Interesting Article on Evolution/ID

By -
I must confess I clicked on this because I thought it was going to ridicule Intelligent Design theory (and I like to get angry at writers with whom I strongly disagree). As you can see, I was pleasantly surprised. It sounds almost corny, but I really think music may contain the mysteries of the universe. I mean, what the heck is it for? What does music do?

Another point that would buttress this guy's argument is that some Christians imagine heaven to be singing the praises of God (to His face) for eternity. Now if you're a skeptic you might think, "That sounds boring." But that's because you're not really taking the theist position seriously. Imagine if you were literally in the presence of an omnipotent, omnibenevolent Being. What better use of your time could you devise than announcing all of His achievements, including logic, mathematics, beauty, love, truth, the laws of Nature...Well, I could go on and on. (Ha ha, get it?)

Comments

  1. Anonymous3:31 PM

    Gene, that article (like so may others)
    is written by yet another person who does not
    understand evolution. Randomness mutation and blind chance are not the engines of evolution.
    Natural selection is.

    ReplyDelete
  2. gcallah6:53 PM

    Well, it wasn't Gene who made the post!

    In any case, Neo-Darwinian evolution relies on natural selection and random mutations.

    ReplyDelete
  3. gcallah6:54 PM

    Rob,

    By the way, nice photos!

    Gene

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Machine Learning"

By -
 The name is a misnomer. And a harmful one, because it interferes with understanding the process that is really occuring. What is really occurring is a search of a constrained program space. Let's say you want to be able to identify images of hot dogs . You begin with a plausible program for doing so, that is able to also search the space of nearby programs that might get better results on the problem. You then (in "supervised learning") provide scores that indicate how well one of these possible programs has done on solving the problem. After doing this for some time you settle upon a program that solves the problem "well enough." This is a great technique that can produce truly impressive results on a wide class of problems, such as identifying images of hot dogs. But notice that, except for the phrase in scare quotes, there is no "learning" in the description. Calling this "learning" is importing ideological baggage that just obscures what
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose
Read more