CADRE Comments

The last time I posted in a piece entitled " Star Trek, Proxima b, Nanovehicles and the Unlikely Appearance of Life ," I wrote about the Star Trek Vision - a view point that has existed for a long time (thanks to fellow CADRE member Jason Pratt for pointing that out), but has become more in vogue over the last 50 years. The unsupported idea is that the universe is absolutely teeming with life such that any time a planet is thought to have water, it is almost automatically assumed that life exists on that planet. Just this morning, there is a story on Yahoo! News which provides more evidence of this rule. According to Business Insider, NASA is set to announce surprising news about Europa -- (spoiler alert) -- it appears to have oceans of liquid water below its frozen surface. In the article entitled " NASA will soon reveal a 'surprising' discovery about a moon of Jupiter that may support life ."  To say that it " may support life" isn't rea...

Star Trek turns 50. Wow!  We have likely come to the point where the majority of the American population has been raised on what I call the Star Trek Vision. It's a very positive and optimistic vision that is easy to embrace. It is the vision of humanity traversing the galaxy in a sleek spaceship (more of a space hotel, actually) in search of "new life and new civilizations." And the universe responds to this search by being populated by a whole host of alien races that are largely like humanity or somewhere on the road between becoming like humanity or having evolved beyond humanity. The Star Trek crew has the "Prime Directive" of not interfering with the developing populations, but when it encounters alien civilizations at our level or beyond, the crew aspires to befriend any and all who accept the Federation's vision of universal peace. (Rarely, if ever, has the crew encountered the likes of the aliens in Independence Day, although the Borg are a rea...

I've been meaning to gin up some further contemplations on the ENCODE results, as a followup to my previous article , and in reply to my friend the thoughtful and sober atheistic commenter "Blue Devil Knight" who commented on my article starting here in the comments. But I've been distracted by other projects. BDK asks, "What is it specifically that the naturalists are having so much trouble handling?" If you're referring to my opening paragraph, I meant that "proponents of completely non-intentional biological development" were "scrambling defensively in various ways" in relation to "ID and creationist proponents hopping up and down"--which combined with how I closed that sentence ("...and frankly, at first I didn't see what the big deal was."), plus my next large paragraph, means I didn't understand why the ID and creationist proponents were hopping up and down. But such activity would naturall...

Scientists have been chewing over the mass release results of the ENCODE experiments for the past several days, and will doubtless continue to do so; while ID and creationist proponents hop up and down and proponents of completely non-intentional biological development scramble defensively in various ways and... ...and, frankly, at first I didn't see what the big deal was. At first. I'm going to assume for sake of relative brevity that anyone who is reading this page on the internet knows how to search the internet for pages to read, so if you don't know what I'm talking about, search around for "ENCODE", or click on our sidebar links for Proslogion (which tends to slant young earth creation) and/or Evolution News and Views (which tends to slant old earth creation)--you won't have to page around far to search them for discussion on it. Very shortly, and somewhat oversimply, the project involved mapping genomes (I honestly don't recall if it wa...

I know that some Bible-believing Christians who read this blog are strong believers in evolution. When I have spoken with these individuals they explain that they believe that God created the universe, but they are willing to accept what science teaches on the Theory of Evolution. The way they make these two views work together is to adopt a type of Theistic Evolution, i.e., theistic creation via evolution. There is something to be said for adopting Theistic Evolution: it really does away with the conflict (to the extent it is scientific) between the Theory of Evolution and the Biblical account of Creation. It does so by saying that God is wise enough and all-powerful enough that he could create the initial conditions of the universe in a way the would ultimately lead to the rise of life -- including human life. Thus, whenever a new scientific discovery speculates about how life arose or how it came to be what it is, a person who adopts Theistic Evolution can say, "No problem beca...

On Groundhog's Day 2011, Leonard Pitts, editorialist for the Miami Herald, demonstrated that he has his head stuck in the ground when it comes to the issue of Intelligent Design. In an editorial entitled Losing the race for intelligence , Pitts argues that the failure of many teachers to teach the party line on Darwinian evolution will somehow lead to the fall of America through the analogy of a giant. His editorial begins by noting a rather intriguing study about the teaching of evolution in the public schools. ITEM: Only 28 percent of high school science teachers consistently follow National Research Council guidelines encouraging them to present students with evidence of evolution. Thirteen percent ``explicitly advocate creationism or intelligent design.'' These are among the findings of Penn State political scientists Michael Berkman and Eric Plutzer after examining data from a representative survey of 926 high school biology teachers. Writing in the Jan. 28 issue of Sc...

Dr. Thomas Woodward came to my college (Princeton) to give a talk on Intelligent Design. I had already made up my mind a while back that ID was bogus, the arguments had been pummeled into the ground and that it was bad science and even worse theology. I went to the talk expecting to give him a good talking-to. To my surprise, he was very reasonable and the points he made were at the very least thought-provoking. Some of the evidence of design he presented I hadn't heard before. What was most interesting, though, was that he pointed me to the work of Brad Monton , a philosopher of physics who did his PhD at Princeton, who is an atheist but who also thinks at least some of the ID arguments have some merit. Check out his fascinating blog here and read the preview of his forthcoming book, Seeking God in Science , in which he-gasp-defends ID as an atheist, and thinks ID should be discussed in the science classroom as an illustration of some of the difficult questions that arise in phil...

I have another entry from Sky & Telescope magazine that adds further evidence that the Privileged Planet is More Privileged Than We Thought . In a news item entitled, " Our 'Goldilocks' Solar System ," the magazine discusses a new scientific discovery regarding planet-building necessities. Not too hot, not too cold. . . that's just part of what it takes to make a nice world like ours. Recent planet-building computations have found a new constraint . The protoplanetary disk of gas and dust that spawns a planetary system must be neither too massive nor too sparse. If it's too massive, may giant planets will form. They interact and pull each other's orbits into chaos, expelling or wrecking any smaller worlds. Too little mass, and big planets wouldn't form at all. Our own solar system, which does have giant planets but in safe, distant, nearly round orbits, appears to be an unusual, right-on-the-balance case . This in turn suggests that havin...

Richard Dawkins, blowhard stalwart of the New Atheist movement, has made a rather stunning and significant admission in a recent debate. According to Is Richard Dawkins still evolving? by Melanie Phillips in the Spectator: This week’s debate, however, was different because from the off Dawkins moved it onto safer territory– and at the very beginning made a most startling admission. He said: A serious case could be made for a deistic God. This was surely remarkable. Here was the arch-apostle of atheism, whose whole case is based on the assertion that believing in a creator of the universe is no different from believing in fairies at the bottom of the garden, saying that a serious case can be made for the idea that the universe was brought into being by some kind of purposeful force. A creator. True, he was not saying he was now a deist; on the contrary, he still didn't believe in such a purposeful founding intelligence, and he was certainly still saying that belief in the personal ...

This is the fourth in a series about the debate between Darwinian evolutionists and advocates of Intelligent Design. In part 1 , I used President Bush's statement that the debate should be "properly taught" to point out that no one (at least, no leading figure in the debate) is presently advocating that ID be taught with the same weight as Darwinian evolution. Rather, the case that is being made is that it should be introduced and taught fairly so that students can understand the controversy. In part 2 , I pointed out that statements to the contrary notwithstanding, the central hypothesis of Darwinian evolution has not actually been tested. That doesn't mean that there isn't a lot of evaluating of the evidence and placing the evidence into the Darwinian evolutionary framework. The fact that the evidence fits so nicely (much of the time) into that framework provides evidence that the framework is true. But the problem is that the framework itself remains untested a...

This is the third in a series about the debate between Darwinian evolutionists and advocates of Intelligent Design. In part 1 , I used President Bush's statement that the debate should be "properly taught" to point out that no one (at least, no leading figure in the debate) is presently advocating that ID be taught with the same weight as Darwinian evolution. Rather, the case that is being made is that it should be introduced and taught fairly so that students can understand the controversy. In part 2 , I pointed out that statements to the contrary notwithstanding, the central hypothesis of Darwinian evolution has not actually been tested. That doesn't mean that there isn't a lot of evaluating of the evidence and placing the evidence into the Darwinian evolutionary framework. The fact that the evidence fits so nicely (much of the time) into that framework provides evidence that the framework is true. But the problem is that the framework itself remains untested an...