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:

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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… 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.