In a recent journal article titled, God, Gould, and the Panda’s Thumb (Religions 2023, 14(8), 1006; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel14081006), former philosophy professor Stephen Dilley, who is currently a Senior Fellow with Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture, takes aim at an influential argument for evolution formulated by the late paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002) in his best-selling book, The Panda’s Thumb (Norton and Company: New York and London, 1980). Sadly, Professor Dilley manages to completely misconstrue Gould’s argument, which isn’t about God at all, but about engineering. This can be shown by the fact that even if we delete the two brief references to God and the single reference to an omnipotent creator and replace them with “an engineer,” and if we replace the reference to God’s “wisdom and power” with the term “skill,” then Gould’s argument still makes perfect sense. I maintain that Gould’s use of theological terms is a mere embellishment which obscures the central point he is making: namely, that mere tinkering (i.e. a series of step-by-step natural changes involving the adaptation of pre-existing parts) does not warrant an inference to intelligent design, as it requires no foresight. The panda’s “thumb” works very well, but it appears to be the product of tinkering and shows no signs of foresight on the part of whatever produced it, in the way it is put together. Instead, it is best described as a “contraption,” adapted from “a limited set of available components” via a series of natural transformations, which “follows automatically from simple hypertrophy [i.e. a massive increase in size] of the [panda’s] sesamoid bone.”
Continue reading →

The last few weeks have seen the release of some excellent videos by both defenders and skeptics of the authenticity and reliability of the Gospels. In this post, I’ve decided to collect the best recent articles and videos I’ve seen on both sides, and put them all in one place, where readers can weigh up the evidence for themselves. My work features recent videos on the “names statistics” argument for the reliability of the Gospels, highlighting the recent work of two skeptics, Professor Brian Blais and Dr. Kamil Gregor (who appear in Paulogia’s videos) and a critique by Christian apologist Dr. Lydia McGrew, as well as a five-part series on a new book titled, The Historical Tell: Patterns of Eyewitness Testimony in the Gospel of Luke and Acts by Dr. Luuk Van de Weghe, a New Testament scholar who defends both the authenticity and reliability of Luke’s accounts. My own comments on each episode of the series, in which Dr. Van de Weghe is interviewed by Cameron Bertuzzi on his Capturing Christianity blog, are also shown below. Enjoy!

Continue reading →

Scottish-American historian Niall Ferguson, who is the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and and a senior fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University, has written an article on Bloomberg titled, “Global Population Crash Isn’t Sci-Fi Anymore.” I have to say it’s about as convincing a Doomsday scenario as I’ve ever seen. After identifying the various causes of global fertility decline (the increasing social pursuit of individualistic goals; the empowerment of women, who tend to postpone motherhood in order to achieve career success; the rising cost of raising and educating a child; lower rates of sexual activity among the young as smartphones, economic uncertainties and the stresses of modern life combine to depress people’s sexual appetites; more careful use of contraceptives by young people; declining religiosity due to the rise of secularization; the worldwide failure of government attempts to raise fertility rates; the global trend – America is one of the few outliers – towards easier access to abortion; a 50% fall in global sperm counts over the past 50 years, which is believed to be caused by factors such as “bad food, bad air and bad lifestyle”; increased social tolerance of euthanasia and assisted suicide) and explaining why the rise in international migration will increase the spread of global plagues and stymie attempts to tackle climate change, thereby leading to yet more immigration from exposed countries, Ferguson points out that when it happens, the global decline in population will be precipitous: from around 10 billion in 2100 to less than 2 billion by the year 2400, or a fivefold drop over the space of ten generations. His conclusion is a depressing one:

Continue reading →

Hi everyone. Today’s post is a melange, with a bit of this and a bit of that. There’s an article from The Washington Post on a new piece of the jigsaw puzzle that gives us a better understanding of how life began, plus links to two opposing articles on the origin of COVID-19, a short video by Dr. Dan McClellan on why Moses and the Exodus are probably not historical, and an interview with Dr. Amy-Jill Levine, who is Rabbi Stanley M. Kessler Distinguished Professor of New Testament and Jewish Studies at Hartford International University for Religion and Peace, on about we can know about Jesus. Enjoy, and please feel free to comment as you wish.

Continue reading →

Sara Jayne is a cardiac diagnostic imaging specialist with over 20 years’ experience in the medical field. After being diagnosed with a life-threatening autoimmune disease, she underwent a profound near-death experience (her second), which turned her life around. She now works in Mind-Body Medicine and Applied Neuroscience, delivering mindfulness-based health & wellbeing programs, workshops and retreats. On a recent episode of Passion Harvest Podcast, Sara Jayne shared her story with the host, Luisa, who had the very good sense to let her speak without interruption. Sara Jayne’s Near-Death Experience testimony (which begins at 18:00) was the most beautiful I’ve ever seen. I was impressed by her modesty, her frank admission that what she saw makes no medical sense, and the powerful transformative effect her experience has had on her life. What do readers think?

Continue reading →

An open fiberglass float pool at the Laureate Institute for Brain Research in Tulsa, Oklahoma, USA. Image courtesy of Justin S. Feinstein , Sahib S. Khalsa, Hung-wen Yeh, Colleen Wohlrab, W. Kyle Simmons, Murray B. Stein, Martin P. Paulus and Wikipedia.

Gender identity is defined by Encyclopedia Britannica as “an individual’s self-conception as a man or woman or as a boy or girl or as some combination of man/boy and woman/girl or as someone fluctuating between man/boy and woman/girl or as someone outside those categories altogether.” While it is thought to have a genetic component, no genes have yet been found to underpin it, and a recent scientific paper titled, “Brain Sex Differences Related to Gender Identity Development: Genes or Hormones?” (International Journal of Molecular Sciences, 2020 Mar 19;21(6):2123. doi: 10.3390/ijms21062123. PMID: 32204531; PMCID: PMC7139786) modestly concludes that “to provide reliable conclusions, more data are needed.” Anyway, what interests me as a philosopher is whether gender identity is something purely subjective (like my perception of the color of a bank note), intersubjective (like the value that we as a society collectively assign to pieces of paper we call bank notes), or objective (like the length or mass of a bank note when it is at rest). So I came up with an interesting thought experiment involving a hitman, post-traumatic amnesia and a sensory deprivation tank. (Students of philosophy will notice the resemblance of this case to Avicenna’s “floating man” thought experiment, but my purpose is altogether different.) Curious? Read on.

Continue reading →

Introduction
Fr. Spitzer’s Proof of the Unity of God
The Trinity explained by the act of looking at a bottle
The Incarnation
The central paradoxes of the Trinity and the Incarnation

(NOTE: I’ve included the above podcast, which is divided into five sections, for the benefit of those who would prefer to listen to what I’ve written, rather than read it. People who prefer to read my post are welcome to continue scrolling down.)

Fr. Robert Spitzer S.J. is a Catholic priest in the Jesuit order and a retired President of Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington. Currently, he is President of the Magis Center of Reason and Faith and the Spitzer Center of Ethical Leadership. As well as having a Bachelor of Business Administration degree, Fr. Spitzer has a Master’s degree in Philosophy, a Master of Divinity degree, a Master of Theology degree and a Doctor of Philosophy degree. He has published more than ten books, as well as dozens of articles, and he has appeared on several national television programs, including Larry King Live, The History Channel in “God and The Universe,” The Today Show, the PBS series “Closer to the Truth,” and the Hugh Hewitt Show. So when I came across a Youtube video featuring Fr. Spitzer being interviewed by Lila Rose (a pro-life activist and convert to Catholicism) titled, You’ve Never Heard the Trinity Explained Like THIS, I was intrigued.

Continue reading →

Hi everyone, and Happy New Year! After having five enjoyable days off with my family, I’ll be returning to work this evening. In the meantime, I thought I’d present viewers of The Skeptical Zone with three interesting items for their perusal, as a New Year’s gift. The first is a thoughtfully argued essay on the problem of evil with reference to the atrocities committed by Hamas, titled, Where was God on October 7? A Different Perspective (The Times of Israel, January 1, 2024) by Professor Benjamin Porat, an Associate Professor at the Hebrew University Faculty of Law and a senior fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute. The second is an article titled, Kurt Gödel, his mother and the argument for life after death by Alexander Englert at Aeon Essays (January 2, 2024), which discusses Gödel’s reasons for believing in an afterlife, which he set forth in four letters he wrote to his mother in 1961. The third is a two-on-two debate held on December 22, 2023, in which two Christians (Jimmy Akin and Caleb Jackson) debated two atheists (John Loftus and Dr. Darren Slade) on whether Jesus was born of a virgin. The debate was hosted by Cameron Bertuzzi, of Capturing Christianity. Readers can view the debate below (see the Youtube video).
Continue reading →

It’s been a long time since I’ve posted here. However, I recently did a podcast with the Bob Murphy Show that I think many of you will be interested in. Here we discuss Intelligent Design, evolution, Darwinian and non-Darwinian forms of evolution, and causation. I hope you all enjoy it!

Bob Murphy Show Episode 303

2024! I’m almost glad to see the back of 2023 but have little expectation of good news and I’m finding it hard to be optimistic. Is there anyone still reading The Skeptical Zone that can suggest something that could happen that might help me regain a bit of that lost optimism?

Nonetheless, Happy New Year to everyone.

When one is assessing the credibility of a religion, impact matters: has it been a force for good or for evil? In his Sermon on the Mount, Jesus taught his followers how to discern false prophets: “You will know them by their fruits” (Matthew 7:16, NASB). This is a test that can be applied not only to prophets, but to entire religions. What I am proposing in this essay is that while a religion which makes our world a better place may not necessarily be true on that account, its positive influence on the course of human history at least renders it worthy of consideration. On the other hand, we can probably disregard the truth claims of a religion which leaves the world no better than it was before, and ignore altogether the claims of a religion which actually makes the world a worse place in which to live. So the question we need to ask, before examining the intellectual claims of Christianity, is: has Christianity made the world a better place?

Continue reading →

Dr. Jeffrey Tripp has a PhD in New Testament and Early Christianity. He is also the author of a text titled, Direct Internal Quotation in the Gospel of John. His academic publications can be found here. In this interview with Derek Lambert of Mythvision, Dr. Tripp critiques the argument from undesigned coincidences developed by Christian apologist Dr. Lydia McGrew in her book, Hidden in Plain View: Undesigned Coincidences in the Gospels and Acts. I have to say that Dr. Tripp’s rebuttal of Dr. McGrew’s argument is about the best I’ve seen yet: it’s fair, thorough, courteous and scholarly. What do viewers think?

Abstract
Scientists have grappled with reconciling biological evolution1,2 with the immutable laws of the Universe defined by physics. These laws underpin life’s origin, evolution and the development of human culture and technology, yet they do not predict the emergence of these phenomena.

Evolutionary theory explains why some things exist and others do not through the lens of selection. To comprehend how diverse, open-ended forms can emerge from physics without an inherent design blueprint, a new approach to understanding and quantifying selection is necessary3,4,5.

We present assembly theory (AT) as a framework that does not alter the laws of physics, but redefines the concept of an ‘object’ on which these laws act. AT conceptualizes objects not as point particles, but as entities defined by their possible formation histories. This allows objects to show evidence of selection, within well-defined boundaries of individuals or selected units.

We introduce a measure called assembly (A), capturing the degree of causation required to produce a given ensemble of objects. This approach enables us to incorporate novelty generation and selection into the physics of complex objects. It explains how these objects can be characterized through a forward dynamical process considering their assembly.

By reimagining the concept of matter within assembly spaces, AT provides a powerful interface between physics and biology. It discloses a new aspect of physics emerging at the chemical scale, whereby history and causal contingency influence what exists.

Link

Phil Halper (aka SkydivePhil) has produced a hard-hitting new video titled, “Atheism’s Best Argument? The Problem of Animal Suffering & The Neuroscience of Pain,” in conjunction with philosopher of consciousness Ken Williford, neuroscientist David Rudrauf, pain expert Perry Fuchs, as well as ethicists Peter Singer and Mark Bernstein, and philosopher Joe Schmid and Within Reason host Alex O’Connor (the artist formerly known as cosmic skeptic). Here’s a brief excerpt from the video’s description:

The problem of animal suffering (a version of the problem of evil) has recently been described as the biggest problem for Christianity. However, a new paper in the International Journal for Philosophy of Religion suggests that the problem is far worse than imagined. Here, we explain why and counter attempts by theists to reply.

I’ll be putting out a TSZ post on the problem of evil later this year. In the meantime, I’d like to ask viewers what they think of SkydivePhil’s latest video. Comment is welcome.

Recently, some prominent defenders of the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin have produced a spate of online videos promoting their point of view. We’ll have a look at two of these below. At first blush, they sounded pretty convincing – especially their attempts to debunk the carbon-14 dating for the Shroud to somewhere between 1260 and 1390. I then did some online research, and I came across some very convincing rebuttals of popular pro-Shroud arguments. Interestingly, these rebuttals were made by a Catholic science teacher named Hugh Farey, a current former editor of the British Society for the Turin Shroud newsletter, and a former Shroud believer. I was highly impressed with Hugh Farey’s eloquence as a speaker. Shroud believers will find his arguments devastating. I post them here for readers’ interest.

5 Popular Arguments for the Shroud of Turin Debunked

Continue reading →

Yesterday I saw someone joking online about how if you apply dimensional analysis to fuel efficiency, you end up with an area. Why? Because fuel efficiency is expressed (in Canada and Europe, anyway) as liters per 100 kilometers. The liter is a unit of volume, or length³. The kilometer is a unit of length. If you divide length³ by length, you end up with length², or area. (Similar reasoning applies to American-style fuel efficiency expressed as miles per gallon.) Continue reading →

We’re all familiar with déjà vu — the false sense that what we’re experiencing right now is something we’ve already lived through in the past. Continue reading →

Wanted to share this interesting article in Aeon on human gestures and the extent to which they are universal vs culture-specific:

Gesture talks

Abstract

Phenotype robustness, defined as the average mutational robustness of all the genotypes that map to a given phenotype, plays a key role in facilitating neutral exploration of novel phenotypic variation by an evolving population. By applying results from coding theory, we prove that the maximum phenotype robustness occurs when genotypes are organized as bricklayer’s graphs, so-called because they resemble the way in which a bricklayer would fill in a Hamming graph. The value of the maximal robustness is given by a fractal continuous everywhere but differentiable nowhere sums-of-digits function from number theory. Interestingly, genotype–phenotype maps for RNA secondary structure and the hydrophobic-polar (HP) model for protein folding can exhibit phenotype robustness that exactly attains this upper bound. By exploiting properties of the sums-of-digits function, we prove a lower bound on the deviation of the maximum robustness of phenotypes with multiple neutral components from the bricklayer’s graph bound, and show that RNA secondary structure phenotypes obey this bound. Finally, we show how robustness changes when phenotypes are coarse-grained and derive a formula and associated bounds for the transition probabilities between such phenotypes.

Source