Category Archives: Podcasts

Podcasts

William Dembski discusses new peer-reviewed paper on intelligent design

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The paper talks about how to measure the amount of information required by evolutionary algorithms in order for them to work. The paper describes accounting processes for measuring where information is put into evolutionary algorithms, so that it becomes clear how much information is needed up front. The paper shows that the information present in evolutionary algorithms does not emerge as a result of evolutionary algorithms – the “active information” has to be put into the process at different points for the process to work.

The paper:

“Conservation of Information in Search: Measuring the Cost of Success,” published in IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics A, Systems & Humans.

The MP3 file for Part 1 is here.

Part 1 Topics:

  • about the IEEE, the publisher of the paper Dembski and Marks
  • the search problem and evolutionary algorithms
  • the concept of “active information”
  • blind search versus targeted searches
  • No Free Lunch theorems
  • Conservation of information
  • Responding to an objection: is Darwinism analogous to the search problem?
  • does evolution have mathematical underpinnings?

The MP3 file for Part 2 is here.

Part 2 Topics:

  • fitness functions and fitness landscape
  • constraints as information
  • does the paper support intelligent design?
  • how have critics responded to this paper?

You can read the entire paper for free here.

Podcasts

Jennifer Roback Morse connects feminism to same-sex marriage and Marxism

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This is awesome, and only 15 minutes long.

Here is the full MP3 file.

Topics:

  • her role in the prop 8 campaign in California
  • the toxic atmosphere around the issue of same-sex marriage
  • the connection between the gay rights and feminism
  • how Marx and Engels viewed marriage, family and parenting
  • the left’s goal to involve the state inside the family
  • the goal of domestic violence laws and social programs
  • the left’s view of sex and sexuality
  • why same-sex marriage requires state coercion of individuals
  • how same-sex marriage affects religious liberty
  • what is the purpose of traditional marriage
  • how fathers stand to lose if same-sex marriage becomes law

Jennifer Roback Morse is fun because she connects these social issues to fiscal issues and liberty. It’s really interesting! One of the best things about her is that she is very much outward-focused. She took a lead role in defending traditional marriage and traditional families in California during the prop 8. She also speaks on campuses to the college students, just like William Lane Craig.

Here are a few more of her lectures:

The first lecture is particularly suitable for stay-at-home mothers, who have a critical role in society during the first 18 months of post-birth child development.

Podcasts

Debate summary: Craig vs Ahmed on “Does God Exist?” – Ahmed’s first speech

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I thought that I would summarize a debate that occurred at Cambridge University between Dr. William Lane Craig and Dr. Arif Ahmed. Craig is by far the foremost defender of Christianity in the world, and Ahmed won his previous debate against the venerable Dr. Gary Habermas by a landslide. Could Dr. Ahmed repeat his previous victory?

The full MP3 is here. (H/T Brian Auten of Apologetics 315)

Craig’s opening speech is in the previous post. I am sorry but I cannot help but inject a little snark into my summaries of atheist speeches. I apologize in advance for being snarky. The snark is in italics.

And here is my summary of Dr. Ahmed’s first opening speech: (22:10)

Rebuttal to Craig’s case for God.

0) Craig is wrong about faith and reason (25:20)
– Craig’s book Reasonable Faith, he makes a number of statements about faith and reason
– He writes that Christianity is not accountable to reason if reason goes against Christianity
– He writes that the truth of Christianity is knowable without rational arguments
– He writes that even if there are no reasons to believe, and many reasons to disbelieve, humans are still obligated to believe
– Question for Craig: is Christianity reasonable or isn’t it? Do reasons matter or don’t they?

1) Response to Craig’s first argument: the origin of the universe (28:27)
– what mathematicians say about the contradictory nature of subtraction and division for actual infinities is wrong
– what cosmologists and physicists say about the beginning of time is wrong, every event follows another one, there is no first event
– even if the universe is 15 billion years old, the act of Creation requires time and there was no time prior to the supposed beginning of the universe for God to act in
– the cause of the universe need not be a personal agent
– all minds are made of matter so a mind cannot be the cause of the universe, because all the people who pre-suppose materialism like me think that minds must be made of matter
– it is impossible for a person to act outside of time, because all the persons I know act in time
– why did God wait 15 billion years before creating humans and relating to them? – i wouldn’t have done it that way

2) Response to Craig’s second argument: the fine-tuning of the creation (32:38)
– where do these probabilities that Craig is using come from?

3) Response to Craig’s third argument: the moral argument (34:07)
– I have personal preferences about what counts as right and wrong, and they are superior to God’s preferences
– moral intuitions are not a good way of discovering objective moral values, so therefore objective moral values don’t exist

4) Response to Craig’s fourth argument: the resurrection (36:00)
– the number of eyewitnesses is not enough, because groups number of eyewitnesses can be fooled by illusions, as in David Copperfield illusions
– the Gospels contradict themselves, e.g. – the story of Matthew’s earthquake and walking dead isn’t in Mark – so that’s a contradiction, so the Gospels are not reliable sources for Craig’s 3 minimal facts

5) Response to Craig’s fourth argument: personal experience (37:30)
– there are many different religious experiences because there are many different religions
– if lots of people disagree about something, then no one can be right

Ahmed’s case against God.

1) Absence of evidence is evidence of absence (39:00)
– if there is are no reasons to believe in God, then this alters reality to make it true that he doesn’t exist

2) The inductive argument from evil (40:04)
– some evil is gratuitous – events cause people to suffer, and has no benefit that I can see, based on my limited knowledge in time and space and my personal preference of what counts as a benefit and what doesn’t
– God would not have allowed people to suffer, because God’s job is to make us feel happy in this life

3) Belief in God makes people evil (41:52)
– all genuinely religious people are very immoral, according to my personal preferences about what counts as right and wrong

Please only comment on the content of Dr. Ahmed’s arguments, there will be a poll at 6 PM to vote in and then you can comment on who is winning, too. This was a very entertaining debate to listen to, and the audio is crystal clear! If I get lots of comments, I summarize the rest of the debate for Friday!

In case you are wondering about his inductive argument from evil, please read this summary on the problems of evil and suffering, which is taken from my list of arguments for and against Christian theism.  Keep in my mind that I am a software engineer with two degrees in computer science… not philosophy!

Craig mentions a paper by the late William P. Alston of Syracuse University in his rebuttal to the inductive problem of evil. The paper lists six limitations on human cognitive capacities that make it difficult for humans to know that some instance of  apparently gratuitous evil really is gratuitious – that God has no morally sufficient reason for permitting this specific instance of evil.  Since Ahmed is making the claim that some evil is gratuitous, he bears the burden of proof.

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