All posts by Wintery Knight

https://winteryknight.com/
Podcasts

Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse explains the dangers of cohabitation

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The podcast is here.

The story she is talking about is here.

Excerpt:

DALLAS — The hotel bathroom was a de facto prison cell — a cramped, foul space where three young children were starved, beaten and sexually assaulted for at least nine months.

The toilet didn’t work. The bathtub was a place to sleep. Meals were rare, and the two oldest children — once each a healthy 90 pounds — withered to less than 60 pounds.

Each day for reasons unknown, their mother’s boyfriend would force the 10-year-old boy to stand in the corner with his arms raised above his head; his 5-year-old half brother had to kneel in another corner, arms also raised.

The disturbing details emerged in court records that tell the horrific story of the torture borne by the two boys and their 11-year-old half sister, all of whom have different fathers. The children were found July 2 after their mother called a relative to say she feared for her own life and those of her children.

A photo of the cohabiting couple are here.

Dr. J’s blog is here.

Commentary

Huge debate at Neil Simpson’s blog on religion and same-sex marriage

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Neil Simpson has the best online debates. Here’s the post that kicked it all off.

Excerpt:

Here’s why I am free to support real marriage in the public square:

1. That First Amendment thingy.  We’re allowed to let our religious views inform our political views whether you like it or not. It doesn’t inhibit religious freedoms, it protects them.

2. My religion tells me that stealing, perjury, gay bashing and murder are also wrong.  Do you object to me letting those views inform my political views, or just the views you don’t like?

3. Lots of churches are thoroughly pro-gay, such as the UCC and the Episcopals.  I don’t recall you objecting to their advancement of the pro-gay cause.  If you were being consistent and if you really opposed any religious beliefs in the public square, shouldn’t you be objecting to their views just as strenuously?  Why do you just use that argument against views you disagree with?

4. You are begging the question by assuming what you should be proving.  You claim that we are denying “rights” to gays but you must change the definition of the word in question to draw that conclusion.  But the whole debate is whether to change the word and give them a new right.  You cheat and pretend that we’ve already changed the word and given them the right and then insist that we’re denying this existing right.  Sadly, pro-gay apologists commit this fallacy so reflexively that I doubt you realize what you are doing….

5. Finally, and most importantly, I didn’t bring up religion.  You did.  I can argue this topic without it — though of course, if you want to know Jesus’ views on it I’ll be glad to share the biblical view with you.

To give you a hint of how things are going over there with Neil, I’ve excerpted a sample exchange from the comments.

Sample exchange:

morsec0de writes:

Denying homosexuals the ability to marry each other has no secular justification.

Neil writes:

By nature and design [same-sex marriages] do not produce the next generation. Please don’t come back and tell me about infertile couples, those who use birth control, etc., as that isn’t the point I just made. My point is that by nature only heterosexual unions can produce children.

Homosexual couples can never provide a mother and father to a child, which by nature and design is the ideal. Again, just because there are non-traditional families doesn’t mean we shouldn’t encourage the ideal.

My own argument against same-sex marriage is here. Notice that it is completely fact-based, without even a hint of religion. That’s the way we roll on the Wintery Knight Blog.

Polemics

What is the scientific evidence for intelligent design?

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This article summarizes three types of evidence for intelligent design.

They are:

  1. Fine-tuning of the laws of physics to allow for advanced life
  2. Information in life
  3. Irreducible complexity

(Not discussed in the article are three other mainstream scientific arguments against naturalism, from the origin of the universe, habitability-observability convergence and the sudden origin of body plans in the fossil record)

Recall that intelligent design is based on the notion of specified complexity. A sequence of symbols is complex if it is composed of a large number of symbols. It is specified if it conforms to an independent pattern. If it is large and conforms to a pattern, then it exhibits specified complexity. Sequences that exhibit specified complexity are designed.

Examples:

  • Neither complex, nor specified: “AB”
  • Complex, not specified: “AB KN IH KML NIFCS YDH HOEHS KFSA”
  • Specified, not complex: “The”
  • Complex and specified: “Obama is the worst president ever”

Now you know more about intelligent design than 99.9% of journalists who bash intelligent design.

Here’s a snap shot of each of three basic arguments for intelligent design:

Fine-tuning

The fine-tuning of the laws of physics and chemistry to allow for advanced life is an example of extremely high levels of CSI in nature. The laws of the universe are complex because they are highly unlikely. Cosmologists have calculated the odds of a life-friendly universe appearing by chance are less than one part in 1010^123. That’s ten raised to a power of 10 with 123 zeros after it! The laws of the universe are specified in that they match the narrow band of parameters required for the existence of advanced life.

The Origin of Life

Studies of the cell reveal vast quantities of biochemical information stored in our DNA in the sequence of nucleotides.  No physical or chemical law dictates the order of the nucleotide bases in our DNA, and the sequences are highly improbable and complex. Moreover, the coding regions of DNA exhibit sequential arrangements of bases that are necessary to produce functional proteins. In other words, they are highly specified with respect to the independent requirements of protein function and protein synthesis.

Irreducible complexity

One easily testable form of CSI is irreducible complexity, which can tested and discovered by experimentally reverse-engineering biological structures through genetic knockout experiments to determine if they require all of their parts to function.  When experimental work uncovers irreducible complexity in biology, they conclude that such structures were designed. This method has been used to detect irreducible complexity in a variety of biochemical systems such as the bacterial flagellum.

Now you know what the word “intelligent design” really refers to. Notice that it has absolutely nothing to do with religion, in much the same way as atheism nothing to do with science.