It amazes me how often I hear that Jesus never existed or that scripture is just fiction.
So here are a few rather recently published books for the skeptic who claims to have never seen any evidence that scripture is not fiction or that Jesus ever existed.
Why Are There Differences in the Gospels
The Historical Reliability of the New Testament
Merry Christmas
The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) sponsored the work of John Calhoun on social behaviors. Here were the results of one of his experiments:
On July 9th, 1968, eight white mice were placed into a strange box at the National Institute of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. Maybe “box” isn’t the right word for it; the space was more like a room, known as Universe 25, about the size of a small storage unit. The mice themselves were bright and healthy, hand-picked from the institute’s breeding stock. They were given the run of the place, which had everything they might need: food, water, climate control, hundreds of nesting boxes to choose from, and a lush floor of shredded paper and ground corn cob.
This is a far cry from a wild mouse’s life—no cats, no traps, no long winters. It’s even better than your average lab mouse’s, which is constantly interrupted by white-coated humans with scalpels or syringes. The residents of Universe 25 were mostly left alone, save for one man who would peer at them from above, and his team of similarly interested assistants. They must have thought they were the luckiest mice in the world. They couldn’t have known the truth: that within a few years, they and their descendants would all be dead.
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Today marks the 11th anniversary of the conclusion of Tammy Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District. This, of course, was the court case that made it clear that the Intelligent Design movement is nothing more nor less than yet another incarnation of creationism.
The Dover trial had a number of memorable moments. Just months before, William Dembski posted his Vise Strategy at Uncommon Descent, talking tough about facing “Darwinists” in court. When he found out that his deposition would be attended by Wesley Elsberry and Jeff Shallit, Dembski suddenly found himself unable to participate.
Another highlight was the NCSE’s discovery that the intelligent design creationist textbook at the center of the trial, Of Pandas and People, had been modified shortly after the Supreme Court ruled in Edwards v. Aguillard that the teaching of “creation science” is unconstitutional. Every instance of “creationism” and “creationist” had been replaced with “intelligent design” and “design proponent” respectively. Every instance but one, that is. “cdesign proponentsists” survived the edit to demonstrate that the terms are synonyms.
World Scientific is pitching Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics, by Robert Marks, William Dembski, and Winston Ewert, to a general readership, but with particular note of enthusiasts of apologetics. The book features the Conservation of Information Theorem, which was the centerpiece of Dembski’s religio-philosophical treatise Being as Communion: A Metaphysics of Information (2014). So there is no denying that the authors regard their mathematical arguments as support for their religious views. And there is no great surprise in learning that the nonprofit Center for Evolutionary Informatics, operated by Marks and Dembski, has the alternate name Arbor Ministries in public records. The forthcoming book includes a section titled “The Genesis,” and this leads me to hope that the authors, mindful of the canonical teachings of Jesus, have made a clear statement of faith.
No one lights a lamp and hides it in a clay jar or puts it under a bed. Instead, they put it on a stand, so that those who come in can see the light. For there is nothing hidden that will not be disclosed, and nothing concealed that will not be known or brought out into the open. Therefore consider carefully how you listen. Whoever has will be given more; whoever does not have, even what they think they have will be taken from them.
There are numerous definitions of naturalism. Here is one definition with some additional observations from infidels.org:
As defined by philosopher Paul Draper, naturalism is “the hypothesis that the natural world is a closed system” in the sense that “nothing that is not a part of the natural world affects it.” More simply, it is the denial of the existence of supernatural causes. In rejecting the reality of supernatural events, forces, or entities, naturalism is the antithesis of supernaturalism.
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Milan Ćirković has written an interesting piece in Nautilus (and featured on RealClearScience) titled, Why Darwin Needs ET. Ćirković is not a biologist; he’s a senior research associate at the Astronomical Observatory of Belgrade and an assistant professor in the Department of Physics at the University of Novi Sad in Serbia and Montenegro. Nevertheless, the questions he poses in his article are interesting ones, and I’d like to hear what readers – especially those with a strong background in the life sciences – think of his questions, and his proposal regarding how scientists could go about answering them.
In order to avoid confusion, I should declare at the outset that Ćirković isn’t asking whether evolution generates the same outcomes elsewhere in the cosmos as the ones it generated on Earth. His question is a deeper one: he wants to know if it’s the same kind of process on other life-bearing planets as it is on Earth. In his own words (emphasis mine):
But does evolution operate the same on life everywhere? The success of Darwinian theory to explain life on Earth has lulled many of us into thinking that it must be. In fact evolution might have functioned by different mechanisms in Earth’s distant past as well as elsewhere in the galaxy. We could envision a planet dominated by Lamarckian inheritance of acquired traits, or a world where large mutations — and not the gradual variation of natural selection — are the main agents of change.
The first thing that strikes me about this paragraph is that it misrepresents how evolution occurs on Earth, in referring to “the gradual variation of natural selection” as the main agent of evolutionary change. It isn’t. Don’t take my word for it; listen to what biologists working in the field have to say.
Tom English, in his recent post on this blog, has argued that:
Distinguishable entities operating identically by simple rules can form structures high in specified complexity
This is, of course, an example of a long standing critique of specified complexity. However, the critique is nonsense. The critique fundamentally misunderstands specified complexity.
Specified complexity makes no claims as to the probability of the outcomes or entities under consideration. It assumes that you have some other way of assesing that probibility under that given hypothesis. The only role of specified complexity is to justify rejecting a hypothesis if it renders the observed outcome overly improbable.
Is there anything that everyone here can agree on?
There is a saying: ex nihil, nihil fit. Out of nothing, nothing [be]comes.
Is this one of those obvious truths that folks like to deny the existence of, or do folks here believe that from utter nothingness sprang forth the world and all that is in it?
Winston Ewert, William A. Dembski, and Robert J. Marks II rebranded specified complexity as a measure of meaningful information, at the Engineering and Metaphysics 2012 Conference. In my mind, that was quite a remarkable event in the history of the “intelligent design” (ID) offshoot of “creation science” — particularly in light of the fact that Dembski and Marks changed the meaning of information in the Law of Conservation of Information from specified complexity to active information, back in 2008. But the organizer of that conference, Jonathan Bartlett, seems not to have noticed. He recently undertook to explain algorithmic specified complexity to the unwashed masses, but made no mention at all of meaning.
Jonathan approves of my observation, posted here in The Skeptical Zone, that the “conga lines” formed by hermit crabs are high in algorithmic specified complexity (emphasis added):
Tom English asked about Hermit Crabs forming a line. I agree that this exhibits high ASC for certain things (remember, ASC depends on what you are comparing it to). It gives a high ASC for the line compared to the hermit crabs just walking around. That seems like a success, not a fail, as you have successfully determined that they are lined up intentionally. Even though you don’t have all of the prerequisites for a design inference (at least in your post here), you have at least shown that intentionality on behalf of the hermit crabs is a live possibility. Since they are lining up for a particular purpose, that seems to line up with reality.
He has not responded to my main point (emphasis in original):
Distinguishable entities operating identically by simple rules can form structures high in specified complexity. That is, the crabs in the video differ in size, but not in the “program” they execute. Want more specified complexity? Just add crabs.
Let me begin with a confession: I honestly don’t know what to make of the “miracle of the sun” that occurred in Fatima, Portugal, on October 13, 1917, and that was witnessed by a crowd of 70,000 people (although a few people in the crowd saw nothing) and also by people who were more than 10 kilometers away from Fatima at the time, as well as by sailors on a British ship off the coast of Portugal. On the other hand, no astronomical observatory recorded anything unusual at the time.
Rather than endorsing a particular point of view, I have decided to lay the facts before my readers, and let them draw their own conclusions.
Here are some good links, to get you started.
… the Supreme Court of the United States heard oral arguments in the case of Edwards v. Aguillard. Four days later, the New York Times published Michael T. Ghiselin’s review of The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design. The “intelligent design” offshoot of “creation science” is as much a response to the dissenting opinion of Justice Antonin Scalia as to the work of popular science by the arch atheist Richard Dawkins.
Some interesting entailments present themselves If we accept that minds do abductive inference differently than non-minds. For instance it allows us to have some fun with neural networks.
There is an AI experiment from Google that attempts to guess the subject of your doodles. I’ve found It can be easily defeated by simply drawing a random line through the middle of the screen before you begin to draw your picture. Even when your drawing skills are good the AI will usually get it wrong simply because it will assume that the line is an integral part of your drawing and not just a red herring or noise. Continue reading
I’ll just park this here, it seems a good time..
This is the first part of a series of posts that are meant to help me think through the relationship between ID and Turing tests. Please be patient I will get to the controversial stuff soon enough but I want to lay some ground work first
Below is a quick refresher video explaining the three forms of inference for those interested.
It’s a given that abductive inference is the most subjective of the three and that is usually seen as a bad thing. I would like to argue that this subjectivity makes shared abductive inference a great proxy Turing test.
I have just been watching a TED talk given in February 2015 by the acclaimed author and TV host Sharyl Attkisson, titled, “Astroturf and manipulation of media messages.” It’s only 10 minutes long, and I would invite readers to watch it and draw their own conclusions.
The following excerpts are some of the highlights from Sharyl Attkisson’s scintillating speech.
What is Astroturf? It’s a perversion of grass roots – as in fake grass roots. Astroturf is when political, corporate or other special interests disguise themselves, and publish blogs, Facebook and Twitter accounts, and publish ads, letters to the editor, or simply publish comments online, to try to fool you into thinking that an independent or grassroots movement is speaking. The whole point of Astroturf is to try to give the impression that there’s widespread support for or against an agenda, when there’s not. Astroturf seeks to manipulate you into changing your opinion, by making you feel as if you are an outlier, when you’re not.
The challenge, for all and sundry but especially for “Darwin doubters”, should you wish to take it, is to submit a one-paragraph summary of the theory of evolution. The idea is to see if you understand it well enough to fairly summarize the theory so that you pass as a proponent of evolution. We also need some examples from proponents to test the null hypothesis!
To ensure anonymity, please submit your paragraph by private message to me or another admin and we will add it in edit. (Or email it to me at alanfox@free.fr if you prefer.) Continue reading
I am working on a series of tutorials to cover the basics of Intelligent Design, especially the mathematics of it. This is my tutorial on Specified Complexity, and I would appreciate any thoughtful criticism of it.
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Let me begin by saying that I’m a big fan of Ray Comfort’s 2011 pro-life movie, 180, which packed a powerful punch, but also made you think. The hypothetical question which Comfort posed to the college students he interviewed was simple but stunningly effective, in exposing the intellectual inconsistency of the pro-choice position.
Last night, I viewed Ray Comfort’s latest movie, The Atheist Delusion, which is now available on Youtube. Professor Jerry Coyne has already critiqued some of Ray Comfort’s anti-evolutionary arguments – especially the ones about the chicken and the egg, the origin of the eye, and the origin of the heart and circulatory system (see here: his segment starts at 46:45 and runs till 56:30). I will be saying more below about Comfort’s two main arguments for God (relating to the origin of the universe and the origin of DNA), which Coyne did not address.
But the aim of Comfort’s movie is not merely to convince people that God exists. Ray Comfort is, and always will be, a missionary, and in the latter half of the movie, he tries to convert the people he interviews to Christianity. Not all Christians agree with his theology, however, and in this post, I’d like to ask him one question which I think will blow his apologetic to smithereens. But before I do that, I’d like to describe Comfort’s interviewing technique.
What does this remind you of?
Happy holidays, everyone.
This is an open challenge to all and sundry!
Can anyone represent the views of someone he disagrees with well enough to pass the “Turing Test” and be mistaken for a real proponent of those views? Barry Arrington has recently issued this challenge for skeptics of “Intelligent Design”. He seems to have overlooked the point that the test should be anonymous and also that most remaining active ID skeptics are unable or unwilling (or both, in my case) to participate at “Uncommon descent”. Continue reading