Tag Archives: Materialism

News

Denyse O’Leary and William Dembski author new book on theistic evolution

2 Comments

Here’s a post by Denyse on Uncommon Descent.

Excerpt:

In Christian Darwinism: Why Theistic Evolution Fails As Science and Theology (Broadman and Holman, November 2011), mathematician Dembski and journalist O’Leary address a powerful new trend to accommodate Christianity with atheist materialism, via acceptance of Darwinian (“survival of the fittest”) evolution.

[…]In the authors’ view, no accommodation is possible. More to the point, accommodation is not even necessary. There are good reasons for doubting Darwin and good reasons for adopting other models for evolution – or for deciding that there is not enough evidence to make a decision.

Dembski and O’Leary insist that this conflict has nothing to do with the age of the Earth. Darwinism is, as they will show, the increasingly implausible creation story of atheism, which diverges at just about every point from the Christian worldview on which modern science was founded.

Denyse’s blog on intelligent design is here.

My regular readers know that I consider theistic evolution to be equivalent to atheism. If a Christian thinks that we can’t detect God in the world using science apart from subjective opinions, then they might as well be an atheist. Christianity is a knowledge tradition, not a blind-belief tradition.

Commentary

Do beliefs have to be proven scientifically to be true?

12 Comments

Another Paul Copan article from Chris Shannon.

Some atheists think that the only way to know what is really true is to use the scientific method.

Richard Dawkins declares,“Scientific beliefs are supported by evidence, and they get results. Myths and faiths are not and do not.” Harvard biologist Richard Lewontin calls science “the only begetter of truth.”

This is called scientism, and it comes in two varieties.

Scientism comes in two versions: strong (science is the only path to knowledge) and weak (science is the best path to knowledge, even if some other disciplines like philosophy may help).

Scientism, particularly its strong form, is a worldview or philosophy of life that affirms two things: the material world is all that there is, and science is the (only) means of verifying truth claims. All claims of knowledge have to be scientifically verifiable; otherwise, they are meaningless.

The rest of the paper discusses the following topics (and more):

  • What is science?
  • Can the scientific method find evidence of non-physical and/or intelligent causes in nature?
  • is materialism falsifiable or is it just an assumption?
  • can scientism itself be tested scientifically?
  • is science self-justifying, or does it rest on certain assumptions?
  • has the progress of science removed the need for God?
  • what is the god-of-the-gaps? Is there a naturalism-of-the-gaps?
  • can scientism block the progress of science?

Also see my posts on how the progress of science disproved atheism via the cosmological argument and the fine-tuning argument.

News

The Cambrian explosion is getting more explosive

7 Comments

A story on the Cambrian explosion from the radically pro-evolution BBC. (H/T Evolution News)

Excerpt:

In a new study, Canadian researchers identified a previously unclassifiable fossil that was long believed to belong perhaps to the shrimp family.

They called it Nectocaris pteryx – a small soft-bodied cephalopod with two tentacles rather than the eight or 10 seen in today’s octopuses.

The new survey’s results were presented in the journal Nature.

The findings make the ancestors of modern squid and octopuses at least 30 million years older.

Evolutionary biologist Martin Smith, the main author of the study, told PA news agency that the findings bring cephalopods much closer to the first appearance of complex animals.

“We go from very simple pre-Cambrian life-forms to something as complex as a cephalopod in the geological blink of an eye, which illustrates just how quickly evolution can produce complexity,” said Mr Smith.

Yes, isn’t it amazing how naturalistic mechanisms like “evolution” can create brand new complex body plans out of nothing, in the blink of an eye? And isn’t it amazing that this evidence doesn’t falsify naturalism at all! Oh, no no no no no no, it doesn’t – because naturalism is a blind faith commitment. Evidence is irrelevant to a blind faith commitment. The entire physical universe can pop into being out of nothing, but naturalism is still true – because they want it to be true. All praise the Flying Spaghetti Monster!

The more body plans that appear suddenly, the less plausible evolution becomes. You can’t have a massive infusion of biological information appearing out of nowhere without an intelligent agent to sequence the individual characters. New software requires a software engineer.

Related posts