From Evolution News & Views: What can we hope to learn about animal minds? Consciousness (a mind) perceives and acts on information. But there are at least two — more basic and probably unconscious qualities — that distinguish life from non-life, and seem to act by processing information: self-preservation and adaptability. Life forms constantly try to preserve themselves in a living state — that is, they try to survive. They adapt their methods as needed, whenever possible. A rock falls from a high cliff and breaks; a cat has somehow learned to relax, turn in mid-air, and land on his feet. Or consider Slijper’s goat and Faith the dog, both of whom, born without forelegs, adapted to a lifestyle that Read More ›

We didn’t think anyone would be so honest about it, but get this from Quanta Magazine: As things stand, the known elementary particles, codified in a 40-year-old set of equations called the “Standard Model,” lack a sensible pattern and seem astonishingly fine-tuned for life. Arkani-Hamed and other particle physicists, guided by their belief in naturalness, have spent decades devising clever ways to fit the Standard Model into a larger, natural pattern. But time and again, ever-more-powerful particle colliders have failed to turn up proof of their proposals in the form of new particles and phenomena, increasingly pointing toward the bleak and radical prospect that naturalness is dead. … Arkani-Hamed considers his tendency to speculate a personal weakness. “This is not Read More ›

But many Christians in science do not seemingly want to confront that fact. Can they not face the ensuing responsibilities? Further to “How BioLogos describes the intelligent design community, commenter Ted Davis, a Biologian, replies (he follows up with a challenge for yer news hack, as per below): I’ll follow it with a second question for you, Denyse: Why do you continue to whip on the ASA? Is your complaint simply that the ASA is not an advocacy organization, such as UD or TDI or AiG or BL? If your complaint is that there are too many proponents of evolution in the ASA, then persuade a few hundred ID supporters to join the ASA and you’ll change the facts. … Read More ›

If a pop playwright does see that, things are  surely changing, big time. In his new play, The Hard Problem, British playwright Tom Stoppard, writer for Shakespeare in Love proposes the following plot: Above all don’t use the word good as though it meant something in evolutionary science. Hilary, a young psychology researcher at a brain-science institute, is nursing a private sorrow and a troubling question at work, where psychology and biology meet. If there is nothing but matter, what is consciousness? This is ‘the hard problem’ which puts Hilary at odds with her colleagues who include her first mentor Spike, her boss Leo and the billionaire founder of the institute, Jerry. Is the day coming when the computer and Read More ›

From: Imagine a world of religions that naturalism might indeed be able to explain: Regarding the phenomenon of religion, here are two curious things: When naturalists (materialists) study religion, they get so many basic facts wrong, one wonders why they bother, except to bolster their own view. Second, they mainly study “revealed” religion, where the world is interpreted through a divine message (or some would say, an acute insight), revealing a higher order of reality. The recognized principal purpose of religion in that case is understanding of reality, not control over it. But it was not always so. Closing this series on the human mind, I would like to take you on a journey back to a time much closer Read More ›

Here at Evolution News & Views: Another claim we hear, from celebrity skeptic Michael Shermer for example, is that science — and he of course includes Darwinian mechanisms for evolution in that category — is objective knowledge that will save us from superstition. But in the United States, a 2007-2008 Baylor University survey reported that traditional Christian religion greatly decreases credulity, as measured by beliefs in such things as dreams, Bigfoot, UFOs, haunted houses, communicating with the dead and astrology (Ch. 15, “Credulity: Who Believes in Bigfoot”). They found that self-identified theological liberals and irreligious people were far more likely to believe in such things than other Americans. More.

In my recent post, On the impossibility of replicating the cell: A problem for naturalism, I argued that naturalism, even if true, cannot be shown to be true or even probable – in which case, I asked, why should rational people believe it? The responses of my critics reveal a real poverty of thinking on the part of those who believe evolution to be a totally unguided process. The “naturalism” that I criticized in my post was not methodological naturalism (which makes no claims about the nature of reality, but merely states that non-naturalistic explanations of reality don’t properly count as scientific ones). My target was a more robust kind of naturalism, which I termed “scientific naturalism”: namely, “the view Read More ›

I have sometimes had the idea that the best way for Intelligent Design advocates to make their case would be to build a giant museum replicating the complexity of the cell on a large scale, so that people could see for themselves how the cell worked and draw their own conclusions. Recently I came across an old quote from biochemist Michael Denton’s Evolution: A Theory in Crisis (Adler and Adler, 1985) which put paid to that idea, but which raised an interesting philosophical puzzle for people who adhere to scientific naturalism – which I define here as the view that there is nothing outside the natural world, by which I mean the sum total of everything that behaves in accordance Read More ›

I want to draw readers’ attention to a great debate that recently took place at the University of Texas at Dallas, between Blake Giunta, the founder of a recently-developed online apologetics resource called “TreeSearch“, and Justin Schieber, the host of the Reasonable Doubts radio show and podcast. Blake posted a postmortem review of the debate at his website. That, along with a video of the debate itself, can be found here. I highly recommend watching this debate for yourself and reading the summary over at the TreeSearch website. Blake is an up-and-coming intellectual who is supportive of ID (this comes out in the debate) and has shown himself to be widely read, thoughtful and reflective, and winsome in his approach. I am sure we Read More ›

Within the UK, we have a large number of vocal and influential people who want to exclude all expressions of biblical Christianity from education, whether state funded or independent. Their first target is to banish the concept of creation and replace it with the exclusive teaching of evolutionary theory. These crusaders present themselves as speaking for Enlightenment science and they make much of the supposed consensus within the scientific community about these issues. Their latest success has come with the Department for Education (DfE) requiring church schools converting to academies to adhere strictly to the evolutionary account of origins when teaching science. The new development has been warmly welcomed by the British Humanist Association’s Head of Public Affairs Pavan Dhaliwal: Read More ›