Last year, I reviewed Daniel Friedmann’s best-seller, The Genesis One Code, which argued that the Bible, when properly interpreted, teaches that the universe is 13.74 billion years old – which is about as old as scientists currently believe it to be (13.798 billion years). Friedmann’s book also made a number of scientifically falsifiable claims – including the striking prediction that the Earth would turn out to be 9 billion years old and to pre-date the solar system (which sounds unlikely but just might turn out to be true). Friedmann’s scientific background as a professional engineer with a master’s degree in engineering physics who is also the CEO of a leading aerospace company undoubtedly lent his book extra credibility. Friedmann’s second Read More ›

The concept of information is central to intelligent design.  In previous discussions, we have examined the basic concept of information, we have considered the question of when information arises, and we have briefly dipped our toes into the waters of Shannon information.  In the present post, I put forward an additional discussion regarding the latter, both so that the resource is out there front and center and also to counter some of the ambiguity and potential confusion surrounding the Shannon metric. As I have previously suggested, much of the confusion regarding “Shannon information” arises from the unfortunate twin facts that (i) the Shannon measurement has come to be referred to by the word “information,” and (ii) many people fail to Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: what seems like a counter-intuitive move against survival, within animals, some cells are fated to die from the triggering of an elaborate cell death program, known as apoptosis. Now, Sakamaki et. al., have honed in on understanding the evolution of caspase-8, a key cell death initiator molecule that was first identified in humans. By performing the most extensive evolutionary analysis of the Casp8 protein to date, they found that Casp8 activity arose very early (more than 500 MYA), and is universally conserved throughout evolution, demonstrating its functional significance throughout the animal kingdom. … Thus, the cell death toolkit is of core importance to animal evolution, with cell death occurring to eliminate unnecessary, non-functional, unhealthy, or dangerous cells from Read More ›

Dear Readers, In recent days we have been working on our “Darwinian Debating Devices” series.  Links to each entry in the series are set forth below. CALL FOR COMMENTS:  UD is opening up the series to comments from our readers.  When you see a Darwinist using faulty reasoning, logical fallacies or otherwise unfair argument, please bring it to our attention, and we will consider it for addition to the series.  Is predict we will have a fairly lengthy list before we’re done.  Here’s a challenge to start:  Does anyone have an example of a Darwinist using the following fallacy: “No True Scotsman.” REQUEST FOR CATEGORIZATION:  When debating Darwinists it is often helpful to call them out on the exact type Read More ›

Perhaps the most deep-rooted Darwinist debate tactic is hyperskepticism. While I have done a briefing note on this, I like HeKS’ nice summary raised a little while back, in an Oct 9th 2014  remark that deserves to be headlined: Normal skepticism is generally equitable and a good thing. It applies a reasonably consistent demand for warrant across the board before some claim of fact or some argument is accepted. It prevents one from being credulous, but allows one to believe what is reasonable to believe once one has received a reasonable amount of supporting evidence and/or argumentation. There’s obviously some subjectivity here in terms of what one person considers to be a sufficient or reasonable amount of evidence or argumentation Read More ›

The Straw Man tactic is especially reprehensible, because it is fundamentally dishonest. Wikipedia describes the tactic as follows A straw man is a common type of argument and is an informal fallacy based on the misrepresentation of an opponent’s argument. To be successful, a straw man argument requires that the audience be ignorant or uninformed of the original argument. The so-called typical “attacking a straw man” argument creates the illusion of having completely refuted or defeated an opponent’s proposition by covertly replacing it with a different proposition (i.e., “stand up a straw man”) and then to refute or defeat that false argument (“knock down a straw man”) instead of the original proposition In this post we took down a straw Read More ›

In this post Dr. Torley engages in a philosophical discussion about the nature of God. In the comment thread we have Graham2 saying: This site lost any claim to the practice of impartial science long long ago. And william spearshake says: UD, which purports to be in support of the “science” of ID, supposedly not religiously based, loses what little credibility it has when it’s moderator continues to allow articles that are purely religious. It should be noted for the record that Dr. Torley did not start this discussion. He was responding to a post by one of the world’s most prominent materialist atheists, Jerry Coyne. I did a quick check through the comment thread to Dr. Coyne’s post, and Read More ›