible world, while a contingent one (such as we are) exists in at least one possible world, but would not exist in at least one possible world. This is because contingent beings are causally dependent on external enabling factors. For example, ponder the fire tetrahedron: A fire, being contingent, has Read More ›

With an interesting chapter on carnivorous plants. At Oscillations, Suzan Mazur takes note of the new book by structuralist Antonio Lima de Faria, now an emeritus professor at Lund University, whom she describes as “one of the Osaka Group of ‘structuralists,’ whose other members included Brian Goodwin, Mae-Wan Ho, Peter Saunders et al.” The main theme of Periodic Tables Unifying Living Organisms at the Molecular Level: The Predictive Power of the Law of Periodicity is that “the recurrence of form and function in biology makes possible a periodic table similar to the periodic table of chemical elements (a subject first explored in his 1983 book) and reveals the “law of biological periodicity.” Carnivorous plants have long been an evolutionary puzzle: In the section “Periodicity of Plant Carnivory,” Lima-de-Faria makes Read More ›

Symbiosis has been called “the most relevant and enduring biological theme in the history of our planet.” It can safely be said that symbiotic relationships quite often resist Darwinian explanation. According to Maureen A. O’Malley, “There is a long history of researchers who have theorized about symbiosis and evolution, and many of them have aligned themselves against Darwinian evolutionary theory.” One article puts it this way: “Mutualism among species is ubiquitous in nature but its evolution is not well understood.” Or, in the words of Doebeli and Knowlton: “Interspecific mutualisms are widespread, but how they evolved is not clear.” Thus, symbiotic relationships are problematic for evolutionary theory. In a previous article, I proposed the use of power-sets for determining irreducible complexity. Read More ›

Sometimes. From Helen Gordon at Wired: Long thought an impossible dream, the emerging field of palaeocolour is revolutionising our view of the prehistoric world, turning it from black-and-white into glorious technicolour. So far only a handful of dinosaurs, insects and reptiles have been studied but, as Johan Lindgren, a scientist from the University of Lund, says, “We’re only just scratching on the surface.” Finding evidence of colour in the fossil record will do much more than simply tell us what hue to paint a T-Rex. Bones can fossilise. but behaviour does not. “When we look at the animals and plants we see in the world around us we see striking colours and colour patterns,” says Maria McNamara from the University Read More ›

Hugh Ross thinks so. From Tyler O’Neil at PJ Media: On Wednesday, media outlets breathlessly reported that scientists have discovered a “lake of liquid water” on Mars. Fox News called it a “game changer” in the search for alien life, and Yahoo News reported something similar. The New York Times headline spelled out the implications: “Raising the Potential for Alien Life.” He quotes Hugh Ross, Ph.D. astronomer Hugh Ross told PJ Media that these reports twisted the truth. In reality, the scientists found what could be a lake, but Ross noted that it certainly does not contain life. The peer-reviewed study published in the journal Science reported on findings from 22 planetary astronomers in Italy working on data from the Read More ›

From Mind Matters Today: A recent conference raises concerns, according to Science Magazine, that our machines may never be able to get wise to human deviancy. So-called “white hat” hackers who test the security of AI have found it surprisingly easy to fool. Matthew Hutson reports, Last week, here at the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), a group of researchers described a turtle they had 3D printed. Most people would say it looks just like a turtle, but an artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm saw it differently. Most of the time, the AI thought the turtle looked like a rifle. Similarly, it saw a 3D-printed baseball as an espresso. These are examples of “adversarial attacks”—subtly altered images, objects, or sounds Read More ›

Ever since Michael Behe published Darwin’s Black Box in 1996, the concept of irreducible complexity has played a central role in the debate over Darwinian theory. I am proposing a new, theoretical method of determining whether a system is irreducibly complex using power-sets. First, however, it is necessary to define irreducible complexity. Various definitions of irreducible complexity exist. Michael Behe defines it as “a single system which is composed of several interacting parts, and where the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to cease functioning.” Critics have noted that this definition is actually a definition of interlocking complexity, a concept H. J. Muller had written about years earlier and which is perfectly compatible with Darwinian theory. In Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: The reproductive history of the unisexual, ladies-only salamander species is full of evolutionary surprises. In a new study, a team of researchers at The Ohio State University traced the animals’ genetic history back 3.4 million years and found some head-scratching details — primarily that they seem to have gone for millions of years without any DNA contributions from male salamanders and still have managed to persist. For some time, it has been assumed that they steal other species’ sperm, “which the males of sexual species deposit on leaves and twigs and the like. When this happens, it stimulates egg production and the borrowed species’ genetic information is sometimes incorporated into the genome of the unisexual salamanders, a process Read More ›