CADRE Comments

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...

In the comments section of one of my recent posts on religious epistemology, atheist David Ellis asks: "Of what does a personal relationship with someone who is invisible, insubstantial, and does not speak back when you speak to him consist? Does a personal relationship with such a God (assuming its real) look one iota different from a personal relationship with an imaginary God who one is firmly convinced is real?" This is a very good question, even though it was made from a standpoint of manifest ignorance of how personal relationships work, with God or anyone else. From the question I infer that Ellis takes the following facts for granted about any 'real' personal relationship: 1) the other person has to be visible, 2) the other person has to be substantial and 3) the other person has to speak back when you speak to him, where presumably speaking is limited to creating differentials in air pressure that are propagated to the ear, where stimulation of the cochlear ...