I found this interview on the Website of Brandon Vogt, a Catholic blogger and speaker who’s the Content Director for Bishop Robert Barron’s Word on Fire Catholic Ministries. Allow me to quote from Vogt’s introduction:

A few months ago, a man named Dave Rubin reached out to us at Word on Fire to ask if Bishop Barron would be open to an interview. (Apparently lots of Dave’s Twitter followers suggested the idea.)

To be honest, we didn’t know much about Dave at the time. But after some Googling, we discovered he’s a well-known comedian and host of the super popular “Rubin Report”, a show that airs directly through YouTube. “The Rubin Report” has over 350,000 subscribers and 100 million views. It’s one of the most popular YouTube channels in the world…
Dave is an interesting guy. One website describes him as a “rising media star” and “the voice of liberals who were mugged by progressives.” It says he’s “a 39-year-old pro-choice, pro-pot, recently gay-married atheist with a strong allergy to organized religion.”
In other words, the anti-Bishop Barron…

I encourage you to watch both parts of the interview. Bishop Barron did such a marvelous job. He was smart and eloquent, even when Dave pushed the discussion toward hot-button issues…

So, what do viewers think of this interview? Does anyone feel that the bishop made an interesting case for belief in God?

The British biologist J.B.S. Haldane is said to have remarked that the discovery of fossil rabbits in the Precambrian would falsify the theory of evolution. Over at Evolution News and Views, Dr. Cornelius Hunter has argued in a recent post that the sea anemone (whose genome turns out to be surprisingly similar to that of vertebrates) is “the genomic equivalent of Haldane’s Precambrian rabbit – a Precambrian genome had, err, all the complexity of species to come hundreds of millions of years later.” Apparently Dr. Hunter is under the impression that many of these ancestral genes would have been lying around unused for much of that time, for he goes on to triumphantly point out that “the idea of foresight is contradictory to evolutionary theory.” RIP, evolution? Not by a long shot.

An unfortunate misunderstanding

Dr. Hunter seems to have missed the whole point of the report that he linked to. A sentence toward the end of the report would have set him right, had he read it more carefully (emphases and square brackets are mine – VJT):

It’s surprising to find such a “high level of genomic complexity in a supposedly primitive animal such as the sea anemone,” [Dr. Eugene V.] Koonin [of the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) in Bethesda, Md.] told The Scientist. It implies that the ancestral animal “was already extremely highly complex, at least in terms of its genomic organization and regulatory and signal transduction circuits, if not necessarily morphologically.”

That’s right. Genomic complexity and morphological complexity are two completely different things. That was the take-home message of the report. It was also the message of the other report cited by Dr. Hunter:

Continue reading →

Over at Evolution News and Views, an article by Dr. Cornelius Hunter titled, Irony Alert: Michael Shermer on “When Facts Fail”, accuses evolutionists (and especially Shermer) of intransigence in the face of awkward facts which spoil their case. Shermer recently authored an article in Scientific American, in which he noted that “people seem to double down on their beliefs in the teeth of overwhelming evidence against them” because revising these beliefs threatens their worldview. Dr. Shermer proposed that the best way to persuade people to revise their erroneous beliefs is to convince them that dropping these beliefs will not require them to change their worldview. When people are reassured that their fundamental worldview is not at stake, they can them examine the evidence dispassionately. Dr. Hunter was not impressed: he maintains that evolutionists are leading offenders, when it comes to refusing to revise their beliefs.

Dr. Hunter points to trilobites as his star example of “facts that fail” to square with the alleged “evidence for evolution.” However, a recurring failing of Dr. Hunter’s criticisms is that they reveal a lack of familiarity with the scientific literature – especially the most recent writings on the issues he raises.

Continue reading →

Do any of the skeptics of skepticism think there is an alternative to science in medicine or engineering?

When confronted with unexplained mysteries, is incredulity a better stance than parsimony?

Is the invisible hand that constructs complex systems Adam Smith’s, or the hand of a deity?

Is nature regular or subject to caprice?

In popular parlance, “child abuser” is just about the worst thing you can call anyone. So you can imagine my shock when I read the latest comments on one of my own recent threads and found one commenter accusing another of child abuse – a charge he repeated in the Moderation thread. My astonishment grew when I read of a proposal in Moderation to ban child abusers from The Skeptical Zone, on the grounds that people who post porn are already banned, and child abuse is much, much worse.

And what was the alleged offense? Here it is: “admitting to using strawman arguments, fallacious reasoning, and false claims to destroy childrens’ ability to think rationally about certain scientific topics. That’s child abuse.” Except that the person accused made no such admission. Regardless of whether the arguments were fallacious or not, no deceit was involved. It was the accuser who attacked the arguments as fallacious and illogical, not the person he accused.

And what were the arguments about? In a nutshell, abiogenesis. The arguments were presented to a group of six-year-old children and their parents, in an attempt to make them see that the origin of life from non-living matter is astronomically improbable, that macroevolution (e.g. fish to bird) is also vanishingly improbable, and that Intelligent Design is the only rational inference. A detailed description of the presentation can be found here.

I’d like to make a couple of very brief points. First, the term “child abuse” can be defined in three ways. First, could be defined very broadly to mean behavior which actually causes severe and/or life-long physical or psychological damage to children. Second, it could be defined more narrowly to mean behavior which is intended to cause severe and/or life-long physical or psychological damage to children. Third, it could be defined as behavior which the vast majority of responsible people, at the present time, would agree causes severe and/or life-long physical or psychological damage to children.

The first definition is clearly ridiculous, as it would make all of our parents or grandparents child abusers. Think of passive smoking. Or think of spanking: fifty years ago, it was quite common for naughty children to get their little bottoms hit with a belt and sent to bed without supper. The second definition is also unsatisfactory, as it would exonerate parents who refused to take their dying child to a doctor, but took her to a quack faith healer instead: here, the parents didn’t mean to harm their child, but any sensible person would say that they should have known better. That leaves us with the third definition.

Continue reading →

In an earlier post I showed that ID is not anti-evolution. http://theskepticalzone.com/wp/intelligent-design-is-not-anti-evolution-2/

So is ID is not anti-evolution then what is being debated? Continue reading →

Dr. Stephen Meyer and Dr. Douglas Axe were recently interviewed by author and radio host Frank Turek on the significance of November’s Royal Society Meeting on evolution, in London. The two Intelligent Design advocates discussed what they see as the top five problems for evolutionary theory:

(i) gaps in the fossil record (in particular, the Cambrian explosion);
(ii) the lack of a naturalistic explanation for the origin of biological information;
(iii) the necessity of early mutations during embryonic development (which are invariably either defective or lethal) in order to generate new animal body types;
(iv) the existence of non-DNA epigenetic information controlling development (which means that you can’t evolve new animal body plans simply by mutating DNA); and
(v) the universal design intuition that we all share: functional coherence makes accidental invention fantastically improbable and hence physically impossible.

In today’s post, I’d like to focus on the third argument, which I consider to be the best of the bunch. The others are far less compelling.

Continue reading →

Creationists have no problem with sexual selection concepts while rejecting natural selection for the origin of biological life.

Sexual selection in fact would confirm YEC ideas on a fallen world desperately striving against decay in order to allow rime for God’s redemptive plan. Biology grasping at a marginal advantage to beat a dying/decay attrition. A arms race in survival.

Secxual selection claims are fine but once again are they accurate? Are they really done well by those who don’t do well in figuring out origins and living equations in biology? i think not!

i watch youtube videos , well done, on sundry creatures. Recently i saw ones on the Tasmanian devil and the hyaena. Surprising information but suggesting quickly clues.

Instead of a sexual selection going on in the episodes of creatures in mating I discovered instead the creatures always are striving/selecting to maintain the group/herd/nation in its strengh. So when selecting for mates its just a minor extra episode of what they do all the time. they just in sexual union continue to maintain the reasons for why their is strong.

Therefore its not a strange , instinct, desire to improve/maintain genes. its not that sophisticated. they just continue to aggressively desire strength in the whole group. they just do it in mating also. So its not a special thing but a continuum in a spectrum of maintaing the groups strength.

So I might say sexual selection doesn’t exist but only is a special case in a spectrum of staying strong.

This makes more sense, to me, then a segregated , special, drive for special mating designs.

I’d invite readers to have a look at this two-minute video, titled, “Humans have caused climate change for 180 years”:

Here’s an excerpt from an article in the ANU Reporter, dated 25 August 2016 (emphases mine):

An international research project has found human activity has been causing global warming for almost two centuries, proving human-induced climate change is not just a 20th century phenomenon.

Lead researcher Associate Professor Nerilie Abram from The Australian National University (ANU) said the study found warming began during the early stages of the Industrial Revolution and is first detectable in the Arctic and tropical oceans around the 1830s, much earlier than scientists had expected.

“It was an extraordinary finding,” said Associate Professor Abram, from the ANU Research School of Earth Sciences and ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science.

“It was one of those moments where science really surprised us. But the results were clear. The climate warming we are witnessing today started about 180 years ago.”

Continue reading →

colewd made a comment I found interesting:

We should also admit the major evolutionary transitions are poorly understood because they require significant new biological information.

We should educate them on what biological information is.

We should admit that the origin of biological information is poorly understood.

 

Continue reading →

Two articles exposing “fake science” claims have recently been published over at Evolution News and Views. One article attacks the fossil evidence for whale evolution, while the other seeks to discredit the claim that human and chimp DNA are 99% identical. Both articles suffer from serious scientific flaws.

“Fake science” Story No. 1: Whale evolution – too little time for it to happen?

Continue reading →

One of the densest Creationist tropes has to be ‘Common Design’. It is proposed as a direct competitor to Common Descent – template mediated copying of DNA – as an explanation for the high sequence similarity of two DNA segments. But what is actually held in common? If we look at a particular transposon sequence, and find it is in A and B but not C, and another that is in A but not B, etc, we can generally organise a set of such markers into a ‘tree’ structure, much as would be predicted by Common Descent. But no, we are assured that these apparent markers are in fact part of the ‘design’. If A is a whale, B a pig and C a deer, there is something that is vital for the function of both whale and pig but is definitely not required in deer. Instead, a sequence which, in whale and pig, sits either side of the insertion, runs uninterrupted in the deer. That, too, is functional, supposedly, even though the insert would give a product which was the A/B one with a gap and possibly a frameshift, if it were transcribed.

But this is held to be the case even if the sequence, with and without transposon, is never transcribed. A sequence that does nothing, and organises hierarchically exactly as would be expected of common descent, is nonetheless functional … because?

Continue reading →

Let me clarify that by saying that I mean a theory that purports to be a scientific theory, that makes testable predictions (“if ID was correct we should observe…, if ID were not correct, we should not observe…”) and is an alternative explanation for the diversity and extent of the pattern of life we see on Earth. Continue reading →

Edge‘s big question for 2017 is: “What scientific term or concept should be more widely known?” The compilation of answers (205 in all) makes for fascinating reading. For his part, Professor Jerry Coyne has nominated physical determinism as “a concept that everyone should understand and appreciate.” Unfortunately, Coyne’s defense of this concept leaves a lot to be desired. As I’ll argue below, even if you reject interactionist dualism (as most scientists do), you can still believe in libertarian free will.

Professor Coyne begins by mis-defining determinism as the notion that “all matter and energy in the universe, including what’s in our brain, obey the laws of physics.” I know of no philosopher who defines determinism in this way. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, for instance, roughly defines causal determinism as “the idea that every event is necessitated by antecedent events and conditions together with the laws of nature.” Coyne says nothing about antecedent conditions, and fails to even mention the notion of necessitation.

To illustrate what’s wrong with Coyne’s definition, I’ll use an analogy which is often cited by philosophers: the game of chess. All the pieces obey the rules (or laws) of the game, but those laws don’t tell the player where to move the pieces. Even if the pieces were capable of moving themselves without the help of an outside agent, nothing in the rules of the game would determine the moves that followed. That’s because the rules of chess merely constrain the set of moves which are allowed, without determining the movement of any of the pieces. What Coyne needs to show is that the laws of physics are more than mere constraints, and that for any given collection of molecules, they narrow down the set of possible outcomes to just one, and no more.

Continue reading →

Certain commentators seem surprisingly agitated about pursuing the idea that there is no ‘theory of evolution’. Some mean there is no single theory, although on examination the things they see as separate are frequently simply different components of the same broad process. Or, alternatively, they are referring to evolution in other senses, or in non-biological contexts. Others say there is no theory at all, as if that against which they argue does not even exist.

A theme has emerged that TSZ is somehow suppressing their concerns. So, in the spirit of suppressive dictatorships everywhere, here is a thread for people to say whatever they want about this vital topic. Hopefully without pasting in vast swathes of something already posted elsewhere – a link will suffice.

Continue reading →

This video is doing the rounds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lA8rFGVFxhc

To those that believe in such things as ghosts and poltergeists (Clive @ UD I’m looking at you), does this video demonstrate that the realm of ghosts is real? If not, why not?

To the believers, is it possibly a real video or must it have been faked?

To those that don’t believe in such things, has this video converted you? Why not?

Is it relevant that the video was sourced from the Daily Mail? Does the messenger matter?

As the Christmas season is drawing to a close, I thought I might put up a post with some useful links for people wishing to argue for and against the credibility of the Christmas narratives in the gospels of Matthew and Luke, and let readers draw their own conclusions.

On the skeptics’ side:

The Star of Bethlehem: A Skeptical View by Aaron Adair. Onus Books, 2013.

The Nativity: A Critical Examination by Jonathan M.S. Pearce. Onus Books, 2012.

For Jonathan M.S. Pearce’s recent posts on the Nativity, see here:

Debunking the Nativity: The Gospel Sources
Debunking the Nativity: The Virgin Birth
Debunking the Nativity: The Mistranslation of “Virgin”
Debunking the Nativity: The Male Genome
Debunking the Nativity: Contradictory Genealogies
Debunking the Nativity: To Bethlehem or Not to Bethlehem
Debunking the Nativity: Boney M
Debunking the Nativity – Quirinius vs Herod and the Ten Year Gap

On the believers’ side:

Continue reading →

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic

Researchers use the term stochastic systems to describe the physical systems in which the values of parameters, measurements, expected input, and disturbances are uncertain

Would we expect different designers to create different designs? Does the same designer ever design competing solutions? Why is that? What factors inform a design decision and outcome?

Outside of hard determinism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_determinism) isn’t everything a stohastic process?

Apparently theists do not look kindly upon liars but some don’t understand why atheists feel the same. A commenter on this site writes:

Most [atheists] appear to despise lies, falsehoods, and misrepresentations as much as any theist. I’m just a bit fuzzy on why.

So I thought I’d look to their leader for support for this. And it seems to me theists are happy to lie when it suits their agenda:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/mar/17/pope-africa-condoms-aids

“The traditional teaching of the church has proven to be the only failsafe way to prevent the spread of HIV/Aids.”

That is from the head theist at the time, Pope Benedict XVI.

Continue reading →