Clement of Rome on the supremacy of the Father.

    

Clement of Rome (AD 45-101) : "The apostles received the gospel for us from Jesus Christ, and Jesus Christ was sent from God. So Christ is from God, and the apostles are from Christ: thus both came in proper order by the will of God."[4] Also, "Let all the heathen know that thou [the Father] art God alone, and that Jesus Christ is thy Servant..."[5] 

What about when midway is the cursed earth?

 Will This Proposal “Fix Science”?

Rob Sheldon 

Cory Clark and Philip Tetlock, both at the University of Pennsylvania, explain, “In Bed with the Enemy: How to Fix Science.” They advocate “adversarial collaborations.”

Adversarial collaborations (henceforth, adcollab), is a methodological procedure in which disagreeing scholars work with each other rather than against each other to resolve their empirical dispute.

First, adversaries must articulate their disagreement in terms that both sides find accurate. This eliminates the use of wishy-washy disagreement language that scholars use to make big claims with little accountability. This also prevents scholars from only confronting the strawman version of their opponent’s perspective. In our experience, these initial conversations often cause adversaries to retreat from the bailey to their motte, to realize that their opponent’s views are much more nuanced than they previously thought, and consequently, to discover that the disagreement is much smaller than previously thought.

Second, adversaries must mutually design methods that both sides consider a fair and unbiased test of their competing hypotheses. This eliminates cherry-picking of methodological procedures designed to confirm preferred hypotheses. And this eliminates the ability for scholars to design methods that can only confirm preferred hypotheses while writing off failed tests as studies that simply did not “work”. Scholars must commit a priori to the diagnosticity of the study and agree that contradictory findings would at least cast some doubt on their preferred hypothesis. In our experience, this step leads scholars to develop far more rigorous methods as each side vetoes the blatantly rigged procedures that their opponents prefer. And this leads to more efficient tests because the results are informative no matter how they turn out.

Third, adversaries must mutually write and publish the results. This eliminates the possibility of excessively broad claims. Each adversary serves as a check on their opponent to make sure the claims are duly circumspect. Such reports will be less likely to forward unwarranted promises that lead other scholars, policymakers, and interventionists down expensive dead ends.

There are many, many ways that science has stopped functioning. Certainly, one of them is that it incentivizes the wrong things. But after reading this article, and considering their proposal, ask yourself if any Darwinist would co-write an article with an ID person. In fact, in our woke culture, ask yourself whether merely talking politely to an adversary would not taint one’s career. I have seen events cancelled because the speaker knew somebody who knew somebody on the black list. 

The reasons they give for “adcollabs” apply to people with a few scientific disagreements, but an overall philosophical agreement. Once the gulf gets too wide, I’m afraid that diplomacy doesn’t work too well. Right now, ID is the disenfranchised minority, and for a mainstream Darwinist to submit to an “adcollab” would damage their career while enhancing the ID proponent’s career. Until that perception is removed, until ID has enough clout, until ID isn’t culturally despised, diplomacy will never occur. 

David Berlinski tries to teach an old dog a new trick(i.e self-awareness)

 Science After Babel: An Exercise in Self-Criticism

David Berlinski 

Editor’s note: We are delighted to welcome Science After Babel, the latest book from mathematician and philosopher David Berlinski. This article is adapted from the book’s Introduction.

The scientific revolution began in the 16th century, and it began in Europe. No one knows why it happened nor why it happened where it happened, but when it happened, everything changed. 

Until the day before yesterday, the imperial architects of the scientific revolution were well satisfied and sleek as seals. An immense tower was going up before their very eyes. The physicists imagined that shortly it would reach the sky; the biologists were satisfied that it had left the ground; and only the theologians were heard to observe that it would soon collapse. 

The Tower is still there. It is, in fact, larger than ever. But it has neither reached the sky nor left the ground. It resembles Bruegel’s Tower of Babel far more than the Chrysler Building, and if it suggests anything at all, it suggests that its original plans have somehow been lost. Some parts of the Tower are sound and sturdy; but, my goodness, the balustrade devoted to the multiverse — what were they thinking?

Who Knows? 

In looking at the Tower, if we are moved to admire its size, we are also bound to acknowledge its faults. The algorithm and the calculus are the two great ideas of the scientific revolution. They are radically different. Algorithms belong to the world of things. The creation of numbers, Thierry of Chartres observed, was the creation of things. In the theory of recursive functions, some part of thinginess has been brought under rational control. 

It is the continuum, on the other hand, that is essential to the calculus. If an algorithm is a part of the world of things, in war, Lewis Fry Richardson once remarked, thinginess fails. In quantum field theory, too. A quantum field is not a thing. The true continuum, René Thom once remarked to me, has no points: it reflects at a distance Freud’s oceanic feeling — what Meister Eckhardt described as pure formlessness. And these, too, are ideas deep in human experience. In the calculus, and mathematical analysis generally, some part of the continuum has been brought under rational control. 

Mathematical analysis and the theory of recursive functions are great achievements, but they are different; they answer to different imperatives; they are the work of different architects.

No wonder the Tower looks as it does. It is a miracle that it remains standing.

The result has been a popular culture littered with ideological detritus: atheism, of course, or naturalism, or materialism, or physicalism, or scientism, or even, God help us, transhumanism. These are not very precise terms, nor do they denote very precise ideas. Naturalists can rarely say of naturalism anything beyond that it is natural. 

“I come from a scientific background,” David Chalmers modestly remarked. “I want everything to be natural,” he added at once, “reduced to the simplest possible set of laws and entities.”1

A Foundation for Belief

On this view, it is hard to see why stuff happens should not be considered a foundation for belief, the declaration requiring only two words and one substance. 

Materialism has just a bit more by way of oomph. From a material base, as Marxists might say ominously, everything. Within contemporary physics, the deduction of everything from something is by no means complete and remains in that empyrean of assurances of which your check is in the mail is a notable example. Nor is the requisite something persuasively a material object. On current physical theories, that material base is occupied by various quantum fields, where, like so many electric eels, they occupy themselves in quivering with energy. Leptons and bosons emerge as field excitations, and so does everything else. 

The great merit of materialism has always been its apparent sobriety. A world of matter? Look around! Bang the table, if necessary. Quantum fields do not encourage a look-around. There is no banging them beyond banging on about them. And for the most obvious of reasons. “Quantum field theory,” Lisa Randall writes, “the tool with which we study particles, is based upon eternal, omnipresent objects that can create and destroy those particles.”2

This is an account that suggests the dominion of Vishnu as much as metaphysical materialism, a point not lost on Indian physicists. And it may well change, that account, those infernal quantum fields vanishing tomorrow in favor of otherwise unexpected entelechies. 

What Everyone Accepts

There remains the curious fact that no one much likes what everyone accepts. What everyone accepts is something like the scientific system of belief. It is to this system that every knee must bend, with trust the science functioning both as an inducement and an admonition. If contemporary scientists are not voyaging strange seas alone, to recall Wordsworth’s epitaph for Isaac Newton, they are yet determined to put as much distance as possible between themselves and dry land. That quantum mechanics makes no sense is widely celebrated as one of its virtues. Not a day passes in which its weirdness is not extolled. As much might be said of the Eucharist, but with this considerable difference: scientific weirdness tends inexorably toward a kind of bleakness. “Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m’effraie,” Pascal remarked3; and had he been acquainted with contemporary cosmologies in which the universe is destined to gutter out into something barren, formless, flaccid, lightless, and large, his anxieties may well have been proportionally increased.

Implacable and Unavoidable

The scientific system of belief remains what it was: implacable and unavoidable. There is no getting around it and so no getting out of it. The notes, incidental remarks, essays, and reviews that comprise this book represent an inside job, and it is in the nature of inside jobs that the inside jobber cannot expect outside help. It is an irony of any imperial enterprise, whether political, social, or intellectual, that it determines the conditions under which it may be criticized. 

For this reason, what I have written in this book is an exercise in self-criticism as much as anything else. I often wish that things were otherwise. “The Shepherd in Virgil grew at last acquainted with Love, and found him a Native of the Rocks.”4 No one quite gets what he wants — not in life, nor in love, nor, as it happens, in writing critical essays. 

Notes

David Chalmers, “Is the Soul Immortal?,” interview by Robert Kuhn, Closer to the Truth, YouTube, May 4, 2021, video, 9:06, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bejm1mYsr5s&t=34s.

Lisa Randall, Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe’s Hidden Dimensions (New York: Harper Perennial, 2006), 158.

Blaise Pascal, Pensées (1670).

Samuel Johnson to Lord Chesterfield (Philip Dormer Stanhope), February 7, 1755,

JEHOVAH has made the truth easily available

  Luke ch.10:21 "At that time Jesus, full of joy through the Holy Spirit, said, “I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children. Yes, Father, for this is what you were pleased to do." 

If we would simply allow JEHOVAH'S word to speak for itself. The truth would fairly leap off the page and command our allegiance.

John ch.1:18Douay Version "No man hath seen God at any time: the only begotten Son who is in the Bosom of the Father, he hath declared him." 

First the text does not say that no man has seen the Father. Mainly because it does not need to. This being prior to the confusion introduced by Christendom it was common knowledge that the Father was the God. As it was that God was immutably invisible. 

Romans ch.1:20NIV"For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made(including the Son of Man), so that people are without excuse." 

From the creation onward the Lord JEHOVAH has been continuously invisible to Man. His virtues could be discerned however through his creation, especially his first and foremost creation his Logos.

My 2 cents re:reductive materialism.

 Here's my beef with reductive materialists ,as they themselves doubtless know, matter itself is not reducible to matter. A quantum(i.e an atom) of matter does not consists of matter.

Likely you recall enough of your secondary (high) school chemistry to know that atoms are composed of immaterial subatomic "particles" in reality tiny packets of energy ,in other words wraiths. That's right matter which has weight and occupies space consists of ghosts which neither have weight nor occupy space. Also the cause of physical matter must doubtless be super physical if we are being logically consistent.

So the premise of reductive materialists i.e that there is no evidence of a superphysical reality that can affect physical matter is demonstrably false.

Everyone's favourite contrarian is at it again.

 New! Philosopher and Mathematician David Berlinski on “Science After Babel”

Evolution News 

Polymath and raconteur David Berlinski is at it again, challenging the shibboleths of contemporary science with his inimitable blend of deep learning, close reasoning, and rapier wit. His new book, Science After Babel, reflects on everything from Newton, Einstein, and Gödel to catastrophe theory, information theory, and the morass that is modern Darwinism. The scientific enterprise is unarguably impressive, but it shows no sign of reaching the empyrean heights it seemed to promise a century ago. “It resembles Bruegel’s Tower of Babel,” Berlinski says, “and if it suggests anything at all, it suggests that its original plans have somehow been lost.” Science endures. Scientism, it would seem, is guttering out.

We will be featuring excepts, commentary, and conversations with Dr. Berlinski in days to the come. Order your copy now. And enjoy some of the advance praise the book is already receiving!

Advance Praise

Many will read this book for the close, elegant reasoning, the astonishing erudition, or the mordant analysis. I confess I read it for the prose. “Vast sections of our experience might be so very rich in information” — I quote here from the discussion of our limited ability to define complexity — “that they stay forever outside the scope of theory and remain simply what they are: unique, ineffable, insubsumable, irreducible.” See what I mean? Nobody but David Berlinski has ever employed such sweet, gorgeous prose in writing about science.

PETER ROBINSON, MURDOCH DISTINGUISHED POLICY FELLOW AT THE HOOVER INSTITUTION AND FORMER SPEECHWRITER TO PRESIDENT RONALD REAGAN

Whether deconstructing the latest theory of everything or dishing on scientists and mathematicians he has known, whatever David Berlinski writes is delightful and profitable to read!

MICHAEL BEHE, PROFESSOR OF BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES, LEHIGH UNIVERSITY, AUTHOR OF DARWIN’S BLACK BOX, THE EDGE OF EVOLUTION, AND DARWIN DEVOLVES

If I were picking two books to be required reading for every college student in the United States, Science After Babel would be one. A striking and beautiful and absolutely necessary book. David Berlinski at his spectacular best.

DAVID GELERNTER, PROFESSOR OF COMPUTER SCIENCE, YALE UNIVERSITY

Science After Babel is a literary triumph. In it, David Berlinski masterfully exposes the hubris of scientific pretensions with a wit that dances deftly between the lines, unveiling profound insights with a refreshing candor. This book testifies to the author’s penetrating intellect, inviting readers to reconsider the limits of scientific authority and reject facile invocations of science that demand assent at the expense of compelling evidence and rigorous thought.

WILLIAM DEMBSKI, MATHEMATICIAN, PHILOSOPHER, AND FORMER HEAD OF THE MICHAEL POLANYI CENTER AT BAYLOR UNIVERSITY; AUTHOR OF MULTIPLE GROUNDBREAKING WORKS ON THE THEORY OF INTELLIGENT DESIGN, INCLUDING THE DESIGN INFERENCE (CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1998)

Berlinski speaks wittingly as an insider to the sciences and their recent history. As a historian-philosopher of science, I recognize numerous valuable insights in this collection of arguments and memories. He captures the wonder of scientific inquiry without misplaced worship of speculative pronouncements made in its name. Berlinski is the most enjoyable antidote to scientism I know.

MICHAEL KEAS, LECTURER IN THE HISTORY AND PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE, BIOLA UNIVERSITY, AUTHOR OF UNBELIEVABLE: 7 MYTHS ABOUT THE HISTORY AND FUTURE OF SCIENCE AND RELIGION

Dr. Berlinski explores everything from the complicated spawning behavior of salmon and the problems with the RNA World hypothesis to various acute challenges to modern evolutionary theory, including the Cambrian explosion, molecular machines, and the failure of punctuated equilibrium. As he shows, trouble is brewing for Darwin on other fronts as well — population genetics, taxonomy, behavioral psychology, and the philosophy of biology, to name just a few. In total, Science After Babel is a lively mix of deep scientific knowledge, literary skill, and humor. The work reveals why scientism’s contemporary tower of babel has failed to reach the heavens. I highly recommend the book and hope it is widely read.

OLA HÖSSJER, PROFESSOR OF MATHEMATICAL STATISTICS, STOCKHOLM UNIVERSITY

In Science After Babel David Berlinski takes critical scholarly aim at many current day “scientific truths” — more properly shibboleths — including Darwinism, reductionism, the Standard Model of particle physics, and “talking” chimpanzees; and he shows how much nonsense often passes as secure scientific knowledge. Neo-Darwinism he describes as “empty,” and in discussing the Standard Model he comments wryly, “Theories come and go.” He also takes aim at a vast constellation of recent authors, including cosmologists Brian Greene and Lawrence Krauss, biologist Stephen Jay Gould, and philosopher of biology Michael Ruse.

The book is a delightful read delivered with great wit and erudition. We are treated to unique recollections — of his drinking coffee in Paris with René Thom, the founder of catastrophe theory; of the insane driving, also in Paris, of his friend, the mathematician, polymath, and leading French anti-Darwinist Marcel Schützenberger; and of a conversation with Noam Chomsky. Altogether the book represents an extraordinary and absolutely fascinating tour de force touching on topics as diverse as medieval Islamic astronomy and the great twentieth-century mathematician John von Neumann’s reflections on the role of chance in evolution. The text is interspersed throughout with some beautiful descriptive writing — Mount Rainer’s snow glimpsed flying out of SeaTac was “silent, sweeping, silvery, still, serene.”

The book is a stunning intellectual achievement. Few authors could have written such a far-reaching, in-depth critique of so many current philosophical and scientific beliefs. Science After Babel is mandatory reading for anyone interested in a critical assessment of much current scientific thinking. No other recent publication comes close, and unquestionably this brilliant book establishes David Berlinski as one of the leading intellectuals of our time.

MICHAEL DENTON, PHD, MD, FORMER SENIOR RESEARCH FELLOW IN THE BIOCHEMISTRY DEPARTMENT AT THE UNIVERSITY OF OTAGO IN DUNEDIN, NEW ZEALAND, AUTHOR OF EVOLUTION: A THEORY IN CRISIS, NATURE’S DESTINY, AND THE MIRACLE OF MAN

Mathematically evaluating technology?

 Intelligence Metrics: Measuring the Degree of Intelligence in Design

William A Dembski 

A terrific conference just took place in Denton, Texas (June 1-3, 2023): the Conference on Engineering in Living Systems, or CELS. Its aim was to inspire cross-disciplinary research between biology and engineering by bringing together biologists, engineers, and some fellow travelers like me (a mathematician). I had the privilege of speaking on intelligence metrics. Here are my Slides. I hope soon to develop this talk into a proper peer-reviewed paper.

I want to thank Steve Laufmann and Eric Anderson especially for helping to make this conference happen.