Dmitry Chernikov’s Blog

Here is a talk.origins reply to the claim that evolution is tautological. “According to Popper, any situation where species exist is compatible with Darwinian explanation, because if those species were not adapted, they would not exist. That is, Popper says, we define adaptation as that which is sufficient for existence in a given environment. Therefore, [...]

So, I am watching Life on the Discovery Channel on my HDTV, and it’s so cool. Sometimes the narrator slips into saying things likes “this plant evolved such-and-such behavior” which of course is a mere homage to the dull Darwinian orthodoxy. I mean, suppose you replace “evolved” with “were created 6,000 years ago with” or [...]

It is the essence of every physical object to be able to move and actually to move, because for every object there exists another object somewhere in the universe, relative to which it is moving. But if something is moving relative to something else, then it has relative to that object kinetic energy. So, every [...]

Mises insists that the human mind has a logical structure. Experience is not written upon a blank slate; it is interpreted by the mind. That which receives experience has its own properties. The properties Mises calls “categories.” “The categories are a priori; they are the mental equipment of the individual that enables him to think [...]

The reason why nihilism and the idea that life is meaningless were weeded out by evolution (if any such occurred) of commonly held human beliefs, Steve Hays argues, was preponderance of suicides by those who had such beliefs before they had a chance to reproduce. On a side note, when a consistent evolutionist sees a [...]

In one episode Peter is filming a plastic bag being moved to and fro by the wind and saying that there’s so much beauty in the world, obviously in a reference to the movie American Beauty. Then there is a shot of God on a cloud yelling at him: “It’s just a piece of trash [...]

I mean, I’m having an intellectual orgasm here. That’s from reading Michael Behe’s second book on evolution and design, The Edge of Evolution. If I weren’t a philosopher, I’d go into biology for sure. You can just feel the Godlike engineering power crystallized in the molecular “nanobots” Behe describes. The “trench warfare,” which is how [...]

Why man chooses various ends: psychology. What men’s ends should be: ethics, aesthetics. How to use means to arrive at ends: technology. What man’s ends are and have been, and how man has used means in order to attain them: history. The formal implications of the fact that men use means to attain various chosen [...]

Almost every point in this critique of ID is off the mark. It is simply not true that ID deals with the origins of life; and evolution, with the “progress” of life once life arose. ID claims that numerous biological systems could not have come about via the Darwinian pathways from whatever their physical precursors [...]

According to many scientists, the clergy and the Church are: fanatical; anti-intellectual; irrational in their mindlessly blind faith; moralistic and intrusive; eager to impose their arbitrary values onto people; prone to persecuting those who disagree with them “for their own good” or to save them from themselves; closet Inquisitors, torturers, and killers for their petty [...]

Victor Stenger, the toughest-minded NT stone-cold sonofabitch this side of Californie, angrily rips apart the mystical anthropic principle and its allegedly theism-friendly consequences. Apart from that scary spectacle, there is an interesting note that “André Linde proposed that a background spacetime ‘foam’ empty of matter and radiation will experience local quantum fluctuations in curvature, forming [...]

And I thought I first generalized intelligent design as a form of grace! But William Dembski got there before me: “In book two of the Physics Aristotle referred to design as completing ‘what nature cannot bring to a finish.’ (Note that Thomas Aquinas took this idea and sacramentalized it into grace completing nature.)” (The Design [...]

Suppose there are 100 balls in the urn. Each ball is either red or black, but you don’t know how many balls are of what color. You start taking the balls out of the urn one by one. Each time you get a red ball. What is the probability after you have taken out 99 [...]

The universe is too big, says Nickolas Everitt. And why has much time passed since the beginning of the universe until humans came onto the scene? It’s just so… “inapt,” unfitting given what theists take God to be, unlike even the Genesis account. (The Improbability of God, 2, 1) So far this is the funniest [...]

Our author invokes the Hartle-Hawking model of the Big Bang to prove that the universe appeared by itself out of nothing. (The Improbability of God, Ch. 7, “Why Stephen Hawking’s Cosmology Precludes a Creator”) Stephen Barr explains: “Some idea of what is involved can be had by the analogy of a mathematical cone. Such a [...]

Quentin Smith objects to the theistic implications of Big Bang cosmology as follows: If God intends to create a universe that contains living beings at some stage in it history, then there is no reason for him to begin the universe with an inherently unpredictable singularity. Indeed, it is positively irrational. It is a sign [...]

“They” are trying to turn us into obedient slaves! Well, not exactly, and there are easier ways. (Write columns for the NY Times, for example.) But here is an example of a private company blowing the lid off the problems with government water which, according at least to the NYC government, “continues to meet all [...]

Wallace I. Matson considers the following two arguments equally weak: I. Natural objects share with artifacts the common characteristics of adjustment of parts and curious adapting of means to ends. II. Artifacts have these characteristics because they are products of design. Conclusion. Therefore natural objects are probably products of a great designer. and I’. Natural [...]

Here is Draper’s original article. Our author is not done yet. “Our cognitive faculties are, however, much less reliable when it comes to moral and religious matters. Surely this is much more surprising on theism than on (Darwinian) naturalism. Or consider the moral qualities of human beings. Humans are as a rule very strongly disposed [...]

Here is Draper’s original article. Our author’s evidence for naturalism, “E,” is as follows: “For a variety of biological and ecological reasons, organisms compete for survival, with some having an advantage in the struggle for survival over others; as a result, many organisms, including many sentient beings, never flourish because they die before maturity, many [...]