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Orwellian world an inevitable outcome of materialist philosophy

Following up on Grant Sewell’s interesting discussion of consciousness as a hard problem for Darwinism, and my response:

In “Brave Newark World”, law prof and columnist Mike S. Adams exposes an Orwellian world of reprogramming inside the dorms at the University of Delaware:

Presently, students are actually pressured or even required to take actions that outwardly indicate agreement with the university’s official ideology, regardless of their beliefs as individuals. Such actions include displaying specific door decorations and committing to reduce their ecological footprint by at least 20% and fighting for “oppressed social groups.” (There is no indication that one of these groups is made up of University of Delaware residents who are oppressed by RAs who can’t stop asking “how do you feel?”).

In the Office of Residence Life’s internal materials, these programs are described using a chilling language of ideological re-education. In a manual relating to the assessment of student learning the residence hall lesson plans are actually referred to as “treatments.”

I wrote a letter to Adams because, while I greatly respect the work of groups like The Fire in fighting intellectual oppression, I also think that a critical dimension is missing – the role that materialism inevitably plays in producing the Orwellian conditions is too often ignored: Read More ›

Low Probability is Only Half of Specified Complexity

In a prior post the order of a deck of cards was used as an example of specified complexity.  If a deck is shuffled and it results in all of the cards being ordered by rank and suit, one can infer design.  One commenter objected to this reasoning on the grounds that the specified order is no more improbable than any other order of cards (about 1 in 10^68).  In other words, the probably of every deck order is about 1 in 10^68, so why should we infer something special about this deck order simply because it has a low probability. Well, last night at my friendly poker game I decided to test this theory.  We were playing five card Read More ›

Darwinism’s biggest (and least discussed) problem

The biggest problem of all with Darwinism, in my opinion, is one that is almost never discussed by either side. In my Dec 2005 American Spectator article (updated version here) I tried to express the problem as follows: “When you ask [the modern scientist] how a mechanical process such as natural selection could cause human consciousness to arise out of inanimate matter, he says, ‘human consciousness — what’s that?’ And he talks about human evolution as if he were an outside observer, and never seems to wonder how he got inside one of the animals he is studying.” You may be able to convince a gullible layman that natural selection of random mutations can cause mud to evolve into robots Read More ›

Behe vs. Mothra (no MRSA)

In a prior post DRG wonders how could Behe’s EoE inform the development of drugs that fight antibiotic resistant bacteria? Today’s WSJ, for example, describes the problem of MRSA and other superbugs that defy existing antibiotics. Given the expense of the pharmaceutical development process, an ID-oriented research program ought to reduce the cost of development by only focusing on drugs that would require resistant bacteria to evolve beyond the EoE (which Behe shows is not possible).  http://drugwonks.com/

Today’s Class Project

Alex Tee Neng Heng and David C. Green think they have demonstrated that the “monkeys typing” hypothesis is true here.  The class is assigned the task of identifying their blunder.

Darwin Didn’t Get God Off the Hook

As Michael Behe discusses in the article I linked in my last post, Darwinists Kenneth Miller and Francisco Ayala reject ID, because they believe it makes God (if one assumes God is the designer) culpable for all of the pain and misery in the natural world.  Ayala goes so far as to suggest that ID is blasphemous because it implicates God in causing this pain and misery. Miller and Ayala are wrong, and their error stems from their failure to understand elementary principles of culpability that any 1st year law student can stand and recite from memory. Generally, the law recognizes four culpable mental states (mens rea for the Latin buffs).  In descending order they are: Intentional conduct.  An actor acts intentionally when Read More ›

Antony Flew — Still with his head in the game!

A friend of mine and I have been reading Antony Flew’s new book THERE IS A GOD. Flew had been the English-speaking world’s most prominent atheist until Richard Dawkins assumed that role. A few years ago, Flew announced his conversion to theism (though not full-blown Christianity). This caused a stir at the time, but true to their materialist bias, the academy and media quickly fluffed it off (“poor Antony — he’s just getting old and a bit soft in the head”). As the following excerpts (that my friend collected) attest, Flew knew exactly what he was doing in rejecting his lifelong commitment to atheism. Also, a refreshing feature of the book is Flew’s evident grace, good will, and sensitivity — the contrast with the boorishness of neo-atheists like Dawkins-Hitchens-Harris is stark.

>From p. 79 ff:

“For Dawkins, the main means for producing human behavior is to
attribute to genes characteristics that can significantly be
attributed only to humans. Then, after insisting that we are all the
choiceless creatures of our genes, he infers that we cannot help but
share the unlovely personal characteristics of those all-controlling
monads.

“Genes, of course, can be neither selfish nor unselfish any more than
they or any other nonconscious entities can engage in competition or
make selections. (Natural selection is, notoriously, not selection;
and it is a somewhat less familiar logical fact that, below the human
level, the struggle for existence is not “competetive” in the true
sense of the word.) But this did not stop Dawkins from proclaiming
that his book ‘is not science fiction; it is science …. We are
survival machines — robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the
selfish molecules known as genes.’ Although he later issued occasional
disavowals, Dawkins gave no warning in his book against taking him
literally. He added, sensationally, that ‘the argument of this book
is that we, and all other animals, are machines created by our genes’ Read More ›

Cambrian Math

I was looking at some numbers concerning the Cambrian explosion.  The results were quite stunning to me. Simple life, we are told, emerged 3.8 billion years ago, and the Cambrian Explosion occurred 550 million years ago.  In a single 10 million year period (taking the longest estimate), 95% of the animal phyla appeared.  The math: For the first 85% of the history of life there was no significant animal life. Almost all animal life arose in only the last 15% of the history of life. Indeed, 95% of animal phyla arose in a length of time that is only one forth of one percent of the history of life (0.25%). If the entire history of life were 3,800 years long, almost all Read More ›

Genetic Entropy and Malarial Parasite P. falciparum

The two most recent books I’ve read are Biochemistry Professor M.Behe’s Edge of Evolution and Cornell geneticist J.Sanford’s Genetic Entropy. Edge of Evolution I found to be amazing. It presented a case history of a eukaryote (P.falciparum) that has replicated billions of trillions of times within a span of a few decades. More importantly this is one of the most well studied organisms in biology due to its huge toll on human lives. In the last decade we’ve gone beyond phenotype analysis of the bug and have completely sequenced its genotype. This represents the largest test of evolution that we can hope to observe. The result of random mutation + natural selection being given billions of trillions of opportunities to Read More ›

Warming Revives Flora and Fauna in Greenland

HT to Phil Johnson for giving me the link. As I’ve been saying, Global Warming isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Check this out… Warming Revives Flora and Fauna in Greenland By SARAH LYALL October 28, 2007 The New York Times NARSARSUAQ, Greenland — A strange thing is happening at the edge of Poul Bjerge’s forest, a place so minute and unexpected that it brings to mind the teeny plot of land Woody Allen’s father carries around in the film “Love and Death.” Its four oldest trees — in fact, the four oldest pine trees in Greenland, named Rosenvinge’s trees after the Dutch botanist who planted them in a mad experiment in 1893 — are waking up. After lapsing into stately, Read More ›

Atheism: An Intellectual Revolt or Pelvic Rebellion?

This is just too funny to pass up. As a preemptive strike against any commenters who feel a need to say “Aha! ID is all about religion” put a sock in it. I filed this under “Humor”. HT to Jon Wells for giving me the link to this article. Atheism: An Intellectual Revolt or Pelvic Rebellion? By Doug Giles Saturday, October 27, 2007 Atheists would love for everyone to believe that their motive for not believing is an intellectual one. Yes, the atheists ardently suppose that they are wise and the Christians, well, we’re the buckle-shoed buttheads. Yes, darling, the atheists would love all of us to suppose that they cannot believe because they are so astute and rational, and Read More ›

Prebiotic Information Crisis

Package models and the information crisis of prebiotic evolution Daniel A. M. M. Silvestre,  Jos´e F. Fontanari http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0710/0710.3278v1.pdf The coexistence of different types of templates has been the choice solution to the information crisis of prebiotic evolution, triggered by the finding that a single RNA-like template cannot carry enough information to code for any useful replicase. In principle, confining d distinct templates of length L in a package or protocell, whose survival depends on the coexistence of the templates it holds in, could resolve this crisis provided that d is made sufficiently large. We review the prototypical package model of Niesert et al. (1981) which guarantees the greatest possible region of viability of the protocell population, and show that this Read More ›

Darwinism seen as old-fashioned materialism

In a recent column, Marvin Olasky observes New York Times columnist John Tierney recently offered a materialist version of “intelligent design”: All of us are actually characters in a computer simulation devised by some technologically advanced future civilization. Fanciful to the extreme, sure, but the growing number of such theories — life comes from the past (Mars, when it was theoretically livable) or future (Tierney) — is one more indication that Darwinism no longer satisfies. Reporters pretending to referee the origin debate used to have it easy: slick evolutionists vs. hick creationists, progress vs. regress. Now, Darwinism is looking fuddy-duddy, and sophisticated critiques of it are becoming more diverse. I interviewed Michael Behe, author of “Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Read More ›

Who Says Darwinists Don’t Make Predictions

. . . so long as the predicted event is safely 100,000 years in the future:  Human race will split into two different species  The human race will one day split into two separate species, an attractive, intelligent ruling elite and an underclass of dim-witted, ugly goblin-like creatures, according to a top scientist. 100,000 years into the future, sexual selection could mean that two distinct breeds of human will have developed. The alarming prediction comes from evolutionary theorist Oliver Curry . . . Dr Curry’s theory may strike a chord with readers who have read H G Wells’ classic novel The Time Machine, in particular his descriptions of the Eloi and the Morlock races.  In the 1895 book, the human race has Read More ›