The writer, philosopher and home-maker Lydia McGrew makes some very sensible points about Intelligent Design arguments in a recent post on her blog, titled, Special agent intention as an explanation (May 12, 2014), which cogently rebuts the claim (made by some critics) that ID rejects the notion of God as the necessary Cause of created things. She writes: All Christians believe that God made the universe and sustains the universe. All Christians also believe that God sometimes does things that in some sense “go beyond” making and sustaining the universe. We usually call those miracles. Some have argued that, if a particular “going beyond” was “front-loaded” into the initial conditions of the Big Bang, it shouldn’t be considered a miracle. Read More ›

I previously mentioned an upcoming “Emergence of Life” course that folks here might be interested in.  Details here. The course has now been scheduled and starts this Monday, July 14, 2014, at Coursera.  You can find the course here. If you decide to take the course, I encourage professionalism and civility in any forum interactions with other students and staff, in what can potentially be a controversial subject. As I stated before: Will the course have some holes?  No doubt.  Will it answer some of the key issues that have been raised about the cause of the Cambrian Explosion, the infusion of information necessary for the emergence of different forms, how complex functional structures can arise via natural processes?  Unlikely.  Yet Read More ›

A food-for-thought lecture: Thoughts? END PS: Kindly note this (and the discussion in the original post here with onward discussion and video here) on the problem of neural networks, computation vs contemplation and trying to get North by heading West: