A review in the New Yorker of three new books:
The Enigma of Reason, by Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber
The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone, by Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach
Denying to the Grave: Why We Ignore the Facts That Will Save Us, by Jack and Sara Gorman
Robert Koons and Logan Paul Gage have a defense of ID uploaded, titled St. Thomas Aquinas on Intelligent Design. The article is intended to address specifically theist criticism against ID and to show that ID is perfectly compatible with Thomistic metaphysics.
Last week, George Church talked at the school where I take part-time evening classes. I provide a link to that talk. He talked about re-engineered codons (something I’m grateful to Rumraket for introducing me to), stem cell research, human animal chimeras, aging therapies, human genome re-engineering, and just a little bit about ENCODE. Though I have ethical concerns about human/animal chimeras, and human genome re-engineering (like what happens if you mess up), Church goes into the technologies and raises questions as to what our world may look like in the not too distant future. Not that I’m trying to make a point about ID or God by linking this video, but it shows how rapidly we may be forced to deal with certain issues.
I personally don’t have too much problem with GMO foods. After all, my YEC friend John Sanford created the gene gun through which a large fraction of genetically engineered crops on the planet were made at one time. But one thing that bothers me is genetically engineered bacteria. Church discussed super bacteria created for research applications. I can imagine an accident where germs are created accidentally that become really hard to kill and we basically have an apocalypse. Maybe that will be the fulfillment of prophecy by Jesus, “there will be famines and pestilence”.
Here is the video (with Francis Collins speaking at the start):
https://videocast.nih.gov/summary.asp?Live=21803&bhcp=1
Here is a description of the talk:
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Both Mung and KeithS have asked me to weigh in on the question of whether the existence of evil counts as a good argument against Christianity, as KeithS has maintained in a recent post, so I shall oblige.
It is important to understand that the problem of evil is not an argument against the existence of God or gods, but against what KeithS calls the Christian God (actually, the God of classical theism), Who is supposed to be omniscient, omnipotent and omnibenevolent. KeithS succinctly formulates the problem as follows:
Let’s say I claim that an omniGod named Frank exists — omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent. Suppose I also claim that Frank regards seahorses as the absolute height of evil. The world contains a lot of seahorses, and Frank, being omnipotent, has the power to wipe them off the face of the earth. Why doesn’t he? Why does he countenance a world full of seahorses?
KeithS emphasizes that it is not enough for the Christian to show that God is on balance benevolent. Rather, the Christian needs to defend the claim that God is omnibenevolent:
The Christian claim is that God is omnibenevolent — as benevolent as it is logically possible to be. Finding that the items on the “good” side of the ledger outweigh those on the “bad” side — if that were the case — would not establish God’s omnibenevolence at all.
Finally, KeithS provides his own take on the problem of evil:
The problem of evil remains as much of a problem as ever for Christians. Yet there are obvious solutions to the problem that fit the evidence and are perfectly reasonable: a) accept that God doesn’t exist, or b) accept that God isn’t omnipotent, or c) accept that God isn’t perfectly benevolent. Despite the availability of these obvious solutions, most Christians will choose to cling to a view of God that has long since been falsified.
He even suggests how he would resolve the problem if he were a theist (emphasis mine – VJT):
Suppose God hates evil and suffering but is too weak to defeat them, at least at the moment. Then any such instances can be explained by God’s weakness.
It addresses the problem of evil without sacrificing theism. I’m amazed that more theists don’t seize on this sort of resolution. They’re too greedy in their theology, too reluctant to give up the omnis.
I think KeithS is onto something here. In fact, I’d like to ditch the conventional Christian views of God’s omniscience, omnipotence and omnibenevolence. It’s time for an overhaul.
Lately I’ve been reading Outline of Pyrrhonism by Sextus Empiricus. Sextus collects the arguments for Skepticism as practiced by ancient Greek and Roman philosophers. Since the notion of “skepticism” seems to play some small role here, I thought it would be fun to take a look at what Sextus means by it.
We are all too familiar with the schtick of certain posters. I’d like to know what they hope to achieve by pounding their limited collection of nails year in year out.
One could summarise the entire output of some in a dozen or so sentences. They KNOW that no-one will answer their challenges to their satisfaction. They KNOW (rather, they think they know) that this is because their challenges cut right to the heart of the matter, and evolutionary theory (“which evolutionary theory?”, a poster mutters for the thousandth time) is not an arena of explanation that will satisfy them. So, once you have satisfied yourself that this is the case, why keep buzzing against that glass like a trapped house-fly?
Recently I described a possible alternative Turing test that looks for certain non-person like behavior. I’d like to try it out and see if it is robust and has any value.
Here is some data represented in an ordinary control chart.
Testability is the main thing a concept needs in order to be considered science. If your claims cannot be tested then science doesn’t care about them. Enter evolutionism, also mistakenly called the theory of evolution, ie the concept that all biological diversity evolved via natural selection, drift and neutral construction starting from some much simpler biological replicator, which in turn evolved from much simpler molecular replicators.
None of that can be tested. Not only that the sub-claims are also untestable. Biology is full of biological systems, subsystems and structures. These too need to have testability, yet they do not. Evolutionists hide behind father time and think that excuses them from the testability criteria science requires. All that does is prove theirs is not a scientific position.
No one knows how ATP synthase arose and no one knows how to test the claim that natural selection, drift and neutral construction did it. Dembski tried to help by formulating a conditional probability but he was shrugged off. Evolutionists are fine failing on their own and don’t need no steenking help from Dembski!
So how can we test your claims, evolutionists? And why, in the absence of testability, do you think your position qualifies as science?
The edifice of the Modern Synthesis has crumbled, apparently, beyond repair.
– Eugene Koonin (2009)
Does this make Eugene Koonin an evolution skeptic?
The summary of the state of affairs on the 150th anniversary of the Origin is somewhat shocking: in the post-genomic era, all major tenets of the Modern Synthesis are, if not outright overturned, replaced by a new and incomparably more complex vision of the key aspects of evolution. So, not to mince words, the Modern Synthesis is gone.
I’m still struggling to incorporate Alan Fox’s allegation that I am an evolution skeptic. I still don’t really know what it means to be an evolution skeptic. Eugene Koonin rather obviously rejects the view of evolution held by Alan Fox. Is Eugene Koonin an evolution skeptic?
Or is this just another example of Creationist quote mining. Maybe it’s both.
What say you, “skeptics”?
The Origin at 150: is a new evolutionary synthesis in sight?
I’d say the often hysterical reaction to the election of Trump and his executive orders is baffling to me, but based on my view of politics, it isn’t baffling at all – it’s something I expected. However, I don’t see much in the way of rational, principled justification for the kind of over-the-top anti-Trump behavior we find not only at the street level, but also in the implied (if not outright) consent and support such intimidating and violent tactics are often provided in public forums by many politicians and media figures. We’ve had people call for the removal of Trump by “any means necessary” and calling for impeachment, military coups and even assassination.
Today Mung claimed of TSZ that
I see mocking of Christianity, what I don’t see are arguments that Christianity is false.
As the regulars here (including Mung) know, this is bollocks. There have been many such arguments, and Mung has fled from a number of them.
The Skeptical Zone is not fit for its intended purpose.
…given its implicit Aristotelianism, the computationalist approach provides Thomists and other Aristotelians and Scholastics with conceptual and terminological resources by which contemporary naturalists might be made to understand and see the power of Thomistic, Scholastic, and Aristotelian arguments in natural theology. It might help them to explain both how the conception of nature on which traditional Scholastic natural theology was built is no pre-modern relic but is still defensible today, and how radically it differs from the conception of Paley and “Intelligent Design” theorists, whose arguments naturalists understandably regard as weak.
…what Searle and the Aristotelian can agree on is that the computationalist conception of nature is far more metaphysically loaded than most of its defenders realize.
From Aristotle to John Searle and Back Again: Formal Causes, Teleology, and Computation in Nature
See also:
Information is the new Aristotelianism (and Dawkins is a hylomorphist)
I found the recent contest in which an algorithm was able to successfully defeat four professional poker players in a particular version of poker to be very interesting.
What strikes me is not the fact that the algorithm was successful but the way in which it accomplished the task.
check this out it’s all interesting but pay close attention from about the 8 minute mark
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:
I’m sure the name Jerry Falwell Jr means more to US members than it does to me. A friend passed on a link where I read:
Donald Trump appoints creationist college president to lead higher education reform taskforce
The focus will be on “overregulation and micromanagement of higher education,” according to university spokesman Len Stevens. This would be consistent with Falwell’s past positions, in which he has opposed federal regulations on funding and accreditation for American schools of higher learning.
Following the appointment of (Calvinist?) Betsy DeVos as Education secretary, should we be concerned for the future of public education in the US?
On another forum the claim was strongly put that the anatomy of theropod dinosaurs was so similiar to moderrn birdds that its excellent evidence for birds to have evolved from dinosaurs. So some evolutionists say birds today are really the end game of dinosaur evolution.
yEC say birds wewre created in their kinds on creation week and were on the ark in kinds. So were creatures we call dinosaurs and so these theropod ones.
So its impossible birds evolved from theropod dinos.
The only evidence they have is the anatomy of theropods . Some say they had feathers.
I have another hypothesis. That it is only a convergence of bone structures(anatamy) for the same needs. It is not that these dinos have bird bones but thart birds don’t have bird bones. they both only have bones to join body with physics. the theropods needed to be liught on their feet and the only answer is size and structure of bones to allow this. birds have the same need and so have the same bones. Yet its physics that determoines the bone structure and not a biological ancestry. there is no ancestry. they were created in whole right away. Perfect. its just the right and only conclusion .
In this provocative history of contemporary debates over evolution, veteran journalist Tom Bethell depicts Darwin’s theory as a nineteenth-century idea past its prime, propped up by logical fallacies, bogus claims, and empirical evidence that is all but disintegrating under an onslaught of new scientific discoveries. Bethell presents a concise yet wide-ranging tour of the flash points of modern evolutionary theory, investigating controversies over common descent, natural selection, the fossil record, biogeography, information theory, evolutionary psychology, artificial intelligence, and the growing intelligent design movement. Bethell’s account is enriched by his own personal encounters with of some our era’s leading scientists and thinkers, including Harvard biologists Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin; British paleontologist Colin Patterson; and renowned philosopher of science Karl Popper.
Darwin’s House of Cards: A Journalist’s Odyssey Through the Darwin Debates
Of course, no real skeptic will want to read this book.
I thought you all might be interested in a book we just released this week – Naturalism and Its Alternatives in Scientific Methodologies. It has been heading up the Amazon charts, and hit the #1 Hot New Release spot today on three lists – Scientific Research, Epistemology, and Psychology.
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