16May 2020 by Post

There’s More Than One Way To “Trust The Science”

Apologetics, Bob Perry, Christianity, faith, Philosophy of Science, science, scientists, Theology and Christian Apologetics, True Horizon
I have made the case before that scientism is a dangerous belief system. And the COVID-19 Pandemic has done nothing but prove the point. In their response to the virus, many in power exhort us to “trust the science.” Listen to the doctors. Their wisdom should guide the trajectory of our collective futures. But accepting that view greatly depends on your understanding of what science is … and whose science you’re trusting. The truth is that science never provides answers to anything. Scientists do. And that means we not only have to know what branch of science they’re representing, we also have to trust the scientists’ judgment. Our leaders can make decisions using science as a tool. But we accept those decisions on other grounds. That’s because science is not the arbiter of anything.…
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16May 2020 by Post

Stephen Meyer: Teach the (Coronavirus) Controversy

Biola University, Center for Science & Culture, coronavirus, COVID-19, Daniel G. Murphy, Douglas Axe, Economics, Eran Bendavid, Harvard University Medical School, Hull York Medical School, Jay Bhattacharya, John Ioannidis, John Lee, Knut Wittowski, lockdown, Marcello Pera, Martin Kulldorf, medical opinion, Medicine, Red Team, Rockefeller University, Scott Atlas, St. Barnabas Hospital, Stanford University Medical Center, Stephen Meyer, Team B, The Federalist, White House
Our colleague and CSC director Stephen Meyer has a terrific article up now at The Federalist. As readers will know, when it comes to evolution education, the Center for Science & Culture advocates “teaching the controversy.” Note Meyer’s application of the “Teach the Controversy” principle to how medical opinion is being given to U.S. leaders who make policy decisions about a national response to COVID-19. As Dr. Meyer observes, “The administration’s virus taskforce has recommended only a gradual lifting of stay-at-home orders and has established criteria for full re-opening that could take months to satisfy in many states.” His proposal is that rather than listen only to a group of experts with one set view, it would be productive to listen to another group as well, a “Team B,” or “what…
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15May 2020 by Post

Just-in-Time Delivery in Living Cells

Amazon, cardiovascular disease, cell's, coronavirus, cryo-electron microscope, delivery, endosomes, enzymes, FedEx, HSPG, Intelligent Design, Lauren Jackson, lipoprotein lipase, LPL, male haploid genome, Max Planck Institute, NEDD8, nexins, PNAS, ribosomes, SDC1, sex, shipping, sperm, Structure (journal), syndecan-1, trash, triglycerides, truckers, U.C. San Diego, U.S. Postal Service, ubiquitin, UPS, Vanderbilt University, vesicles
During the coronavirus crisis, truckers have played an essential role in getting masks, medicines, and equipment to hospitals that were overwhelmed, and food to the grocery stores to prevent a starvation crisis as people obeyed stay-at-home orders. Some of the truckers drove long all-night shifts to meet the critical demand. Non-essential deliveries of goods from retail merchants like Amazon continued mostly uninterrupted, too.  Human delivery systems rely on distributed storage. Cells know all about this. A cell is a large place, like a city to the molecules inside; it is inefficient to store needed cargoes far from their work sites. Within the cell, highways of microtubules grow in the directions that cargo carriers like kinesins need them. Some new discoveries show that additional mechanisms supplement those well-known processes to provide…
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14May 2020 by Post

COVID-19, Random Mutations, and Aristotle’s Matrix of Design

Andrew McDiarmid, Aristotle, bodies, coronavirus, COVID-19, Evolution News, ID The Future, Intelligent Design, Medicine, Michael Egnor, mutations, neurosurgeon, philosophy, Podcast, purpose, random events, viruses
On a new episode of ID the Future, host Andrew McDiarmid speaks with neurosurgeon Michael Egnor about Dr. Egnor’s recent Evolution News article, “The Coronavirus Demonstrates How Evolution Presupposes Intelligent Design.” Download the podcast or listen to it here. Egnor notes that the coronavirus and other viruses are not, strictly speaking, considered living things, even if they depend on living hosts for their continued existence. Egnor also discusses the role of random mutations in viruses and draws upon Aristotle to argue that these and other random events only occur, and have their meaning, against a backdrop of purpose and design — in this case, the designed systems, the bodies, that viruses invade.  Image: Aristotle, by Francesco Hayez (1811) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons. The post COVID-19, Random Mutations, and Aristotle’s Matrix of Design…
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13May 2020 by Post

Guillermo Gonzalez Extends “Privileged Planet” Arguments to Space Travel

BIO-Complexity, Circumstellar Habitable Zone, earth, Exoplanets, fuel, gravity, Guillermo Gonzalez, Industrial Revolution, Jay Richards, NASA, Peggy Whitson, Physics, Earth & Space, rockets, solar system, space travel, super-earths, The Privileged Planet
As outlined in the book The Privileged Planet, by Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay Richards, the Earth is not only fine-tuned for life, but is also well-designed to allow us to make scientific discoveries. A new BIO-Complexity paper by Guillermo Gonzalez, “The Solar System: Favored for Space Travel,” extends privileged planet arguments to our ability to travel in space. Gonzalez previously summarized some of his arguments here, but it’s worth outlining some of his arguments. Many of the exoplanets that are being discovered are giant “super-earths,” planets with a mass up to 10X Earth’s mass. These planets pose a problem for space travel. As the gravity of a planet increases, so does the amount of fuel that is needed for a rocket to escape the gravity of the planet and reach space. As Gonzalez puts it,…
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13May 2020 by Post

The Redefinition of Love—Resulting From the Loss of Truth

Apologetics, Christianity, Culture, FreeThinking Ministries, God, Legislating Morality, Culture & Politics, Love, morality, objective morality, Politics, Redefinition of Love, Rich Hoyer, Right and Wrong, society
By Rich Hoyer Most people agree that we should love one another. But what does it mean to love others? Love can’t mean what our culture says it means.  It can’t be untethered from a transcendent moral standard (i.e., God’s word and natural Law) and left to be defined subjectively by our feelings, to be molded and fashioned into whatever shape current societal trends bend it. The average person in the US today is a Popular Secularist[1] and has accepted the Popular Secularist definition of love. When most people speak of love today, to speak of “loving others” means something like, “I want you to have whatever you want; to exist in whatever state you think will make you happy.” Love is now defined in terms of the core Popular Secularist…
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12May 2020 by Post

New Jersey’s Suicide Confusion

assisted suicide, coronavirus, COVID-19, Culture & Ethics, despair, District of Columbia, doctors, New Jersey, Phil Murphy, public policy, suicide prevention, Well Being Trust
New Jersey recently became one of the seven states (plus the District of Columbia) to legalize assisted suicide by statute. In effect, New Jersey sanctions suicide for some residents through its public policy. Now, with COVID-19, New Jersey officials are worried about a spike in suicide caused by the shutdown, so for them, suicide is bad. From the NJ.Com story:  On top of the more than 78,000 Americans who have already died from the fast-spreading virus, a new study from the Well Being Trust found conditions from the pandemic — including lost jobs, isolation, and fear over the future — could lead to 75,000 deaths in the nation from drug or alcohol abuse and suicide over the next decade.This comes as a number of critics say they’re worried lockdowns designed to save lives from COVID-19 could…
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11May 2020 by Post

¿Qué es el posmodernismo?

Apologética, Apologética cristiana, Apologética en Español, Cristianismo, Español, Jairo Izquierdo, Posmodernismo, Teología
En vista de que dicha corriente filosófica se ha vuelto muy popular en estos días en las redes sociales, me ha sido menester escribir esta nota para explicar lo que en realidad es el posmodernismo; ya que suelo notar que muchas personas utilizan el adjetivo de “posmo” como un sinónimo de “progre” o de “chairo”, cuando no lo son (aunque no quiero decir que sean excluyentes), o que ser posmoderno es único del ateísmo, lo cual es totalmente falso. Abordar el tema del posmodernismo requeriría más de unas simples páginas, por lo que el presente escrito será para aclarar de manera sencilla y breve lo que representa el posmodernismo de una manera muy general. Primero. El posmodernismo no solo cubre el movimiento filosófico que siguió al modernismo, sino también movimientos…
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11May 2020 by Post

Three Actions You Can Take to Address Emotional Doubt

Apologetics, christian, Christian Apologetics, Christianity, Doubts, Jeremy Linn, Reasons, Theology and Christian Apologetics, TwinCitiesApologetics
By Jeremy Linn A few weeks ago, my ministry had a Livestream discussion on the topic of doubt. I thought it would be a great idea to pull in the principles that came from the discussion into a short, sharable source. To explain the principles we covered, I’m going to bring in my own struggle with doubt, and trace through the principles to see how they can help my own struggle with doubt. My doubt is the following: When I get close to death, I’m not sure if I will really be confident that God is real and that heaven exists. The first thing to filter this doubt through is the question – Does this doubt have a primarily intellectual nature or an emotional nature? Identifying the nature of the…
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11May 2020 by Post

In Biology, Intelligent Designs that Amaze, Amuse, and Entertain

Alticini, An Uplifting Story, bottlenose dolphins, catapult, dandelions, Darwinism, dolphins, Evolution, fish stocks, flea beetle, flea beetles, Francis Collins, Illustra Media, infrared cameras, infrared radiation, Intelligent Design, International Society for Photonics and Optics, Keith Moorad, killer whales, leaf beetles, Lehigh University, Life Sciences, Michael Behe, National Institutes of Health, night vision goggles, origami, parachute, Pensoft, PNAS, toothed whales, U.S. Navy, Zookeys
A parade of amazing designs from the living world has passed through these pages over the years, and it shows no sign of stopping. Here are some entertaining examples from recent news. Jump Like a Flea, Beetle Flea beetles, or Alticini, are high-jump champions among the coleopterans (beetles) in the insect world. There are some 9,900 species of flea beetles, a “hyper-diverse group” that inhabits environments from deserts to rainforests all over the world. The Pensoft blog shows a picture of one, saying, “Exceptional catapulting jump mechanism in a tiny beetle could be applied in robotic limbs.”  The fascinating and highly efficient jumping mechanism in flea beetles is described in a new research article in the open-access journal Zookeys. Despite having been known since 1929, the explosive jump — which is also the reason behind the colloquial name of this…
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