Tag: Naturalism

interior view of the Cistercian church at Salem Palace in southern Germany

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Author
Stephen C. Meyer

Date
February 6, 2023

Categorized
Faith and Science

Tagged
Adolf Hitler, Atheism, Bible, Big Bang, Biological Information, British Judaism, Christendom, Christian faith, civic value, fine tuning, Friedrich Nietzsche, George Washington, Holocaust, Judaism, Judeo-Christian morality, King Charles, Miracles, multiverse hypothesis, national morality, Naturalism, Nazis, Nazism, panspermia, philosophical materialism, religious wars, scientific atheism, the Fall, Third Reich, Thomas Jefferson, virtue, what would Jesus do, World War I}

Tom Holland, Stephen Meyer, Douglas Murray: God and the West

_{Stephen C. Meyer

February 6, 2023

Faith and Science}

On today’s ID the Future, Uncommon Knowledge host Peter Robinson talks with historian Tom Holland, journalist Douglas Murray, and philosopher of science Stephen Meyer about the decline of theistic faith in the West. Here in Part I of the conversation, the men consider possible causes for the decline of theistic faith. According to Meyer the decline has occurred in the face of increasing scientific evidence for the existence of God. So what gives? Tune in to hear their stimulating exploration of the question, and what each sees as the appropriate response. This material is used by permission of Peter Robinson and the Uncommon Knowledge podcast.

Cocked empty mousetrap on dark background.

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Author
Michael Behe

Date
September 26, 2022

Categorized
Intelligent Design

Tagged
A Mousetrap for Darwin, beginning of universe, Big Bang theory, co-option, Darwin Devolves, Darwin’s Black Box, eternal universe, Evolution, exaptation, Graham Oppy, inductive reasoning, Intelligent Design, Kenneth R. Miller, methodological materialism, methodological naturalism, Michael J. Behe, Molecular Machines, mousetraps, natural law, Naturalism, philosophy of science, purposeful arrangement of parts, The Edge of Evolution, Thomas Aquinas, Who Designed the Designer}

Behe Counters the Best Objections to Irreducible Complexity and ID, Pt 3

_{Michael Behe

September 26, 2022

Intelligent Design}

On today’s ID the Future biologist Michael Behe and Philosophy for the People host Pat Flynn conclude their conversation (posted by permission here) about some of the best objections to Behe’s central case for intelligent design. One objection Behe and Flynn tackle in this episode: the idea of evolution overcoming the irreducible-complexity hurdle through co-option. That is, maybe the precursors to what would become one of today’s molecular machines, such as the bacterial flagellum motor, co-opted simpler machines being used for other purposes, allowing evolution to build a bacterial flagellum motor one small step at a time over thousands or millions of generations, even though the completed bacterial flagellum ceases to function at all when just one of its many key parts Read More ›

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Author
Michael Behe

Date
September 21, 2022

Categorized
Intelligent Design

Tagged
Alvin Plantinga, Atheism, bacterial flagellum, Barry Hall, blood clotting cascade, cilia H. Allen Orr, cilium, Evolution, Graham Oppy, Hermann J. Muller, irreducible complexity, Jack Smart, Kenneth Miller, lactose, Michael Behe, mousetrap, Naturalism, Pat Flynn, philosophical materialism, Philosophy for the People podcast, philosophy of science, Richard Dawkins, Russell Doolittle}

Behe Counters the Best Objections to Irreducible Complexity and ID, Pt 2

_{Michael Behe

September 21, 2022

Intelligent Design}

Today’s ID the Future continues A Mousetrap for Darwin author Michael Behe’s conversation with philosopher Pat Flynn, focused on some of the more substantive objections to Behe’s case for intelligent design in biology. In this segment the pair discuss the bacterial flagellum, the cilium, and the blood clotting cascade, and tackle critiques from Alvin Plantinga, Graham Oppy, Russell Doolittle, Kenneth Miller, and others. This interview is posted here by permission of Pat Flynn.

dog and cat play together. cat and dog lying outside in the yard. kitten sucks dog breast milk. dog and cat best friends. love between animals.

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Author
Michael Behe

Date
August 31, 2022

Categorized
Intelligent Design

Tagged
argument from knowledge, cichlid fish, common descent, Darwin Devolves, Darwin’s Black Box, Darwin’s finches, Darwinian Evolution, Darwinism, death before the Fall, devolution, Evolution, evolutionary theory, From the Crust of the Earth, genetic code, genetic information, genus, God, Hawaiian drosophila, Inference to the Best Explanation, Intelligent Design, Lake Victoria, macroevolution, Matthew Ramage, Michael Behe, Microevolution, Molecular Machines, Natural Selection, Naturalism, Pat Flynn, Philosophy for the People, Pope Benedict, proofs of God, purposeful arrangement of parts, random variation, Richard Dawkins, The Greatest Show on Earth, Thomas Aquinas, Thomism}

Behe and Ramage: Evolution’s Limits and the Fingerprints of Design

_{Michael Behe

August 31, 2022

Intelligent Design}

Today’s ID the Future wraps up a debate over evolution and intelligent design between Lehigh University biologist Michael Behe and Benedictine College theologian Michael Ramage. Both Behe and Ramage are Catholic, and they carry on their conversation in the context of Catholic thinking about nature and creation, in particular the work of Thomas Aquinas and contemporary Thomist philosophers. Ramage seeks to integrate his Thomistic/personalist framework with modern evolutionary theory’s commitment to macroevolution and common descent. Behe doesn’t discount the possibility of common descent but lays out a case that any evolution beyond the level of genus (for instance, the separate families containing cats and dogs) cannot be achieved through mindless Darwinian mechanisms and, instead, would require the contributions of a Read More ›

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Author
Michael Behe

Date
August 29, 2022

Categorized
Intelligent Design

Tagged
aesthetics, beauty, Catholicism, chance, Christian apologetics, Creation, Darwin’s Black Box, Darwinism, Evolution, fine tuning, From the Dust of the Earth, G.K. Chesterton, In the Beginning: A Catholic Understanding of the Story of Creation and the Fall, Intelligent Design, irreducible complexity, Jack Smart, John Henry Newman, Joseph Ratzinger, Just So Stories, Mathew Ramage, Michael Behe, Molecular Machines, Naturalism, personalism, Pope Benedict XVI, Psalm 8, purposeful arrangement of parts, randomness, Rudyard Kipling, teleology, Theism, Theology, Thomas Aquinas, Thomism, voluntarism, William of Ockham}

Behe and Ramage Debate, Pt. 2: Evolution, ID, and Aquinas

_{Michael Behe

August 29, 2022

Intelligent Design}

Today’s ID the Future continues the conversation between Catholic intelligent design biologist Michael Behe and Catholic theologian Matthew Ramage. Both agree that nature points to a cosmic designer, but Ramage says he prefers, on aesthetic grounds, the idea that the biological realm has the capacity, gifted by God, to evolve on its own without the need for intervention by God. Behe notes that people have different aesthetic predilections, but it’s the scientist’s job not to figure out how he would have preferred things to have happened in nature, but to discover how they actually did come about. Behe also says that while the sun, moon, and stars do move according to fixed natural laws, it doesn’t follow from this that Read More ›

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Author
Brian Miller

Date
May 16, 2022

Categorized
Evolution

Tagged
alkaline thermal vents, Brian Miller, Charles Darwin, Darwin, design logics, devolution, DNA, E. coli, enzymes, error-correction mechanisms, Evolution, hype, James Tour, Jeremy England, Life on Fire, Materialism, Michael Russel, Molecular Machines, Natural Selection, Naturalism, Nature Communications, organizational blueprint, organizational design, origin of life, RNA, RNA first, RNA-World hypothesis, Robert Shapiro, Science Daily, self-organization, self-replicating molecules, self-replicating RNA, self-replication, Steven Novella, synthetic organic chemistry, The Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe, University of Tokyo}

Origin-of-Life Mystery at the University of Tokyo, Pt. 2

_{Brian Miller

May 16, 2022

Evolution}

Today’s ID the Future is Part 2 of physicist Brian Miller exploring a recent report from the University of Tokyo claiming a big breakthrough in origin-of-life research. As Miller and host Eric Anderson make clear, the university’s laboratory work on RNA, detailed in a recent Nature Communications article, involved the intelligent interference of the lab scientists and, despite this intelligent interference, the devolution of RNA rather than the evolution of increasing RNA sophistication. Miller says that it’s ironic that Steven Novella, a scientist committed to puncturing science hype, seems to have fallen for the hype surrounding this laboratory work. Miller and Anderson go on to discuss critiques of origin-of-life tall-tale claims, critiques coming Robert Shapiro, James Tour, and others. Life, Read More ›

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Author
Cornelius Hunter

Date
February 7, 2022

Categorized
Evolution

Tagged
bad design, book of Job, Casey Luskin, Charles Darwin, Charles Lyell, Comprehensive Guide to Science and Faith, Cornelius Hunter, Creation, Darwin’s notebooks, Darwinism, deism, dysteleology, Epicureans, Evolution, fall of man, God, HMS Beagle, human finitude, Intelligent Design, Judeo-Christian theology, Junk DNA, Kenneth Miller, metaphysics, natural evil, Natural Theology, Naturalism, Nick Matzke, perfect adaptation, philosophy of science, Problem of Evil, rationalism, science stopper, the Fall, The Origin of Species, theological assumptions, theological utilitarianism, Trinity, upland goose, utilitarianism, vertebrate eye}

Darwin’s Rhetorical Foundation of Sand: Theological Utilitarianism

_{Cornelius Hunter

February 7, 2022

Evolution}

On this ID the Future, biophysicist Cornelius Hunter explores Charles Darwin’s theological arguments for his theory of evolution. By theological, Hunter doesn’t mean that Darwin was arguing for theistic evolution. He means that Darwin received what is known as theological utilitarianism from the intellectual culture of his youth, which had strong deistic tendencies and expected everything in creation to be perfectly adapted, and he made a case against it, presenting mindless evolution as a better explanation for his observations of the biological world than theological utilitarianism. But one problem with this approach, according to Hunter, is that it assumed that theological utilitarianism is THE alternative to blind evolution. In fact, there are other alternatives, including an orthodox Judeo-Christian understanding of Read More ›

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Author
Neil Thomas

Date
January 26, 2022

Categorized
Evolution

Tagged
Alfred Russel Wallace, Charles Darwin, Darwinism, DNA, Eugenics, Evolution, Fossil Record, Francesco Redi, Francis Crick, Friedrich Max Müller, genetic information, Hank Hanegraaff, human evolution, human language, Intelligent Design, Louis Pasteur, Mel Brooks, Michael Denton, Miller-Urey experiment, Naturalism, Neil Thomas, Neo-Darwinism, Niles Eldredge, Noam Chomsky, origin of life, panspermia, physicalism, Punctuated Equilibrium, Richard Dawkins, Robert Cornish, Scopes Monkey Trial, sociobiology, spontaneous generation, Stephen J. Gould, substance dualism, Taking Leave of Darwin, The Descent of Man, Theism, Thomas Aquinas, William Harvey, Young Frankenstein}

Neil Thomas Talks Darwin, Aquinas, OOL and … Young Frankenstein

_{Neil Thomas

January 26, 2022

Evolution}

On this ID the Future, Taking Leave of Darwin author Neil Thomas continues a lively conversation with radio host Hank Hanegraaff. In this second in a three-part series, the two touch on the fossil record’s challenge to Darwinism, Gould and Eldredge’s rescue attempt, the question of whether Darwin’s best known contemporary defender is dishonest or merely self-deluded, the wishful thinking surrounding origin-of-life studies, the failed attempts to reduce the mind to mere brain chemistry, and the morally repugnant pro-eugenics ideas rooted in Darwinism and touted in the textbook at the heart of the famous Scopes Monkey Trial. The conversation is posted here by permission of Hank Hanegraaff. Get Neil Thomas’s book here.

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Author
Neil Thomas

Date
January 24, 2022

Categorized
Evolution

Tagged
agnosticism, Alfred Russel Wallace, Atheism, Charles Darwin, Christianity, Darwinism, Erasmus Darwin, Evolution, fundamentalism, George Eliot, God, H.M.S. Beagle, Hank Hanegraaff, Hank Unplugged, John Milton, Karl Marx, Lawrence Krauss, Mary Ann Evans, memes, methodological materialism, Miracles, Naturalism, Neil Thomas, Oxford University, Paradise Lost, Richard Dawkins, Robert Chambers, Samuel Wilberforce, Satan, Taking Leave of Darwin, theistic evolution, Theory of Evolution, Thomas Huxley, vera causa, William Empson, William Thorpe}

Neil Thomas and Hank Hanegraaff: An Autopsy for Darwinism

_{Neil Thomas

January 24, 2022

Evolution}

Today’s ID the Future kicks off a three-part series featuring Taking Leave of Darwin author Neil Thomas interviewed by radio host Hank Hanegraaff. In this first part, Hanegraaff begins by lauding Thomas’s book and underscoring how influential Darwin’s theory of evolution has been on Western culture. Then Thomas sketches the cultural milieu and individual motivations that he’s convinced drew Darwin toward his formulation of the theory of evolution by natural selection. Here the focus is not on the various evidential weaknesses of Darwin’s theory (which Thomas does cover in his book) but on a question that puzzled Thomas once he became convinced of just how evidentially weak the case for Darwinism was: How was it that a theory so poorly Read More ›

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Author
Eric Cassell

Date
November 10, 2021

Categorized
Life Sciences

Tagged
algorithms, altruism, Animal Algorithms, animal colonies, ants, bees, Biological Information, castes, complex programmed behavior, Darwinian Evolution, Darwinism, division of labor, drone swarms, drones, Eric Cassell, eusocial, inclusive fitness, insect genomes, insect social behavior, insect social colonies, instincts, Naturalism, Neo-Darwinism, novel genes, ORFans, orphan genes, pheromones, queen, Robert J. Marks, superorganisms, swarm intelligence, swarms, taxonomically restricted genes, termites}

Amazing Insect Colonies vs. Evolution

_{Eric Cassell

November 10, 2021

Life Sciences}

On today’s ID the Future, Animal Algorithms author Eric Cassell delves into another fascinating portion of his new book, the programmed social behaviors of colony insects and the challenge these instinctive behaviors pose for modern evolutionary theory. Cassell and host Robert J. Marks discuss the complex caste system of these colonies, the impressive signaling systems they use to communicate, and how technologists study these tiny-brained creatures to learn tricks for developing and improving drone swarm technology. How could a mindless evolutionary process have evolved these sophisticated colonies, where various castes appear essential to the functioning and survival of the colony, and possess their division-of-labor skills instinctively? Some colony members also behave altruistically, a fact that Charles Darwin himself conceded posed Read More ›