The guy had successfully hidden his identity for about five years, while posting all kinds of sexually charged abuse to the Internet about many people, including me. But now we know.

But Wendy Sullivan, the Girl on the Right, has officially found out who the mysterious Canadian Cynic is. Here is stuff he has said about me. He is Robert PJ Day. Small business owner. Computer genius. Well-read book nerd. Anti-creationist debater

A Linux genius, apparently. [Foul language warning re his posts and any reports on them. ]

Here is part of what Sullivan said, once she traced him:

Outing bloggers isn’t usually my thing. I don’t see a point to it. But when you repeatedly abuse and demean people because they do not march in lockstep with you, I’m sorry but you deserve it. I am not a cunt, Robert. Nor a douchebag. Neither is Kathy Shaidle, Kate, Connie Fournier, Sandy Crux, Suzanne Fortin or anyone else on the web you don’t like.

I am not above strong language and hyperbole, Robert, but I am not beneath you. You are not special. I do not dispute that you are extremely smart and well-versed in your subjects of choice. But referring to to those you feel superior to as “cunts”, “wankers”, “douchebags”, “assholes” and more doesn’t make you sound brilliant at all. It makes you sound sad and lonely. It also makes you seem very cowardly, because I know you would never call me a cunt to my face. You would never wander into downtown Toronto and meet with half the people you have insulted - on a one-to-one or at a party - and insult them the way you do behind your chosen alias.

Perhaps not. The thing I know from covering the intelligent design controversy is that a number of people like Cynic give themselves the right to pour obscene contempt and abuse at the public. Obviously, those people are frightened of something.

What would your mother say, Robert, if she knew that you referred to a woman older than she probably is as a douchebag? ( I assume that your mother is still with us. If not, I apologize, one orphan to the next. ) Is that how she raised you?

He had decided to raise the abuse level last night for me, presumably in response to being outed. The Centre for Inquiry is sponsoring it. Did those people really sit there and listen? Read more »

Issue 9 of Salvo (Summer 2009) has come out, with many fine articles. The feature article is on the explosion of kids watching Internet porn.*

A number of interesting features on topics related to the intelligent design controversy:

Gimme that Spacetime Religion: Seeking Salvation in Science by Regis Nicoll, about the effort to transform Darwinism into a religion with all the trappings - except actual guilt for sin.

Wesley J. Smith, describing himself as a “Human Exceptionalist” talks about the effect that the growing practice of equating humans with animals and plants has on bioethics, pointing out, “If they really wanted to be reductionist, they could also say that because carrots are made out of carbon molecules, there is no distinction between carrots and humans either. You can’t get far enough ahead of these guys in terms of satire.”

Read more »

Glenn sent me this post, and I thought some of the commenters might want to tackle his questions. I can’t just now. On deadline:

Denyse,

I am writing you because I could not find a place for feedback or “Contact us” on the Uncommon Descent website.

http://www.uncommondescent.com/id-defined/

Under “ID Defined” I have two concerns.

One is that the definition says “best explained by an intelligent cause”. Shouldn’t this read “an intelligent cause or intelligent causes”? By presenting the word “cause” in the singular, we are taking the focus off the intelligent design we can observe, and we are speculating that all observable intelligent design has a single cause, such as a creator God. ID as a scientific theory should not assume that a single cause is responsible for every “certain feature” addressed in the definition. Also, even if you are saying that each given feature has an intelligent cause, that also seems to be too limiting of the possibility that a single feature could have more than one single intelligent cause.

Read more »

According to Allen McNeil the Gallup poll results for American scientists are:

Young-Earth Creationist = 5%

Guided Evolution = 40%

“Naturalistic” Evolution = 55%

For members of the National Academy of Sciences*, the results are:

Young-Earth Creationist = 3%

Guided Evolution = 14%

“Naturalistic” Evolution = 83%

*data from the Cornell Evolution Project, http://www.cornellevolutionproject.org

So here’s how I read it.  One in six of the most accomplished living scientists believe in a living God responsible for the creation of mankind.

Pascal compares the risks of belief and disbelief:

1) If I disbelieve in God and I’m wrong, I lose everything.
2) If I disbelieve in God and I’m right, I gain nothing.
3) If I believe in God and I’m wrong, I lose nothing.
4) If I believe in God and I’m right, I gain everything.

The only rational position to take is #4 where you have everything to gain and nothing to lose.  That is Pascal’s Wager.

Now if we take our odds of God being real from the greatest living scientists we find the odds of God being real are 1 in 6 (17%).  So this is essentially like playing Russian Roulette with a 6-shot revolver with one bullet in it.  If you pull the trigger and nothing happens you gain nothing but if you pull the trigger and the gun fires you lose your life.  Why play that game?  Even if the odds were a thousand or a million to one against getting a bullet in the head why play? 

Dave Scott

The great physicist Wolfgang Pauli once criticized a scientific paper as so bad that it was “not even wrong.” It was so sloppy and ill conceived, thought Pauli, that to call it merely wrong would be to give it too much credit–it wasn’t even wrong. Today such a condemnation applies well to the theory of evolution which relies on religious convictions to prop up bad science. It seems that every argument for evolution wilts under scrutiny. Here is a classic example.

Continue reading here.

Here’s a neat article on front-loading:

The Front-loading Fiction
Posted by Rob on Wednesday, July 01, 2009 5:49:41 PM

SOURCE: The Procrustean — A Blog of Townhall.com

In responding to an email about “front-loading” as a Deistic solution to the universe that does not require an interventionist (theist) God, I replied that I have some philosophical problems with the phrase “front-loading”. It is a concession to Deism that doesn’t have to be made. Trying to describe a “front-loaded algorithm” highlights the problem with the philosophical solution.

Historically, the argument for front-loading came from Laplacian determinism based on a Newtonian or mechanical universe–if one could control all the initial conditions, then the outcome was predetermined. First quantum mechanics, and then chaos-theory has basically destroyed it, since no amount of precision can control the outcome far in the future. (The exponential nature of the precision required to predetermine the outcome exceeds the information storage of the medium.)

But “front-loading” permitted Deists to say that God designed the Universe, and then stepped back and let “natural” forces operate, thereby removing any “supernatural” interference of the sort that Lucretius fumed about in 50BC. So if Newtonian determinism was now impossible, perhaps there could be some sort of algorithmic determinism (which I’ll call Turing determinism) which could step in and permit a Deist to avoid the supernatural. That is, God doesn’t have to create the oak from the acorn anymore, but the biological program He inserted in the acorn can handle all the intermediate steps. So perhaps, God didn’t have to create humans, but the biological program in the first living cell He created, started the ecosystem that eventually evolved humans.

This remains, of course, the principle argument of theistic evolutionists, and was Howard Van Till’s favored method before he stopped teaching at Calvin College and gave up on theism.

But this argument assumes that one can separate algorithms from the machinery that executes them, the information from the storage medium, the supernaturally contingent from the naturally necessary. The Newtonian revolution was to view the universe as a complicated machine where “natural” laws were the function of the machinery, and “supernatural” interference was information not incorporated into the gears. The fact that a watch tells time was “natural”, whereas the setting to Eastern Standard Time was “supernatural” because it was contingent.

ID (Intelligent Design) makes the argument that the gears are just as supernatural as the time zone, because they are designed to function in a certain way. But such an argument doesn’t escape the TE (Theistic Evolutionist) defense that the time zone setting is just as “natural” as the gears, because there were no laws of nature broken. This would all be semantics, if it were not for the corollary, that ID claims to probe the character of the designer by studying the design, whereas TE claims that front-loading is indistinguishable from chance, making the designer inscrutable. (Which keeps his faith transcendentally Kantian, and science a-theistically independent of God.)

But is it true that algorithmic front-loading can be naturalistic, independent of God, Turing-deterministic, and thus incapable of revealing anything about a living God?

I’d like to make the argument that Turing determinism is impossible for several reasons, and therefore front-loading is indistinguishable from the supernatural, from the actions of God intervening in history.

MORE

Synopsis Of The First Chapter Of  Signature In The Cell by Stephen Meyer

ISBN: 9780061894206; ISBN10: 0061894206; Imprint: HarperCollins

In August of 2004, philosopher Stephen Meyer published an article in the Proceedings Of The Biological Society Of Washington.  The article raised media interest and outrage because it was the first to “advance the theory of intelligent design” in a peer-reviewed scientific journal.  The editor Richard Sternberg lost his position as a result of the ensuing debacle.

Read more »

I realize this is slightly off-topic, but it is related to the spirit of Uncommon Descent. It turns out that Ockham’s Razor is nothing more than a modern myth, and this was proven by William Thornburn in a brilliant and devastating paper he published in Mind 27 (1918), pp345-353.

Ockham’s Razor states that “entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem”, which is often translated as “entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily”. In other words, do not invent more things to fit the facts than are needed. William of Ockham (c. 1288 - c. 1348) himself was a medieval logician, known as the “Singular and Invincible Doctor” (many medieval logicians had street names like this). He was very famous in his own time. “If the Gods used Logic”, said his editor, Mark of Beneventum, “it would be the Logic of Ockham”.

But Ockham never invented Ockham’s Razor. Thornburn appears to have meticulously gone through a vast amount of material, and found that the phrase “Ockham’s Razor” comes from the writings of Sir William Hamilton in the 19th Century. The phase “entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem”, can be found no earlier than 1639, in the writings of John Ponce of Cork. More importantly, neither similar phrases, nor anything that really resembles the concept they are expressing, can be found in the writings of Ockham.

Thornburn’s paper has never been challenged, but the myth remains. If myths can persist in philosophy, why not in science? If unchallenged scholarship can simply be ignored, should it surprise us that science supporting ID is also ignored? How many other scholarly and scientific myths are there out there?

[[Discovery Press Release:]]

In Darwin Anniversary Year, New Zogby Poll Reveals Majority Support for Intelligent Design — Doubts about Darwin Continue to Mount

Seattle – Just a few months before the 150th anniversary of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, a newly released Zogby poll shows that the American public overwhelmingly rejects Darwinian theory in favor of intelligent design. When asked if life developed “through an unguided process of random mutations and natural selection,” a standard definition of Darwinism, only 33 percent of respondents said they agreed with the statement. But 52 percent agreed that “the development of life was guided by intelligent design.”

“In the Year of Darwin, these figures must represent a terrible disappointment to Darwinian advocates,” commented Stephen C. Meyer, Ph.D., director of the Center for Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute, which commissioned the poll. “Darwin’s greatest accomplishment was supposed to be the refutation of intelligent design, yet more than a century later the public has grown increasingly disenchanted with Darwin’s claims.”

Dr. Meyer is the author of a new book from HarperOne, Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design. He suggested the polling data may reflect a growing awareness of recent scientific developments, documented in his book. As word seeps out from the scientific community, confidence in Darwinism has begun to perceptibly erode:

“It’s only in the past decade that the information age has finally come to biology. We now know that biology at its root is digital code. Having advanced to this level of digital technology ourselves, in computer science, we can at last begin to appreciate what is going on inside the cell: the nested coding, digital processing, distributive retrieval and storage systems, the whole operating system in the genome. The cell is doing the same thing a computer’s operating system does, but with far, far greater efficiency.”

Dr. Meyer said it was no coincidence that the public remained fixed in its skepticism of standard evolutionary theories as scientists learned more about the enigma of DNA and its origins: “Undirected evolutionary processes cannot explain what science is revealing. Intelligent design can. Americans are catching onto this.”

Zogby International conducted the omnibus telephone survey of 1,053 likely voters earlier this year, which marks the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth as well as the anniversary of the publication of Origin of Species. The margin of error for the poll is +/- 3.1 percentage points.

The suppression of Alan Carlin’s report arguing against anthropogenic global warming serves as a warning to anyone who would facilely contend that science is self-correcting. Science by itself is not self-correcting. It only becomes self-correcting when scientists and outsiders refuse to let dogmatists who pretend to scientific objectivity monopolize the discussion. Science is not about consensus. It is about informed dissent. Indeed, progress in science is only possible through informed consent. Those who suppressed Carlin’s report should read John Stuart Mill, who stressed the need for all sides in a debate to be fairly represented. This applies to the debate over design and Darwinism as well.

SOURCE: GO HERE

It’s nice to see people like Pat Buchanan feeling more at ease about going after Darwin. In citing Eugene Windchy’s THE END OF DARWINISM, Buchanan writes:

Darwin … lied in “The Origin of Species” about believing in a Creator. By 1859, he was a confirmed agnostic and so admitted in his posthumous autobiography, which was censored by his family.

SOURCE: worldnetdaily.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=102589

A new method for computing evolutionary trees may revolutionize evolutionary biology. That’s good because evolutionary biology needs some revolutionizing. So far its fundamental predictions have consistently turned out to be false. Indeed, at evolutionary biology’s very core, the idea of an evolutionary tree is problematic given the data, and even some evolutionists are suggesting the “tree thinking” may not be useful. But the new research isn’t likely to help on that score. What the research does enable is the creation of erroneous results at a much faster pace.

Continue reading here.

 Before I announce the winner, I should note that Harper One San Francisco has announced that 5 hardback copies of both Steve Meyer’s Signature of the Cell, ( 2009) and Beauregard and O’Leary’s The Spiritual Brain (2007 ) are available free to contest winners. Like, win and add them to your library for free.

Okay, now to Question 5:

Winner VJ Torley writes,

Read more »

A friend alerted me to this piece by Lawrence Krauss from the Wall Street Journal.

Krauss writes:

“J.B.S. Haldane, an evolutionary biologist and a founder of population genetics, understood that science is by necessity an atheistic discipline. As Haldane so aptly described it, one cannot proceed with the process of scientific discovery if one assumes a “god, angel, or devil” will interfere with one’s experiments. God is, of necessity, irrelevant in science.

Faced with the remarkable success of science to explain the workings of the physical world, many, indeed probably most, scientists understandably react as Haldane did. Namely, they extrapolate the atheism of science to a more general atheism.”

No surprise here. But he concludes with

“Finally, it is worth pointing out that these issues are not purely academic. The current crisis in Iran has laid bare the striking inconsistency between a world built on reason and a world built on religious dogma.”

Perhaps the most important contribution an honest assessment of the incompatibility between science and religious doctrine can provide is to make it starkly clear that in human affairs — as well as in the rest of the physical world — reason is the better guide.”

Reason is a better guide than what? Religion? Which religion? All religions? What empircal data does Read more »