Feedback from this site has proven most valuable, when constructing worksheets for the Science classroom,
I have attempted a new tack – by bearding the creationist lion in the classroom den.
I offer the following for everyone’s perusal.
I welcome correction or suggestions for improvement.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/djr9c4e2lymsb33/Irreducible%20complexity%20of%20photosynthesis.docx?dl=0
with best and grateful regards
Today, I’m going to start looking at chapter 5 of Dr. Edward Feser’s Five Proofs of the Existence of God. I thought I’d begin with Feser’s take on Divine foreknowledge and free will. To cut a long story short: Feser is a predestinationist who professes at the same time to believe that humans possess genuine free will. In order to reconcile these beliefs, he proposes an analogy which at first seems plausible, but which ultimately collapses because it completely ignores our personal relationship with our Creator. To make matters worse, Feser holds that God knows everything that happens in this world, non-propositionally. He proposes another analogy to explain how this might be, but at most, it merely explains how God might know creatures; it fails to explain how He knows what they get up to. I conclude that not only is Feser’s account of God’s foreknowledge incoherent, but his account of how God knows any fact whatsoever about the world is also unintelligible.
This will be a much shorter post than my last one, so there’s no need to crack open a beer (at least, not yet). I’ll explain the picture of Mia Farrow shortly.
On Thursday, I received two books which I had previously ordered from Amazon: Five Proofs of the Existence of God by philosopher Edward Feser, and The Resurrection: A Critical Inquiry by Michael Alter, a Jewish author who claims to have discovered no less than 120 contradictions in the New Testament accounts of Jesus’ Resurrection. I’ve also ordered Did Jesus Really Rise From The Dead?: A Surgeon-Scientist Examines the Evidence by Dr. Thomas Miller (a surgeon who is also the author of more than 200 scientific papers and the editor of three textbooks on surgical physiology), but that book hasn’t arrived yet. I’m going to blog about all of these books, but today, I’d like to begin by discussing Dr. Edward Feser’s book. Just to be clear: Feser’s five proofs are not the same as St. Thomas Aquinas’ Five Ways. They are taken from the writings of five different philosophers: Aristotle, Plotinus, Augustine, Aquinas and Leibniz. Feser refers to the arguments put forward by Aristotle and Plotinus, in particular, as cosmological or “First Cause” arguments, although Aquinas also advances a First Cause argument of his own. Leibniz argues to the existence of an ultimate explanation for the existence of contingent beings, using the Principle of Sufficient Reason. Augustine’s argument is the odd one out: it seeks to establish the existence of a necessarily existing intellect which grasps all abstract objects.
Feser’s book has received glowing reviews from four professors of philosophy, one of whom (J.P. Moreland) described it as “a must-read for anyone interested in natural theology.” Over at Secular Outpost, Bradley Bowen seems to agree. He concludes Part 1 of his ongoing review of Feser’s book as follows:
I don’t know at this point whether any of Feser’s arguments are good or bad, valid or invalid, sound or unsound, but even if they are all weak and defective arguments, I am still very grateful to Feser for providing a case for God that meets some basic intellectual requirements for making a reasonable case for God. Unlike the cases for God by Geisler and Kreeft, Feser’s case is NOT a Steaming Pile of Crap, and it is a great pleasure to consider a case that at least has the potential to be a reasonable and intelligent case for God.
Instead of reviewing Feser’s book from start to finish, I’m going to begin with the final chapter, where Feser refutes eighteen common objections to the arguments he presents for the existence of God. Philosopher Stephen T. Davis described this chapter as a gem, adding that “it alone is worth the price of this excellent work.” I’m going to enumerate these objections and quote some very brief excerpts from Feser’s replies. As we’ll see, most of these objections are puerile and idiotic, but a couple of them are not so ridiculous, and warrant further examination.
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Have you ever tried writing palindromes? How about writing phrases that can be read the same way in either direction? Here are some examples:
A man, a plan, a canal: Panama
Live not on evil
Was it a car or a cat I saw
These sentences were no doubt designed…
Can you imagine writing a book that can be read forwards and backwards containing 2 different stories that made sense? Not an easy task…
Watch the video and pay special attention to the following examples:
Another discussion of objective morality has broken out, so I thought I would provide a home for it.
Highlights from Gallup News:
-38% say God created man in present form, lowest in 35 years
-Same percentage say humans evolved, but God guided the process
-Less-educated Americans more likely to believe in creationism
Higher education levels are associated with less support for creationism and higher levels of belief in the evolutionary explanation for human origins.
http://news.gallup.com/poll/210956/belief-creationist-view-humans-new-low.aspx
Search is a central term in the work of Dr. Dr. William Dembski jr, Dr. Winston Ewert, and Dr. Robert Marks II (DEM): it appears in the title of a couple of papers written by at least two of the authors, and it is mentioned hundreds of times in their textbook “Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics“. Strangely – and in difference from the other central term information, it is not defined in this textbook, and neither is search problem or search algorithm. Luckily, dozens of examples of searches are given. I took a closer look to find out what DEM see as the search problem in the “Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics” and how their model differs from those used by other mathematicians and scientists.
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From the Washington Post:
Why it costs so much to be poor in America
Bank of America’s new fees for customers with low balances are one of many penalties people pay for being poor.
Here are some quantitative reflections on “Uncommon Descent” (UD) and “The Skeptical Zone” (TSZ) in 2017. I cannot stress enough the quantity bit, nothing is said about the quality of posts and comments.
Joe Felsenstein recently posted a rebuttal of a critique of Fisher’s fundamental theorem of natural selection (FTNS). The authors, Basener and Sanford, argue that if new mutation (missing from the original FTNS) is taken into account, the theorem shows that Darwinism is impossible rather than inevitable. I agree with each point of Joe’s rebuttal.
Yet, I think that no discussion of this topic is complete without explaining that Fisher’s view, and more generally the original Modern Synthesis, is inadequate precisely because of the rejection of mutation-limited dynamics.
What is The Skeptical Zone, William Basener and John Sanford? Why should you care?
The Skeptical Zone is where a couple of distinguished biologists, Joe Felsenstein and Michael Lynch, have dignified a recently published article of yours with a response. That is all you need to know. If they had responded on the back of a cereal box instead, providing you with a form to clip, then it would have behooved you to clip the form, fill it out, and send it, along with a self-addressed, stamped envelope, to their post office box in Battle Creek, Michigan.
Of course, I am dating myself — and also you. That is just the point. You ought to know that, even as the computer enables studies that were impossible when Ronald Fisher dubbed a not-so-fundamental result of his the Fundamental Theorem of Natural Selection, it enables interaction with domain experts in ways that were impossible in Fisher’s time. We are well into the 21st Century, and no one under the age of 50 will find credible any reason you might offer for declining to engage Joe in this forum. You can ignore all of the riff-raff, myself included, and interact with the scientist who happened, about the time that your paper addressing Fisher’s theorem was published, to address the theorem in the 37th Fisher Memorial Lecture (via video link, I might add).
The prospects for resolving some points, and arriving at a degree of agreement, are much better in a modern exchange of comments than in an old-fashioned exchange of essays. One aspect of The Skeptical Zone makes it particularly appealing in discussion of mathematical models: you can enter stuff like \LaTeX between two dollar signs, and cause readers to see stuff like 
It’s a miracle!
An interesting article in Aeon by Thomas Metzinger:
Given how little control we have of our wandering minds, how can we cultivate real mental autonomy?
He develops a metaphor of conscious thoughts as dolphins that leap from the water of unconscious processing into the air of conscious awareness, and asks:
The really interesting question then becomes: how do various thoughts and actions ‘surface’, and what’s the mechanism by which we corral them and make them our own? We ought to probe how our organism turns different sub-personal events into thoughts or states that appear to belong to ‘us’ as a whole, and how we can learn to control them more effectively and efficiently. This capacity creates what I call mental autonomy, and I believe it is the neglected ethical responsibility of government and society to help citizens cultivate it.
by Joe Felsenstein and Michael Lynch
The blogs of creationists and advocates of ID have been abuzz lately about exciting new work by William Basener and John Sanford. In a peer-reviewed paper at Journal of Mathematical Biology, they have presented a mathematical model of mutation and natural selection in a haploid population, and they find in one realistic case that natural selection is unable to prevent the continual decline of fitness. This is presented as correcting R.A. Fisher’s 1930 “Fundamental Theorem of Natural Selection”, which they argue is the basis for all subsequent theory in population genetics. The blog postings on that will be found here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.
One of us (JF) has argued at The Skeptical Zone that they have misread the literature on population genetics. The theory of mutation and natural selection developed during the 1920s, was relatively fully developed before Fisher’s 1930 book. Fisher’s FTNS has been difficult to understand, and subsequent work has not depended on it. But that still leaves us with the issue of whether the B and S simulations show some startling behavior, with deleterious mutations seemingly unable to be prevented from continually rising in frequency. Let’s take a closer look at their simulations.
As some of you already know, or suspect, I have decided to “return” to publishing OPs at TSZ. There are many reasons for that but mainly to save TSZ from what many blogs like this one suffered; the inevitable death. So, let’s see and hope that my take on old ideas can help to revitalize TSZ again… I have new ideas too… Continue reading
Yesterday, I looked again through “Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics”, when I spotted the Cracker Barrel puzzle in section 5.4.1.2 Endogenous information of the Cracker Barrel puzzle (p. 128). The rules of this variant of a triangular peg-solitaire are described in the text (or can be found at wikipedia’s article on the subject).
The humble authors1 then describe a simulation of the game to calculate how probable it is to solve the puzzle using moves at random:
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This is not intended as a post about President Trump’s recently reported remarks about “s**thole countries,” but about what a Catholic cardinal, Timothy Dolan, said in response to those remarks. The Cardinal tweeted that Martin Luther King Jr., were he alive today, would remind people that “no country is a ‘hole,’ no person unworthy of respect.” In this post, I’d like to explain why I think the Cardinal is perfectly right on the second point and absolutely wrong on the first. I’m also going to try to define a “hole,” and make a tentative list of countries which I think would qualify, at the present time. Readers are welcome to disagree, of course.
Dr Elizabeth Liddle conceived, created and grew this website to the success it is today. It was a new idea. Many other sites can be found where a particular worldview is being promoted or a particular sphere of interest draws people of like interest. TSZ was intended to address the problem that Lizzie saw first-hand at other sites I and many others watched her participate in. Her being turfed from one well-known ID blog was partly the catalyst to trigger this venture. Continue reading
Via a post by Jerry Coyne, I learned of an egregious smear by PZ Myers of Steven Pinker. PZ posted the following on his Facebook page:
He is referring to the following remarks by Pinker. Watch this clip — the entire clip — and ask yourself, as I did: How could any honest and rational person view this and then paint Pinker as “a lying right-wing shitweasel”?
What the hell has happened to PZ over the years? Wasn’t he rational at one point?
why is there so much disagreement in origin subjects when they are claimed to be based on scientific methodology? Who is messing up here in making/rejecting conclusions where othewise science subjects never have such contentions.?
I suggest and conclude that this is because origin subjects are about invisible processes and events. it’s not intellectual failure of one side or the other in presenting or understanding positions.
In fact like religious ideas, or physics, or even atomic levels of biology, like germs etc etc EVERYTHING investigated is not clear to the human eye. germ theory was rejected well into the 19th century because they couldn’t see the germs. physics gain its prestige as more complicated because it was about invisible forces. So proving how these forces existed and worked was lauded as a brilliance above visible discoveries. Continue reading