Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 157

September 15, 2021

Science Uprising: The Big Bang: Something from Nothing is here

Episode 7, debuting now, explains why the Big Bang — the idea of a cosmic beginning — has been resisted by atheists, yet why the best science demands it. In some ways, this is a quick take on the most novel arguments in Stephen Meyer’s recent book, The Return of the God Hypothesis , but presented in a very different way.

David Klinghoffer, “Science Uprising — “Big Bang: Something from Nothing?”” at Evolution News and Science Today (September 15, 2021)

You may also wish to read: Science Uprising is back, with more uproar, fun ENV: “Season 2 is scheduled to begin on September 15 and will include four new episodes, to be released over several months.”

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Published on September 15, 2021 19:24

When people claim that “the science” says this or that…

Edward Feser

Discussing the recent essay by medical statistician John Ioannidis on the was politicization and shoddy research around COVID-19 are corrupting science, philosopher Edward Feser focuses on a couple of his points, including this one, “the deleterious role that social media have played”:

Over the course of the pandemic, people of all political persuasions have confidently asserted that “the science” says this or says that, when in fact most of them have not read what scientists themselves have written and wouldn’t know where to find it if they wanted to. Rather, what they know is what politicians and journalists have claimed about what “the science” says. Worse, they know the simplified versions of what politicians and journalists have said that they find at Twitter, Facebook, and the like. The doubly indirect nature of this knowledge of the scientific research already entails significant distortions. Politicians and journalists of all stripes have biases, lack relevant expertise, etc. and this inevitably distorts their presentation of scientific findings. And when their own presentations are reduced to sound bites by social media, there is bound to be further distortion.

But it’s worse even than that. For one thing, social media do not merely oversimplify complex issues. They positively foster irrational habits of thought – snap judgments, snark and one-upmanship in place of dispassionate debate, groupthink, and so on. And too many scientists active on social media have succumbed to these temptations, which erodes the Mertonian norm of disinterestedness.

Edward Feser, “Ioannidis on the politicization of science” at Edward Feser blogspot (September 11, 2021)

Hat tip: Ken Francis, co-author with Theodore Dalrymple of The Terror of Existence: From Ecclesiastes to Theatre of the Absurd

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Published on September 15, 2021 18:26

World’s oldest art raises question: Is it art?

Hand and footprints lack a “utilitarian explanation,” researchers say:

An international collaboration has identified what may be the oldest work of art, a sequence of hand and footprints discovered on the Tibetan Plateau. The prints date back to the middle of the Pleistocene era, between 169,000 and 226,000 years ago – three to four times older than the famed cave paintings in Indonesia, France and Spain…

“The question is: What does this mean? How do we interpret these prints? They’re clearly not accidentally placed,” said Urban, a co-author of the paper, “Earliest Parietal Art: Hominin Hand and Foot Traces from the Middle Pleistocene of Tibet,” published Sept. 10 in Science Bulletin.

“There’s not a utilitarian explanation for these. So what are they?” Urban said. “My angle was, can we think of these as an artistic behavior, a creative behavior, something distinctly human. The interesting side of this is that it’s so early.”

David Nutt, “Hand and footprint art dates to mid-Ice Age” at Cornell Chronicle (September 14, 2021) The paper is closed access.

Researchers would not be asking if it is art if it were not so old (between 169,000 and 226,000). The underlying assumption seems to be that humans did not think imaginatively in those days. The evidence seems to contradict the evolutionary assumption.

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Published on September 15, 2021 16:58

At Stat News: Science has got obesity all wrong

A science writer reflects on the way paradigms work:

I’ve been a science reporter for 40 years. I’ve wanted to assume that the experts I interview can be trusted to understand their subjects. Put simply, to get it right. But watching researchers in the field of obesity almost blindly follow a failed paradigm has led me to cross a line that few journalists ever do, to publicly embrace and promote a minority opinion that many in the obesity field think is quackery.

For nearly a century, obesity research has been predicated on the belief that the cause of the disorder “is an energy imbalance between calories consumed and calories expended,” to quote the World Health Organization. By this ubiquitous thinking, obesity is an energy balance disorder: People get fat because they take in more calories than they expend. They stay lean when they don’t.

This is the central dogma of obesity science…

People don’t get fat because they eat too much, consuming more calories than they expend, but because the carbohydrates in their diets — both the quantity of carbohydrates and their quality — establish a hormonal milieu that fosters the accumulation of excess fat.

Gary Taubes, “How a ‘fatally, tragically flawed’ paradigm has derailed the science of obesity” at Stat News (September 13, 2021)

The paper is open access.

If he’s right, a popular paradigm it was dangerous to doubt will come under fire.

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Published on September 15, 2021 08:10

September 14, 2021

Life on Mars? Maybe it’ll happen when the first humans arrive…

In a most informative article, David. F. Coppedge contrasts known facts as to why Mars might be lifeless with science writing that relentlessly attempts to paint it as hopeful. Just two examples:

(3) Mars has no global magnetic field to protect life. (4) Mars has no ozone layer to protect it from UV radiation.

David F. Coppedge, “Evolutionists Find it Hard to Imagine a Lifeless Mars” at Creation-Evolution Headlines

vs.

Mars rocks collected by Perseverance boost case for ancient life (Phys.org). The only evidence offered in this simplistic article is that certain rocks in the Jezero Crater where the rover Perseverance is operating could have had contact with water in the past. “If these rocks experienced water for long periods of time, there may be habitable niches within these rocks that could have supported ancient microbial life,” said one female NASA geologist suffering from hydrobioscopy.

Earthly rocks point way to water hidden on Mars (Penn State News). Water is a necessary but not sufficient condition for life on Mars. Mars has an abundance of an iron mineral called hematite. A Penn State doctoral student found evidence to support a “once-debunked 19th-century identification” that some forms of this mineral could contain water. The possibility of Mars having hydro-hematite was enough to switch on this student’s hydrobioscopy buzzer.

David F. Coppedge, “Evolutionists Find it Hard to Imagine a Lifeless Mars” at Creation-Evolution Headlines

People don’t want to be alone or to believe that they are alone. That, far more than any evidence, drives the demand for life on Mars.

Of course, there could be life there but that’s not why people believe it.

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Published on September 14, 2021 21:38

Here’s an interview with Michael Denton on the history and future of ID

Biochemist Michael Denton is one of the earliest figures to question conventional Darwinism.

In English, with Italian subtitles.

The discussion at the YouTube page is in Italian. An auto-generated English language transcript is available.

Also:

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Published on September 14, 2021 18:20

Was Thomas Henry Huxley the first science journalist?

Science historian Michael Flannery discusses how Darwin’s man Huxley (1825–1895) helped set people up for a “science” worldview via popular public lectures:

We can reveal the many problems with Huxley’s scientistic dystopia by working through it point-by-point. Huxley wants to present us with “the facts” and he does so by suggesting that good old sanitation rather than faith in God would have alleviated the plague. Although Huxley couldn’t have known this in 1866, plague is not primarily a sanitary problem; it is caused by Yersinia pestis, a gram-negative bacterium discovered in 1894 that infests fleas residing on rats. Thus the plague has a complex rat-flea-human vector relationship. Less than one hundred years after Huxley’s self-assured pronouncements on the plague, historian Charles F. Mullett pointed out that claiming the plague was a matter of sanitation and overcrowding is too simplistic, “to be unwashed and promiscuous did not in themselves cause the plague” (300). Stephen Porter’s The Great Plague goes further. He argues that cleanliness “is unlikely to have been a major factor in the absence of the plague in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries” (171). More likely is that some type of herd immunity to the Y. pestis bacteria was acquired by rats and/or people.

We can forgive Huxley for not knowing this, but can we forgive him for his adamant portrayal of scientific “facts”? Today we know his discussion of the plague is scientifically wrong. But Huxley should have been better acquainted with his history. Had he actually read Defoe instead of just citing him, he would have known that all kinds of naturalistic causes were given for the plague — comets, poor planetary alignments, earthquakes, weather, all took their respective places in the list of “causes” of this pestilential visitation. Huxley’s privileging of scientific facts is wrong; these facts are no better than the context in which they are formed. I do not doubt that prayerful contemplation — always a useful aid in adversity — would have been a better response to the plague than any of the naturalistic claims about it at the time. And Huxley’s claims notwithstanding, the plague would not have been averted much less removed with just a little more broom work.

Michael Flannery, “Sunday with the Devil’s Acolyte — Thomas Henry Huxley” at Evolution News and Science Today (September 14, 2021)

What Huxley was marketing was not a correct analysis of the cause of the plague but one that promoted materialism. Today, for example, we constantly hear similar stuff like – just for example – “science is closing in on the human mind” or “apes think like people.” They can’t help it, of course, but Huxley’s career might help us understand better how it got started.

You may also wish to read: The final materialist quest: A war on the reality of the mind Going to war with the very concept is an approach even George Orwell did not think up. When George Orwell wrote 1984, he addressed destroying minds, not denying their possibility and changing the language associated with them.

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Published on September 14, 2021 18:02

At Mind Matters News: New theory of mind offers more information, less materialism

First, let’s begin by noting a remarkable fact: Panpsychism seems to have triumphed in the area of theories of consciousness:

At Nautilus, evolutionary biologist Tam Hunt asks us to consider the “General Resonance Theory of consciousness,” which he has been developing with psychologist Jonathan Schooler — “a framework with a panpsychist foundation. It may, he thinks, “at least in theory, provide more complete answers to the full array of questions the hard problem of consciousness poses.”

He’s quite clear about the panpsychism (the view that everything in the universe participates in consciousness)…

Before we get to the Hunt–Schooler theory itself, first, let’s note that panpsychism seems to have triumphed in the area of theories of consciousness.. Christof Koch’s well-regarded theory of consciousness is also panpsychist. No one blinks.

News, “New theory of mind offers more information, less materialism” at Mind Matters News

Takehome: Are there materialist theories of consciousness out there any more? Yes. But it is unclear how many of them are taken seriously. Except in pop science mags.

You may also wish to read: How a materialist philosopher argued his way to panpsychism. Galen Strawson starts with the one fact of which we are most certain — our own consciousness. To Strawson, it makes more sense to say that consciousness is physical — and that electrons are conscious — than that consciousness is an illusion.

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Published on September 14, 2021 07:43

No Middle Ground

Neitzsche’s conclusions are sound, some would argue inexorable, if one grants his fundamental premise, that God is dead. The “good” beyond good and evil is the strong man, the superior man (ubermensch), imposing his will on the weak. In a world without God, there is only power, and those who have it and those who do not. A strong man brutally subjugates a weak man or even a weak people. That is good because it is the natural course of the world once the strong man throws off the fetters of Christianity’s unnatural “slave morality.”

You can have God and the transcendent moral principles that flow from His Being. Or you can have the ubermensch. There is no middle ground. “But atheists can be fine moral people,” I hear someone object. Of course they can so long as the society in which they live has sufficient reserves of moral capital — such as the moral capital that accumulated in the West during centuries of Christian ascendancy — onto which they can latch parasitically. As I have written many times before, I can respect while disagreeing with an atheist who looks unflinchingly into the abyss of his metaphysical commitments. But I detest “what, me worry?” smiley faced atheists who want their nihilism sugar coated with the an appropriated Christian ethic.

Our stock of moral capital is nearly depleted. I look around me and see a generation rising that has been taught to not only to acknowledge but to actively embrace the abyss. There was a time that I could count on a young person repelling in horror at the notion that if morality is subjective, whether the Holocaust was evil is a matter of opinion. No more. Today’s fashionable barbarian is just as likely to respond “I suppose that’s right.” What happens to a parasite when the host dies? Whither a nation when it reaches a critical mass of elites who embrace the abyss? I fear we are about to find out.

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Published on September 14, 2021 06:16

September 13, 2021

Crowd-funded faith-based nature documentary hopes to offer an alternative to traditional atheist approach

The docuseries is called “The Riot and the Dance”:

The vast majority of scientists and nature documentary filmmakers view the earth through an evolutionary lens. The team behind “The Riot and the Dance” points to a just-released poll showing a hunger for another side of the nature equation. A HarrisX online survey of 2,028 adults conducted Aug. 12-14 found several factors in the show’s favor.

For example, 40% of Americans would be willing to invest in TV content that appeals to them, which is the core of Angel Studio’s crowdfunding model, witness past successes like “The Chosen” series and “Dry Bar Comedy.” Plus, many Americans (74%) who enjoy nature programming also find meaning in religion.

Perhaps the most important poll finding was that 84% of those willing to invest in new TV shows believe that God created the earth.

Christian Toto, “Faith-based nature docuseries bypassing gatekeepers thanks to crowdfunding” at Just the News

There are two earlier films in the series. Here’s the trailer for the current one:

Here’s the trailer for the first one:

And the second one:

Here’s a documentary on the series’ goal: Making the films you’re not really supposed to make.

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Published on September 13, 2021 19:21