In a post (see here) the renowned philosopher of science Michael Ruse offered the notion that seems to equalize, in a certain respect, creationism with science.
Continue reading “Philosopher Ruse as an entertainer”.
Mark Perakh Archives
I’ve received a letter from Iowa written by Dr. Hector Avalos, which, I think, may be of interest to many readers of this blog. In his letter Dr. Avalos reports about a defeat of ID advocates in one of the school boards in Iowa. The full text of Dr. Avalos’s letter can be seen here. I hope most of the PT’s denizens will join me in expressing our gratitude to Dr. Avalos for his letter.
A FEW MORE WORDS ABOUT A CREATIONIST’S “REVIEW OF WIDF ANTHOLOGY
On February 19 Dr. Ian Musgrave posted to the Panda’s Thumb a brief rebuttal ( see here ) to Angus Menuge’s supposed “review” of the anthology Why Intelligent Design Fails (WIDF).
Ian replied only to Menuge’s treatment of Ian’s chapter in the anthology, showing that Menuge’s review of that chapter is a chunk of piffle. I fully agree with Ian’s opinion, and may add that the same can be said about Menuge’s treatment of every other chapter in the anthology. His “review” of chapter 11, of which I was the author, is a good example.(The text of my chapter is available online see here).
I know next to nothing about Menuge (I believe I heard he has a degree in chemistry) but his review of my chapter betrays his ignorance of the subject discussed in my chapter. In that chapter I demonstrated Dembski’s misinterpretation of the No Free Lunch theorems by Wolpert & MacReady. Dembski’s thesis boiled down to the assertion that the NFL theorems prohibit evolution, which, therefore, is impossible. Of course, the NFL theorems do nothing of the sort, and Dembski displayed an impressive, for a mathematician, lack of understanding of the matter.
And what has Menuge found worth rebutting in my chapter? In his review there is not a single word regarding the main points of my chapter. Instead, he found there a single statement worth (in his view) discussing, which is a secondary point, in no way crucial for my argument. Even about that statement he could not say anything of substance.
In that statement I claimed that the question of natural evolutionary algorithms being capable of climbing up the naturally occurring fitness landscapes belongs in the discussion of anthropic coincidences. Menuge referred to my statement using the words that I “admit” (rather than “state”) my notion. By this trick Menuge apparently tried to create the impression that the statement in question negated my thesis about Dembski’s misuse of the NFL theorems.
In fact I had nothing to “admit,” and it must be clear to any reader of an average intelligence that my notion about anthropic coincidences in no way contradicted my critique of Dembski’s fallacious discourse. It is obvious that Menuge just could not come up with any reasonable rebuttal of my chapter, so he resorted to an irrelevant and meaningless comment about a secondary point, while avoiding discussion of the gist of my chapter. Quite likely, he had no choice as he probably just could not comprehend my arguments because of his insufficient understanding of the NFL theorems and all the related stuff, but had the gall to pretend to be capable of judging it.
In view of the above, Menuge’s conclusion that the arguments in the anthology in question are “not so fatal “ for ID as the authors of the anthology claimed is nothing more than the usual for ID advocates attempt to present their dreams as reality.
I just received the following letter from Holland:
Yesterday 3 Feb, the Dutch evangelical, TV presentator and former director of the Evangelical Broadcast Organisation (EO), Andries Knevel, openly rejected his belief in Young Earth Creationism and ID. He apologised for promoting those beliefs in the past years to his children and the public. He wants credibility, reliability and belief. He desires an open debate about God and evolution with believers and non-believers alike. He believes GOD and evolution do not exclude each other. Both science and belief have their own value. He still belief that God created heaven and earth en that Jezus is our Saviour.
On July 27 2007 it was discovered and documented http://evolutie.blog.com/1962396/ that the EO censored all evolution and old earth from the BBC documentaries of David Attenborough. Now the EO no longer denies it was censorship indeed by showing fragments they censored in the past years. This is a remarkable breakthrough and conversion. Especially hopeful in the Darwinyear 2009. There are still YEC’s in Holland, but the main evangelical television station has made a very promising move.
Gert Korthof
The “fine-tuning” argument is a version of the creationist interpretation of the antropic coincidences argument. Its essence is an asseveration that the physical constants must have values within extremely narrow limits in order for life to exist. Since the constants indeed have such values as is necessary for life existence, those values, according to creationists, point to the intelligent design of the universe. Many counter-arguments have been suggested refuting the “fine-tuning” argument. Mathematician Mark Frank suggests one more counter-argument from an angle somehow differing from those suggested hitherto. The full text of Frank’s essay can be seen here.
University Professor (emeritus) Paul Gross, who has co-authored with Barbara Forrest (of the Dover trial fame) the well-known book (2004) about the ID “movement,” has now reviewed the recent book by the notorious anti-evolutionist David Berlinski. This review will soon appear in the Free Inquiry magazine, but it can already be read in full in this post.
Professor Peter Olofsson is a prominent mathematician, expert in probability, mathematical statistics and related fields (in particular, he has recently authored an outstanding textbook on probability and statistics). In a new essay Olofsson offers a devastating critique of Dembski’s and Behe’s mishandling of probabilistic and statistical concepts in their attempts to utilize these powerful mathematical tools to support intelligent design “theory.” Olofsson provides a superb analysis of the fallacy of Dembski’s treatment of the Caputo case, reveals Dembski’s distortion of Bayesian approach, and offers strong mathematical arguments against Behe’s latest book. The full text of Olofsson’s essay is available at Talk Reason.
(This essay was also printed in the Chance magazine, 21(3) 2008,)
In the creationist literature of various kinds an assertion is often made that Einstein was a believer in God, and this assertion is often suggested as allegedly an argument favoring religious faith. However such statements are contrary to what can be found in various documents, for example in Einstein’s letters to various people. The fate of one more such letter is revealed by Associated Press in the following message:
Einstein letter dismissing ‘childish’ religion sells for 200,000 pounds.
By The Associated Press
The letter was written to philosopher Eric Gutkind in January 1954, a year before Einstein’s death. In it, the Einstein said that
“the word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honorable but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish.”
Einstein also said he saw nothing “chosen” about the Jews, and that they were no better than other peoples “although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power.”
Unfortunately for creationists, using the authority of Einstein as a supposed argument in favor of their beliefs is based on a distortion of the views of the great scientist. Of course, argument from authority is anyway of little value.
Intelligent Design advocates are fond of using the bacterial flagellum as, in Dembski’s words, a “mascot” of the Intelligent Design movement. In particular, during the recent TV debate between Behe and myself, Behe showed pictures of flagella and triumphantly asserted that they looked exactly like man-made machines, and therefore they must be designed. What ID advocates, including Behe, fail to mention is that the images of flagella they endlessly demonstrate are heavily doctored, and that the real observed flagella do not look like “machines” at all. In fact the structure of flagella is more typical of a bacteriophage virus. Seeing the actual cryogenic electron micrographs of flagella, as well as the images derived from X-rays analysis immediately reveals that showing artificial machine-like images of flagella, without explaining the degree of idealization applied, is sometimes perilously close to committing a fraud.
Read Flagella – Real and Fictional, at Talk Reason.
John Derbyshire quotes Ben Stein (see here). This amazing utterance from the host of the pseudo-documentary Expelled! requires no commentaries, it speaks for itself.
I am posting this as a courtesy to Professor Hector Avalos. I did not add a single word to Avalos’s message, nor made any change in his text.
The Discovery Institute has written a glowing account of the debut of Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed in Ames, Iowa, the home of Dr. Guillermo Gonzalez, the pro-ID astronomer at Iowa State University. Prof. Hector Avalos, also of Iowa State University, tells a different story based on his eyewitnes account, and it does not bode well for Expelled nationwide. Continue reading Expelled pseudo-documentary bombs in Gonzalez’s backyard in TalkReason.
On November 19, 2007 a new book, The Design of Life, authored by William Dembski and Jonathan Wells, was released. Almost immediately a stream of reviews, all giving the book 5 stars (the highest positive evaluation possible for readers’ reviews on Amazon) started appearing on the Amazon website. On December 20, 2007, Wesley Elsberry posted a brief survey of the exaggerated acclaims of the book in question posted on Amazon by a bunch of ID advocates – acclaims bearing unmistakable signs of orchestration.
Elsberry’s survey could have been written even before this book appeared: the behavior of ID advocates follows a predictable pattern. Each time a new book by Dembski or Wells (or Behe, or any other of the Discovery Institute denizens) appears, their cohorts immediately start creating a ruckus, proclaiming the book in question the “end of Darwinism,” a great event in the history of humankind, destined to become a shining achievement in science, philosophy, sock mending, and culinary art.
Continue reading Dembski’s and Wells’s shenanigans - just a reminder, on Talk Reason.
For the last few years (beginning, I believe, in 2004) a lot of noise has been filling a number of websites regarding the “conversion” of British author Antony Flew from atheism to deism. Recently a new book, ostensibly authored by Flew, was published by HarperCollins, wherein Flew’s newly adopted deistic worldview is defended. Two Christian propagandists, Roy Varghese and Bob Hostetler, and, indirectly, Jewish religious propagandist Gerald Schroeder seem to have played a substantial role in producing that book. (See, for example, here.)
Some advocates of theism try to present Flew’s “conversion” as a supposedly important event somehow proving their beliefs. Is it indeed an important event deserving numerous posts and articles? Let us see.
Read Flew, Varghese, Schroeder: What a Company at Talk Reason.
I believe it was a famous French philosopher who said that everybody can make mistakes but only a fool stubbornly adheres to them. The story I am going to tell now may serve as an illustration of the above maxim, with a small modification: although the term “fool” may still (arguably) reflect the situation, the term “incompetent” is applicable unarguably. The hero of the story is William Dembski.
Read Errors not corrected for three years point to incompetence at Talk Reason.
Taner Edis (author of An Illusion of Harmony: Science and Religion in Islam , Prometheus Books, 2007), writes in an essay about the sitiuation with intelligent design vs. evolution in Muslim countries:
“Muslim populations have not been very hospitable to Darwinian evolution, supporting some of the most successful versions of creationism in the world. Lately, some Muslim intellectuals have been showing interest in intelligent design as well.”
Taner Edis argues that this is a mistake, and that enthusiasm for intelligent design can only harm the already weak state of science in Muslim lands.
Read Intelligent design: a blind alley by Taner Edis at Talk Reason.
This is a guest appearance of Erik Tellgren.
I (Mark Perakh) have not contributed anything to this essay and am posting it as a courtesy to Erik.
Here starts Erik’s text:
William Dembski has been one of the most influential contributors to the Intelligent Design (ID) movement. Among other things, his work has added the terms specified information, specified complexity, and complex specified information to the basic vocabulary of the ID movement. These terms are all directly related to the logarithms of special types of probabilities, e.g. the probability of a pattern of interest given that it was produced in some way that excludes the foresight and guidance of an intelligent agent.
In a recent draft manuscript, Dembski and his coauthor Marks extend the vocabulary with three new terms [1]: endogenous information, exogenous information, and active information. They consider as given a search space and a fixed subset, called a target, that makes up some fraction ps of the search space. An issue of interest to them is how to measure how well a search algorithm [2] exploits the structure of the search problem. Two possible candidates are the probability p that a search algorithm is successful and the ratio p/ps. Readers of Dembski’s previous writings will not be surprised to discover that Marks and Dembski prefer to log-transform their probabilities and rename them ‘information’. In equations, their definitions are
endogenous information = -log2(ps),
exogenous information = -log2(p),
active information = -log2(ps/p).
Continue reading Comments on Active Information at Talk Reason
On a few occasions Dembski lamented that his critics are usually not mathematicians and hence are not really qualified to debate his mathematical exercise. Recently two professional mathematicians - Olle Häggström and Peter Olofsson, both highly qualified experts in math statistics and related fields, published essays showing serious faults in Dembski’s mathematical output. Dembski and Marks responded with an article where they attempted to refute Olle’s arguments. While some replies to Dembski and Marks have already been posted, a reply from Olle himself was expected. I am glad to inform PT visitors that Olle’s reply to Dembski and Marks has appeared here. I think Olle succeeded admirably to reveal the emptiness of Dembski-Marks’s arguments.
This is a guest appearance by Hector Avalos. I (Mark Perakh) have not contributed a single word to this essay which I am posting as a courtesy to Professor Avalos.
One of the most common accusations against “Darwinism” and evolutionary theory, as a whole, is that they lead to the devaluation of human life such as was dramatically manifested in the Nazi Holocaust. Such a notion is embodied in Richard Weikart’s From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany (2004). Avalos demonstrates, however, that all of the major ideological precursors of the Holocaust have a long religious history that pre-dates Darwin. We can find such precursors in the work of Martin Luther and among biblical authors. Furthermore, Avalos demonstrates that creationists constitute the most vocal defenders of genocide and infanticide from ancient times to the present day. Therefore, the claim that theistic creationist ethics minimize or eliminate the devaluation of human life is false. Read Creationists for Genocide at Talk Reason.
After a group of ultra-Orthodox rabbis issued a “fatwa” forbidding Jews even to touch books by Rabbi Nathan Slifkin, he became kind of a celebrity. The popularity of his books jumped dramatically. A number of reviewers (and blurb writers) proceeded to extol the merits of Slifkin’s literary output, and specifically of his latest book titled The Challenge of Creation. Slifkin asserted in this book that scientific theories including evolution theory, not only are fully compatible with the tenets of Judaism, but that all science is in fact rooted in the Torah. The list of blurbs for Slifkin’s book includes those by Professor Michael Ruse, and by a number of other university professors, and prominent rabbis.
There is, though, at least one reviewer whose opinion of Slifkin’s opus is quite different from the acclaims by Slifkin’s admirers. His review, titled “When Quote Mining Becomes Quote Mania” can be read at Talk Reason..
A book-length report of the Committee on the Limits of Organic Life in Planetary Systems (commissioned by NASA) based on today’s best science is available free online here (It also can be purchased in a printed form from National Academies Press - see the above link).
