Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

William Lane Craig’s video on the objectivity of morality and the linked reality of God

Here: [youtube OxiAikEk2vU] In this video, Dr Craig argues that we have good reason to accept the objectivity of ought, and from that we see that there is a credible ground of such, God. In slightly more details, if one rejects the objectivity of the general sense of OUGHT as governing our behaviour, we are implying a general delusion. Where, as there are no firewalls in the mind . . . a general delusion undermines the general credibility of knowledge and rationality. And in practice even those who most passionately argue for moral subjectivity live by the premise that moral principles such as fairness, justice, doing good by neighbour etc are binding. That is, there is no good reason to Read More ›

The right to ridicule: what do readers think?

By now, I expect that readers will have formed their own opinions about the tragic massacre of twelve people at the Paris headquarters of Charlie Hebdo. And I expect, too, that people will have read and digested the remarks subsequently made by His Holiness Pope Francis on the inappropriateness of ridiculing other people’s faith. In an interview aboard the papal plane, while flying from Sri Lanka to the Philippines, the Pope gestured towards Alberto Gasparri, a Vatican official who was standing next to him on board the plane, and said: “If my good friend Dr. Gasparri says a curse word against my mother, he can expect a punch in the nose. It’s normal. You cannot provoke. You cannot insult the Read More ›

From Darwinism to Global Warming and Back

I was reading an exchange of emails that took place between noted physcist (and skeptical warmer) Freeman Dyson and his interlocutor, Steve Conner, of the Independent of London. To my eye, Dyson is spot on in his critical thinking. But what most caught my eye was his analysis between the ‘experts’ and the general public that seems to have occurred. I think it serves as a good understanding of where Darwinism/neo-Darwinism now stands in academia. When I was in high-school in England in the 1930s, we learned that continents had been drifting according to the evidence collected by Wegener. It was a great mystery to understand how this happened, but not much doubt that it happened. So it came as Read More ›

What Jerry Coyne doesn’t get about goodness

Over at Why Evolution Is True, Professor Jerry Coyne has responded to neurosurgeon Michael Egnor’s recent article arguing that materialism cannot account for our ability to form abstract concepts, such as the concept of “good” (Free Will is Real and Materialism is Wrong, Evolution News and Views, January 15, 2015). As Professor Egnor puts it: Intellect and will are immaterial powers, and obviously so. Here’s why. Let us imagine, as a counterfactual, that the intellect is a material power of the mind. As such, the judgment that a course of action is good, which is the basis on which an act of the will would be done, would entail “Good” having a material representation in the brain. But how exactly Read More ›

The “quine dilemma” of evolution

Sorry if this post is a bit for computer programmers, anyway I trust that also the others can grasp the overall picture. Evolutionists claim that what it takes to evolution to work is simply “a populations of replicators, random variations on them, and a competition for survival or resources”. Today we will try to partially layout how to simulate on computer such process. First off, we need the replicators, i.e. digital programs able to self-reproduce. In informatics jargon, a computer program able to self-reproduce, i.e. to produce as output a copy of its source code is called a “quine”. Therefore in a sense a quine is a little, minimal digital “bio-cell”. You can write the code of a quine in Read More ›