Who Were the Sea Peoples?

designed to spawn off multiple varieties of stock-trading programs, which master program would then evaluate which spawned programs performed best in a market test. My master program would allow, say, the top-performing 50% of round-one programs to create slight variations of themselves, and cull out the bottom-performing 50% of round-one programs. Round two would begin with the top-50% programs and their spawned variants, and would repeat the market test. After that, the master program would repeat the spawning-and-culling process. And so on. After fifty rounds of this, let's say that I have at hand a suite of programs that perform very well at trading stocks. Would it make any sense to say, "Well, obviously no one intended this, since these programs were selected by a blind evolutionary process?" The point of this example is not to claim that the fact of evolution (which I accept) proves that a designer does exist, but merely to note that surely the fact of evolut...

I think Danny Shahar and I have actually gotten somewhere, which may be a first for a Facebook discussion. I see I should make a concession, and perhaps Kevin Vallier should modify his original hypothesis: If one's design argument for God was a god-of-the-gaps type of argument, then Darwinism significantly weakens that argument. So, here is the Shane Battier analogy: I say, "Battier must be some kind of wizard, who willed that ball into the hoop, because that shot defied the laws of physics!" If you then show me that, no, the shot obeyed those laws in all respects, my case is significantly weakened, if not wiped out. So if someone is forwarding a design argument that runs, "These creatures we see around us are such that only miracles could have created them," then, yes, that design argument is wrecked by Darwinism. I had just never thought of the argument from design in that way myself, although I now see that there surely are people who do. (But any major t...

On Facebook, Danny Shahar continues to query me about my contention that acceptance of Darwinian evolution ought to have no impact, positive or negative, on an argument from design for the existence of God. I have devised this second example to try to explain things to the lad. I make a trip to Arizona. When I get there, Danny asks me, "Gene what are you doing here?" I say, "Well, it was my plan [design] to spend a month in the desert as a cure for my respiratory problems." A eliminative materialist in his department overhears this and says, "Plan? Bah! Every single instant of Callahan's trip can be perfectly well explained by the laws of physics." Would you agree that that is not a defeater for my claim that I planned to go to Arizona? My plan is not some miracle inserted at the start that then set everything else going: my plan was operative at every single turn I made, etc. As were the laws of physics. Looking at this in terms of my plan is not...

Kevin Vallier generated a hailstorm of comments by posting the following on Facebook: "Hypothesis: Darwinism does not significantly alter the force of the design argument for God's existence. If it was weak before Darwin, it was weak after Darwin. If it was strong before Darwin, it was strong after Darwin." Kevin is surely correct here. One way to see this is to reverse the situation: If we tomorrow were to see animals simply popping into existence out of nowhere, would (and should) this convince any atheists that God exists? No: it would simply be held that somehow nature is such that animals pop into existence out of nowhere, and a "naturalistic" theory of how they do so would be developed. Or think of this: If you believe Rembrandt painted a particular picture hanging in your hallway, would this belief be weakened if someone told you, "No, the reason that paint clings to that canvas can easily be explained by the chemical properties of the canvas...