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Saturday, 10 February 2018

Trying to school God.



1)Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig: Under Neo-Darwinism, the Recurrent Laryngeal Nerve Must Have a Rational Design



Ancient whale may have eaten Darwin defenders home work.

A Whale of a Problem for Evolution: Ancient Whale Jawbone Found in Antartica
October 14, 2011 Posted by Jonathan M 

MSNBC.com is reporting on the discovery of a jawbone of an ancient whale in Antarctica: the oldest fully aquatic whale yet discovered. The news story reports,

The jawbone of an ancient whale found in Antarctica may be the oldest fully aquatic whale yet discovered, Argentine scientists said Tuesday.

A scientist not involved in the find said it could suggest that whales evolved much more quickly from their amphibian precursors than previously thought.

Argentine paleontologist Marcelo Reguero, who led a joint Argentine-Swedish team, said the fossilized archaeocete jawbone found in February dates back 49 million years. In evolutionary terms, that’s not far off from the fossils of even older proto-whales from 53 million years ago that have been found in South Asia and other warmer latitudes.

Those earlier proto-whales were amphibians, able to live on land as well as sea. This jawbone, in contrast, belongs to the Basilosauridae group of fully aquatic whales, said Reguero, who leads research for the Argentine Antarctic Institute.

“The relevance of this discovery is that it’s the oldest known completely aquatic whale found yet,” said Reguero, who shared the discovery with Argentine paleontologist Claudia Tambussi and Swedish paleontologists Thomas Mors and Jonas Hagstrom of the Natural History Museum in Stockholm.

Paul Sereno, a University of Chicago paleontologist who wasn’t involved in the research, said that if the new find withstands the scrutiny of other scientists, it will suggest that archaeocetes evolved much more quickly than previously thought from their semi-aquatic origin in present-day India and Pakistan.

“The important thing is the location,” Sereno said. “To find one in Antarctica is very interesting.”

As many readers will doubtless be aware, the evolution of the whale has previously raised substantial problems because of the extremely abrupt timescale over which it occurred. Evolutionary Biologist Richard von Sternberg has previously applied the population genetic equations employed in a 2008 paper by Durrett and Schmidt to argue against the plausibility of the transition happening in such a short period of time.  Indeed, the evolution of Dorudon and Basilosaurus (38 mya) from Pakicetus (53 mya) has been previously compressed into a period of less than 15 million years.

Such a transition is a feat of genetic rewiring and it is astonishing that it is presumed to have occurred by Darwinian processes in such a short span of time. This problem is accentuated when one considers that the majority of anatomical novelties unique to aquatic cetaceans (Pelagiceti) appeared during just a few million years – probably within 1-3 million years. The equations of population genetics predict that – assuming an effective population size of 100,000 individuals per generation, and a generation turnover time of 5 years (according to Richard Sternberg’s calculations and based on equations of population genetics applied in the Durrett and Schmidt paper), that one may reasonably expect two specific co-ordinated mutations to achieve fixation in the timeframe of around 43.3 million years. When one considers the magnitude of the engineering fete, such a scenario is found to be devoid of credibility. Whales require an intra-abdominal counter current heat exchange system (the testis are inside the body right next to the muscles that generate heat during swimming), they need to possess a ball vertebra because the tail has to move up and down instead of side-to-side, they require a re-organisation of kidney tissue to facilitate the intake of salt water, they require a re-orientation of the fetus for giving birth under water, they require a modification of the mammary glands for the nursing of young under water, the forelimbs have to be transformed into flippers, the hindlimbs need to be substantially reduced, they require a special lung surfactant (the lung has to re-expand very rapidly upon coming up to the surface), etc etc.

With this new fossil find, however, dating to 49 million years ago (bear in mind that Pakicetus lived around 53 million years ago), this means that the first fully aquatic whales now date to around the time when walking whales (Ambulocetus) first appear. This substantially reduces the window of time in which the Darwinian mechanism has to accomplish truly radical engineering innovations and genetic rewiring to perhaps just five million years — or perhaps even less. It also suggests that this fully aquatic whale existed before its previously-thought-to-be semi-aquatic archaeocetid ancestors.

Another day; another bad day for Darwinism.

Wednesday, 7 February 2018

No free will,no civil liberty?

Free Will Denial and PreCrimes
Michael Egnor


Tamler Sommers, an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Houston who blogs at Naturalism.Org,  argues that we don’t really have free will, and that giving up the idea of moral responsibility would be beneficial to society:

[T]he idea that criminals do not morally deserve punishment is tough to accept… In fact, giving up on the idea of deep moral responsibility has no … anarchical or distressing consequences. Let’s suppose we did start viewing terrible crimes as we do natural disasters. Would this mean we would not try to prevent future crimes?  Of course not, no more than it would suggest that we not tape our windows or retrofit buildings to protect ourselves from hurricanes and earthquakes. It would mean only that we cease to relentlessly blame criminals (or political figures) for their behavior.

Sommers inadvertently points out the most dangerous consequence of the denial of free will. If we deny free will and treat criminals as we would treat natural disasters, then preemption of crime becomes the logical goal, just as preemption of damage from natural disasters is smart public policy. As Sommers candidly admits, we should “try to prevent future crimes.” We tape our windows before hurricanes, reinforce our buildings before earthquakes, and evacuate our trailer parks before tornadoes. We don’t blame hurricanes and earthquakes for the damage they cause, in any moral sense; natural disasters aren’t guilty of anything. They’re just physical events. A consequence of this pragmatic approach is that we preempt the damage caused by natural events. We act before the natural disaster has happened, to mitigate its effects.

If we treat criminals the way we treat natural disasters — as physical events without moral culpability — the pragmatic approach is preemption as well. Why wait for a murderer to commit murder? In order “to prevent future crimes,” by Sommers’s reasoning, we can identify people with a statistical propensity to commit murder (based on race, age, sex, prior behavior, etc.), and incarcerate them before their crime, and prevent the damage.

Of course, Sommers would argue: you should’t incarcerate innocent people for crimes they haven’t committed! But if Sommers is right, and free will is not real, then there are no innocent people, any more than there are guilty people. There is no innocence or guilt at all, because innocence and guilt only have moral meaning if we have free will. If there is no free will and no innocence and guilt, there are just natural systems (us) doing what natural systems do. And, as with natural disasters, it’s prudent to preempt.

The preemption of crime is the theme of the Tom Cruise film Minority Report, which describes an imaginary world several decades in the future in which people are arrested and incarcerated (in a virtual reality world) before they commit crimes, based on the skills of experts who can visualize the future. The “crimes” of which they are convicted are called PreCrimes.n Sommers’s society in which free will is denied and guilt and innocence are rendered meaningless, there is no moral reason not to incarcerate people for PreCrimes. Of course, they’re not guilty, but they aren’t guilty even after they commit a crime, and they are never innocent either. Why wait to incarcerate people predisposed to crime? Why wait to board up your windows and evacuate your home with the approach of a hurricane? Why wait until a man has committed a crime to incarcerate him?

Hannah Arendt  observed that a hallmark of totalitarian states is the eclipse of the concept of guilt and innocence. In a totalitarian state, masses of people are managed like livestock, irrespective of any imputation of personal guilt or innocence. Hitler didn’t kill Jewish children because they were guilty of crimes. He cared not whether they were guilty or innocent. Stalin didn’t starve millions of Ukrainians because they were individually guilty. He starved them as a matter of public policy, without regard for individual moral culpability.

The denial of free will, and the denial of moral culpability that follows on it, is the cornerstone of totalitarianism. The denial of free will does not, pace Dr. Sommers, herald an era of tolerance and understanding. It heralds an era of human livestock management, and the early experiments based on denial of free will and moral culpability — in Germany and the Soviet Union — have already been run.

Darwinists summon cancer to the ramparts.

Sick of the Oxygen Theory of the Cambrian Explosion? Here’s the Cancer Theory
Evolution News @DiscoveryCSC

You thought you’d heard it all? All the desperate materialist theories seeking to explain the burst of biological novelty some 530 million years ago that Meyer writes about in Darwin’s DoubtYou were wrong. Along comes Lund University in Sweden with a Novel hypothesis on why animals diversified on Earth.”  Get ready for the cancer theory of the Cambrian explosion.

Can tumors teach us about animal evolution on Earth? Researchers believe so and now present a novel hypothesis of why animal diversity increased dramatically on Earth about half a billion years ago. A biological innovation may have been key. 

Not many of us who have seen friends suffer or die from cancer would sanctify tumors as “biological innovations” leading to anything good.

The new hypothesis holds that the dramatic diversification of animals resulted from a revolution within the animals’ own biology, rather than in the surrounding chemistry on Earth’s surface.

This will be a hard sell, but charitably, let’s give them their slot on the Cambrian Gong Show and try to understand their act. It’s good to see they toss out the oxygen theory, the runner-up for worst explanation. Agreed, “a causal relationship between the Cambrian explosion and increasing atmospheric oxygen lacks convincing evidence.” With itching ears we await their convincing evidence for the new hypothesis.

The leader figure behind the cancer theory is geobiologist Emma Hammarlund. She got in touch with a tumor biologist, Sven Påhlman, to consider how cancer acts like a multicellular organism.

“I wanted to learn what tumor scientists observe on a daily basis, in terms of tissue growth and how it relates to oxygen. Tumours are after all, and unfortunately, successful versions of multicellularity”, explains Emma Hammarlund.

OK, so we have multicellularity. Tumors don’t seem to automatically grow eyes and articulated limbs, though. As far as we can tell, tumors only seem to be good at killing their hosts. What’s up with this new hypothesis?

The team, including also tumor biologist Dr. Kristoffer von Stedingk at Lund University’s Paediatrics division, tackled the historic question of why animals developed so late and dramatically with novel clues from the field of tumour biology.

Basically, they looked at stem cells to see how they respond to oxygen. Generally, low oxygen (hypoxia) is a threat to a cell, and stem cells are particularly sensitive to hypoxia (are you still following?). Stem cells, therefore, have various mechanisms to deal with fluctuating oxygen levels. Well lo and behold, tumor cells do, too!

These systems involve a protein that can ‘fool’ cells [to] act as if the setting was hypoxic. This can also fool cells to get stem cell-like properties.

Tumor cells, they say, are able to maintain their stem-cell-like traits in spite of low oxygen. This gives them the freedom to evolve, just like microbes found a way to use sunlight. (What?) You may have to read this news several times to see how they get from point A, an uncontrolled tumor cell, to point B, a trilobite.

The new hypothesis that gives credit to a biological innovation to have triggered animal diversification is similar to how we think of biological innovations changing life in the past. Just the presence of free oxygen is the result of some microbes finding a way of using sunlight to get energy. This was also a biological event.

Dr. Hammarlund is a little clearer about what she means in her article at The Conversation, “Cancer tumours could help unravel the mystery of the Cambrian explosion.”

Could tumours help us explain the explosion of life of Earth? Scientists have typically explained the period of history when large animal species became much more diverse very quickly as the result of the planet’s rising oxygen levels. But my colleagues and I have developed a new idea that the change might have started within animals’ own biology, based on evidence from proteins found in tumours. It wasn’t until animals developed these proteins that they could take advantage of the oxygen and start diversifying.

This new hypothesis appears partly motivated by the failure of the oxygen theory to account for the Cambrian explosion. Here’s how it goes. In short, proteins “developed” out of nowhere. By chance, they gave cells the opportunity to “take advantage” of oxygen. This set them free to diversify. And there you go: trilobites.

Does she explain exactly how they diversified into animals with multi-system, hierarchical body plans with complex systems and behaviors? Not at all. Take a look at this newly discovered Cambrian bristle worm from Marble Canyon in Canada and see if it looks like the product of a tumor set free to diversify (Live Science).

Maybe the original paper in Nature Ecology & Evolution can clarify things. The title is, “Refined control of cell stemness allowed animal evolution in the oxic realm.” The peer-reviewed explanation follows:

Animal diversification on Earth has long been presumed to be associated with the increasing extent of oxic niches. Here, we challenge that view. We start with the fact that hypoxia (<1 a="" achieved="" action="" adult="" allowed="" and="" animal="" animals="" at="" be="" biology="" can="" cell="" cells="" cellular="" challenges="" concentrations.="" conditions="" consistent="" continuously="" control="" cope="" diversification="" enabled="" evidence="" evolution="" evolve="" factors="" fluctuating="" from="" geological="" how="" hypoxia-inducible="" hypoxia-response="" i="" illuminate="" immaturity="" in="" insights="" into="" is="" life.="" machinery="" maintains="" multicellular="" nevertheless="" new="" novel="" o2="" of="" on="" onset="" over="" oxic="" oxygen-sensing="" oxygen="" oxygenated="" paradoxically="" perspective="" provided="" provides="" realm.="" refinement="" regenerate="" regenerating="" settings.="" stem="" stemness="" suggest="" that="" the="" them="" then="" these="" this="" through="" thus="" tissue.="" tissue="" to="" transcription="" tumour="" unprecedented="" view="" we="" whereas="" with="">

From this, you see that all they are really doing is “enabling” microbes to evolve into animals, no matter how much oxygen is present. The authors endow microbes with new transcription factors that don’t restrict the action of their stem-cell properties as oxygen levels rise. Microbes can now become “successful versions of multicellularity” like cancerous tumors, and thus evolve into the Cambrian animals. Are we missing something? Do the judges want to gong this show yet?

In his recent book, Zombie Science, Jonathan Wells already gonged the cancer act when it played in a different venue. Evolutionists feel depressed at the lack of enthusiasm for Darwinism in medical science. A recent paper in PLOS ONE admits this:

Evolutionary biology currently has a marginal place within medicine. There is even a significant tendency to avoid the ‘e-word’ in the biomedical literature when referring to antimicrobial resistance.

In his chapter on antimicrobial existence as an icon of evolution (Chapter 8), Wells discusses the cancer hypothesis as another proposed example of “speciation” of sorts. This claim goes back to Julian Huxley in 1958, and continues today. Most recently, Joshua Swamidass used cancer not as an example of speciation, but of evolution by mutation and selection of the “fittest variants” (not fittest for the host, obviously). Swamidass and others try to view tumor cells as innovators. Wells looks into the examples provided by evolutionists and finds them lacking true novelty. They only rewire existing complex functions, but already have existing complex resources to draw on (p. 166). This is not innovation. It’s more like theft.

Evolutionary theory, furthermore, does little to guide medical science into new treatment options for cancer patients. Its value is “questionable, at best,” Wells concludes (p. 167). It certainly fails as evidence for evolution.

But some people argue that cancer is at least of value in providing evidence for evolutionary theory. Something doesn’t seem right here. According to evolutionary theory, the human body originated by mutation and selection, though the evidence shows that those processes cannot produce anything like a human body. Now we have evidence that mutation and selection can produce cancer, which destroys the human body. How does that support evolutionary theory? (pp. 167-168).

Applying this reasoning to Hammarlund’s cancer hypothesis for the Cambrian explosion, one finds no evidence that tumors can innovate the body plans of Cambrian animals. Jonathan Wells’s last paragraph applies here as well:

Darwinian evolution needs examples of biological processes that build new forms and functions. Cancer destroys these things. Saying cancer is evidence for biological evolution is like saying that I have a theory that explains the rise of modern civilization, and the evidence for my theory is the night of the living dead. (p. 168).

So to the cancer theory for the Cambrian explosion, the most desperate yet, we hit the gong and await the next act.

Mind over matter?

The Representation Problem and the Immateriality of the Mind
Michael Egnor


Materialism as a metaphysical perspective fails on countless levels. Nowhere is that failure more clear than in the understanding of the mind and the brain. The central failure of materialism in philosophy of the mind is the representation problem.

Mental representation is a big topic and has been a fertile issue in philosophy, especially over the past two centuries. I’ll focus on the role of mental representation in abstract thought, which is where the inadequacies of materialism are most obvious.

Thoughts may be divided into thoughts about particulars and thoughts about universals. Thoughts about particulars are thoughts, including perceptions, imagination, memory, etc., about particular objects in our environments. Thoughts about my coffee, or my car, or my family would be thoughts about particulars.

Thoughts about universals are abstract thoughts, and are thoughts about concepts. Justice, mercy, logic, mathematics, etc., are abstract thoughts.

For a materialist, all thoughts are generated by the brain. All that exists is matter, as understood by physics and chemistry. Thus, all thoughts, for the materialist, are generated purely physically, by neurons, neurotransmitters, action potentials, etc. So when we think about a particular object, that thought must somehow actually be a physical thing — a molecule or a relationship between molecules, etc. But of course, if I think about a particular thing — my cat Tabby, for example — my actual cat Tabby isn’t in my brain, so the materialist would say that my cat Tabby is somehow “represented” in my brain, and that representation constitutes the thought, without (immaterial) remainder. In the materialist view, all thought is, boiled down, matter of some sort, or is at least wholly represented in matter.

For thoughts about particular objects, this materialist scheme is not entirely implausible. For some aspects of visual perception, for example, there is a mapping of the visual field from the retina to the cortex, so that an image (of sorts) is represented in the brain as a field of neurons that are activated in a pattern. One might say that the pattern is the representation of the visual image. This still leaves much to be explained, but at least it is not utterly implausible to say that a thought about a particular thing — for example, a perception of my cat Tabby — is a representation in my brain. We still have no scientific (or metaphysical) explanation as to how this neuronal pattern actually becomes the thought, of course. But mental representation may provide a real level of explanation for thought about particulars.

But abstract thought is different. Consider a thought about justice. Justice is a concept, not a particular thing existing in the physical world. The materialist must ask: how can a thought about justice be represented in the brain? It certainly can’t merely be a mapped field in the cortex — justice has no shape or physical pattern, unlike my cat Tabby. A materialist would no doubt say that, like perception of particulars, thought about justice is represented in the cortex. But note carefully what representation means: a representation is a map of a thing. It presumes the existence, in the physical world, of that which it maps. A representation of a city — a map — presumes the city. A representation of my cat presumes my cat. And here’s the problem: a representation of my thought about justice presumes my thought about justice. So representation cannot provide any final explanation for abstract thought, because the representation of an abstract thought, even if it exists, presupposes the abstract thought itself.

As an example, let us suppose that a certain pattern of neuronal activation in my cortex were shown to represent my thought about justice. Obviously that pattern is not my thought about justice itself — justice is a concept, not a bunch of neurons. And if that pattern of neuronal activation represented my thought about justice, it must map to my thought of justice, which presupposes my thought about justice and thus cannot explain it.

Succinctly, mental representation of abstract thought presupposes abstract thought, and cannot explain it. It is on abstract thought that materialism, as a theory of mind, flounders. Abstract thought, classically understood as intellect and will, are inherently immaterial. Any representation in the brain of abstract thought (while it may exist) necessarily presupposes abstract thought itself, which must, by its nature, be an immaterial power of the mind.

The human mind is a composite of material particular thought and immaterial abstract thought. Interestingly, modern neuroscience supports this view. Perception of particulars maps with precision to brain anatomy, but abstract thought is not mapped in the same way. Material powers of the brain are ordinarily necessary for exercise of abstract thought (e.g., you have to be awake to think about justice), but matter is not sufficient for abstract thought.


Abstract thought is an immaterial power of the mind.

The bomb-throwing continues.

The Scientist Who Shouldn’t Exist — New Book by Matti Leisola, Jonathan Witt 
Evolution News @DiscoveryCSC


Matti Leisola isn’t supposed to exist. According to the standard patter from evolutionists, there is no controversy about evolution in the scientific community, nor any need for serious consideration of the theory of intelligent design. That’s because no legitimate scientist doubts modern evolutionary theory; and even if there may be a handful of such doubters in the U.S., there certainly are none to speak of in enlightened Western Europe.

A new book by and about distinguished Finnish bioengineer Matti Leisola authoritiatively brushes aside these Darwinist talking points. The book is Heretic: One Scientist’s Journey from Darwin to Design, co-written with Discovery Institute’s Jonathan Witt, a Senior Fellow with the Center for Science & Culture.

Dr. Leisola is the former dean of Chemistry and Material Sciences at Helsinki University of Technology, and the author of 140 peer-reviewed science publications on enzymes and rare sugars. Among other distinctions, he is a winner of the Latsis Prize of the ETH Zürich.

While arguing, from vast experience, against modern evolutionary theory and for intelligent design, the book is also a memoir. The back cover nicely summarizes the narrative thread:

What happens when an up-and-coming European bioscientist flips from Darwin disciple to Darwin defector? Sparks fly….Heretic is the story of Leisola’s adventures making waves — and many friends and enemies — at major research labs and universities across Europe.

Leisola’s deep knowledge of biology is evident throughout the book, but fellow scientists may find Chapter 10 particularly valuable. There, Leisola unpacks what he has learned about evolution and design from his work on engineering enzymes and microbes.

Dr. Witt worked with Dr. Leisola to make the book readily accessible to a broad audience. A gifted science writer and explainer, Witt is the author previously of A Meaningful World: How the Arts and Sciences Reveal the Genius of Nature, Intelligent Design Uncensored, and three documentaries that have appeared on PBS, including The Privileged Planet.

From the introduction, describing how Leisola started down the path to scientific heresy:

As a young student, I used to laugh at those who, as I thought, placed God in the gaps of our scientific knowledge. This God-of-the-gaps criticism is often leveled against Christians and other religious believers, against all those who insist there is clear evidence of design in nature. To my way of thinking, such people lacked the patience and level-headedness that I possessed. It was so clear to me: Instead of plugging away to discover the natural mechanism for this or that mystery about the natural world, these pro-design people threw up their hands and used the God-did-it explanation as a cover for ignorance.

This criticism of intelligent design proponents struck me as reasonable, so I didn’t listen to their arguments. But eventually I came to realize that this criticism cuts both ways, since a functional atheist also can reach for pat explanations in the face of mystery. It’s just that for him, the pat explanation will never be God. That is, you do not need God in your explanatory toolkit in order to short-circuit careful scientific investigation and reasoning. I realized that I myself had been all too willing to stuff vague materialistic explanations into the gaps of our scientific knowledge….

Also, their argument for entertaining only material explanations in the sciences just assumes that everything we find in nature has a purely material cause. But what if that assumption is wrong? What if there are features of the natural world — the laws and constants of nature itself, for instance — that really are the work of a creative intelligence?

Scientists are supposed to investigate mysteries with an open mind, not assume an explanation from the outset. I came to see that the best approach is to evaluate which explanation among the live options is more logical and fits the facts better.

The book has already garnered impressive endorsements from other scientists. One is from Dr. Erick J. Vandamme, Emeritus Professor of Bioscience Engineering, Centre for Biotechnology and Synthetic Biology, Ghent University, Belgium. Another is by Zombie Science author and biologist Jonathan Wells.

More on those later. Here we’ll only quote an especially colorful passage from German geneticist Wolf-Ekkehard Lönning’s endorsement. Heretic, he writes, is “the exciting story of almost the entire spectrum of aberrant motives, absurd fears, and unreasonable reactions to intelligent design (ID) by evolutionary scientists, clergymen, and church institutions alike.”

Heretic is also a story of fellow Darwin doubters discovered, and new supporters for ID won, in the most unexpected places. But for that you will have to read the book. Get it now at Amazon in paperback or Kindle.

Sunday, 4 February 2018

Yet more on the Elixir of life.

Behind Water’s Beauty, Wondrous Utility
Sarah Chaffee


This scene is about a five-minute walk from our Seattle office, and it never gets old. But when I think about it, it’s a lot about water.

In Seattle, it’s particularly easy to accept the centrality of water to every aspect of our lives — whether it’s salmon for dinner, taking the ferry to the peninsula, wearing hooded jackets from October to April (it’s a Seattle saying that you can pick out the tourists by looking to see if they are using an umbrella). Or (for me) it’s spending a day up at Snoqualmie Pass, snowshoeing on the Pacific Crest Trail.

But it’s more than that. As the picture above shows, we see the water cycle in action. Here’s an explanation.

In The Wonder of Water, this is what Michael Denton says about what water does between mountains and ocean:

[W]e have seen that it is the unique capacity of water to exist in the three stages of matter in the ambient temperature range, in conjunction with the low viscosity of ice and water, that makes possible the hydrological cycle, which has reliably delivered water to the terrestrial ecosystems of planet Earth for millions of years. And because the turning of the hydrological wheel depends largely on the unique properties of water, this means that in effect, water, the very matrix of life, delivers itself to land-based ecosystems by its own capacities. We also have seen that water further possesses just the right suite of diverse chemical and physical properties for the efficient erosion and weathering of the rocks, and for extracting the essential nutrients of life, while at the same time generating the key constituents of the soils that store that vital harvest for the benefit of plant life and indirectly all animal life on land.

In the case of water’s erosional and weathering abilities, it is hard to imagine any phenomenon more indicative of design. Here is a diverse set of physical and chemical properties that convey the impression of having been arranged specifically to the end of breaking down rocks both mechanically and chemically. Even if just one property were involved in eroding the rocks it would be wonder enough, especially in conjunction with the fact that the hydrological cycle depends, as discussed above, on the unique capacity of water to exist in multiple states in ambient conditions. But already we have touched on not one but at least five different properties of water that work together in the task of breaking down rocks and weathering minerals: (1) water’s ability to exist in three different staets in the ambient temperature range; (2) water’s high surface tension; (3) water’s expansion on freezing; (4) water’s viscosity; and (5) water’s capacity to dissolve an unusually wide variety of substances.

Perhaps the conspiracy is not the result of design? But certainly the appearance of design is highly suggestive, or even “overwhelming” — the term used by Paul Davies in describing the apparent design of the cosmic fine-tuning of the laws of physics for life.

Further, if the precious water and its cargo of dissolved minerals is to be used by land plants, it must be entrapped in some medium and held fast rather than permitted to run quickly to the sea. Again, water comes to the rescue. Because as we saw, the same erosional and weathering processes that provide the minerals for land-based life also inevitably generate a set of material components, including perhaps most importantly various clays, that confer on soil superb water- and mineral-retaining properties, which are vital if those same minerals are to be accessed and used by growing plants.

So the same process that yields the minerals also yields the means for plants to use them. Moreover, one of the properties that assists in the erosion of the rocks and hence in the making of soil — water’s high surface tension — is also the key property that holds water in the micropores in the sol, retaining it for use by land plants. And of course all this is a fitness for land-based life! Marine plants have no need for water-retaining soil!

Water’s properties are fit as a delivery man, quarry master, and store-keeper for land-based life, all in one! This is not mere everyday design; analogous to that seen in human technology; this is design of a transcending elegance and parsimony.


Hmm. Behind the beauty of Seattle’s famous views, there is wondrous utility.

Naturalism v. Naturalism?

Naturalism and Self-Refutation
Michael Egnor

Tom Clark  at Brandeis University has a blog called  Naturalism.Org. On his blog he presents a lengthy defense of naturalism as a metaphysical, scientific, and social project. Clark’s blog is valuable because he presents detailed arguments in favor of naturalism, which is unusual. Much of naturalist/materialist blogging is so poorly thought-out that it’s difficult to respond to with anything except satire. Clark at least attempts a coherent logical defense of naturalism, and this opens the door to some interesting discussions.

What is naturalism? Clark defines it thus:

Naturalism asserts that the world is of a piece; everything we are and do is included in the space-time continuum whose most basic elements are those described by physics.

Already we encounter problems for naturalism. Mathematics is certainly something we do. Is mathematics “included in the space-time continuum [with] basic elements … described by physics”? It seems a stretch. What is the physics behind the Pythagorean theorem? After all, no actual triangle is perfect, and thus no actual triangle in nature has sides such that the Pythagorean theorem holds. There is no real triangle in which the sum of the squares of the sides exactly equals the square of the hypotenuse. That holds true for all of geometry. Geometry is about concepts, not about anything in the natural world or about anything that can be described by physics. What is the “physics” of the fact that the area of a circle is pi multiplied by the square of the radius? And of course what is natural and physical about imaginary numbers, infinite series, irrational numbers, and the mathematics of more than three spatial dimensions? Mathematics is entirely about concepts, which have no precise instantiation in nature as described by physics.

Clark would likely argue that the concepts of mathematics are the products of our brains, which are purely material things. But that’s merely an assertion based on metaphysical presupposition, without any basis in physics or science. The hallmarks of the mind — intentionality, qualia, restricted access, the generation of propositions and logic, etc., have nothing whatsoever to do with matter. Matter, as understood by physics, isn’t intentional — it isn’t about anything. Matter is not inherently subjective, it doesn’t generate propositions or logic, etc.

For Clark, thoughts merely appear out of matter, which has no properties, by the laws of physics, for generating thought. For Clark to assert that naturalistic matter as described by physics gives rise to the mind, without immateriality of any sort, is merely to assert magic.

Furthermore, the very framework of Clark’s argument — logic — is neither material nor natural. Logic, after all, doesn’t exist “in the space-time continuum” and isn’t described by physics. What is the location of modus ponens? How much does Gödel’s incompleteness theorem weigh? What is the physics of non-contradiction? How many millimeters long is Clark’s argument for naturalism? Ironically the very logic that Clark employs to argue for naturalism is outside of any naturalistic frame.


The strength of Clark’s defense of naturalism is that it is an attempt to present naturalism’s tenets clearly and logically. That is its weakness as well, because it exposes naturalism to scrutiny, and naturalism cannot withstand even minimal scrutiny. Even to define naturalism is to refute it.