Red flags?

A walk on the darkside?

Letters from deep time?

Why OOL science remains design opponents weakest point.

James Tour and the Challenge to Theistic Evolution from Synthetic Chemistry
David Klinghoffer | @d_klinghoffer

On a new ID the Future podcast, Sarah Chaffee talks with biologist Ann Gauger about the new Theistic Evolution critique. After reviewing some of the contents of this intellectual feast, they focus on the chapter by Rice University synthetic chemist James Tour, “Are Present Proposals on Chemical Evolutionary Mechanisms Accurately Pointing Toward First Life?” His answer is an emphatic no.

Listen to the conversation here.

Dr. Gauger explains what synthetic chemistry means and elaborates a little on Dr. Tour’s exciting work in nanotechnology with its implications for fighting cancer. The bottom line is that a chemist like Tour, a very distinguished one, knows from a career’s worth of lab work how painstakingly difficult it is to synthesize molecules you want — that is, in a modern lab designed (intelligently designed) for such a purpose. Origin-of-life scenarios can’t, obviously, summon a laboratory and a team of top chemists at the dawn of life’s history and must therefore, if they refuse to consider ID, picture as possible things occurring in the wild that are difficult to accomplish with all the expertise and equipment available to Dr. Tour and his colleagues.

Only design can overcome that challenge. Yet TE proponents won’t consider it. That’s one of a variety of scientific and philosophical problems covered in this comprehensive yet accessible book.

It seems that Darwinism's undead minions are as restless as ever.

Zombie Watch: Debunked Finches Re-Emerge to Validate Darwin
Evolution News | @DiscoveryCSC

Peter and Rosemary Grant are the Princeton pair who have spent their careers on the Galápagos Islands trying to tease out the slightest bits of evidence to support the iconic myth of Darwin’s finches. Having received the  Royal Medal in Biology last summer, they’re at it again. That is despite having been soundly refuted by Jonathan Wells in his book  Zombie Science. Now that the Grants are passing the baton to younger researchers, we will undoubtedly be treated to more parades of this zombie icon.

In “Rapid hybrid speciation in Darwin’s finches” in the journal Science, four other lead authors, accompanied by the Grants, try to sanctify neo-Darwinism with a melodrama about three “species” of finches that can all interbreed. Mind you, they are all finches. They are all Galápagos finches. They are all family.

Any differences among the groups are tiny changes in beak size and shape, and changes in the songs one group sings.  Science Daily has a cartoon version of the story, complete with a lineage called “Big Bird”:

The arrival 36 years ago of a strange bird to a remote island in the Galapagos archipelago has provided direct genetic evidence of a novel way in which new species arise.

In this week’s issue of the journal Science, researchers from Princeton University and Uppsala University in Sweden report that the newcomer belonging to one species mated with a member of another species resident on the island, giving rise to a new species that today consists of roughly 30 individuals.

The study comes from work conducted on Darwin’s finches, which live on the Galapagos Islands in the Pacific Ocean. The remote location has enabled researchers to study the evolution of biodiversity due to natural selection. 

The first question is obvious: If they can interbreed, how can they be called different species? Darwin’s book was about the Origin of Species, not the origin of varieties. As Wells points out, “If they continue to breed and exchange genes, they are usually regarded as varieties of the same species, even if they are morphologically different (as is the case with dog breeds)” (Zombie Science, p. 68).

The “strange bird” that showed up was a lone male who had a slightly different song. He found a mate, they had chicks, and the family decided to live in the same community away from the others. This is called “reproductive isolation” and is considered by Darwinians as a step toward speciation. But people do that. How many stories are told of a wayfaring stranger appearing from a far country, finding a bride, and, over the objections of her family, taking her to start a new life together in a different place? Are they now “reproductively isolated”? Are they emerging as a new species? As Wells says in his charitable way, “Indeed, it is far from obvious why we should consider them separate species at all.” He gives an example:

The Ainu people of northern Japan and the !Kung people of southern Africa are separated not only physically and linguistically, but also (for all practical purposes) reproductively. Are they therefore separate species? Or are they all human beings? Of course the Ainu and the !Kung are all members of the same species.

Since the Galapagos finches regularly interbreed, why should we call them separate species, other than to make them appear to be evidence for evolution?

The  BBC News tries to have it both ways:

In the past, it was thought that two different species must be unable to produce fertile offspring in order to be defined as such. But in more recent years, it has been established that many birds and other animals that we consider to be unique species are in fact able to interbreed with others to produce fertile young.

They’d better not push that idea too far, or else they will be calling Japanese a different species from Germans. That’s no joke; to evolutionists, human beings fit in the category “other animals.”

The cartoon version accentuates the differences between the birds to make them look as different as possible. Science Daily continues:

The offspring were also reproductively isolated because their song, which is used to attract mates, was unusual and failed to attract females from the resident species. The offspring also differed from the resident species in beak size and shape, which is a major cue for mate choice. As a result, the offspring mated with members of their own lineage, strengthening the development of the new species.

Humans do this, too. Think of cases where an immigrant population kept to themselves, because they had their own culture and music. This affected their “mate choice,” as well.

The paper in Science makes a big deal of hybridization (see here about how rampant hybridization is scrambling Darwin’s tree). Science Daily explains:

A critical requirement for speciation to occur through hybridization of two distinct species is that the new lineage must be ecologically competitive — that is, good at competing for food and other resources with the other species — and this has been the case for the Big Bird lineage.

But again, the human analogy gives the lie to this idea. If an Ainu woman married a !Kung man, we wouldn’t, needless to say, call their children hybrids. In addition, human tribes in many places on Earth are reproductively isolated, yet successful. They can even be reproductively isolated in the same country, preferring to marry ones that have the same tastes or looks. The idea that they must be competitive comes from Malthus and Darwin, not from real life.

Here’s another glitch in the story not apparently noticed by the researchers:

Researchers previously assumed that the formation of a new species takes a very long time, but in the Big Bird lineage it happened in just two generations, according to observations made by the Grants in the field in combination with the genetic studies.

They sound delighted to find that speciation occurred fast, but think of what that means. Those islands have been isolated from the mainland for at least 8 million years — maybe 90 million. Unless the evolutionists believe the Big Bird incident was extremely rare or unique, such hybridizations should have been frequent. If so, wouldn’t the gene pool be scrambled beyond recognition? If rare, the story begins to look like a case of special pleading. Neither option is particularly helpful to Darwinian theory. The paper appeals to “rare and chance events” to explain Big Bird. Isn’t it odd that such a rare event happened while the Grants just happened to be watching? What’s the probability of that?

Why do the Darwinians make so much of so little? The reason: the Galápagos Islands are holy ground. Researchers will work for years to honor the founder of their worldview.

Mining the womb?

China Shows Eugenics Is Not a Thing of the Past
David Klinghoffer | @d_klinghoffer

As Todd Butterfield points out on an ID the Future episode, we may mistakenly think of eugenics as a horror from the history of a century ago, from which all good people pulled back in disgust when they saw the science, or pseudoscience, embraced to the fullest by Nazi Germany.

But Discovery institute’s Wesley Smith reminds us that eugenic practice is a frontier currently being explored, prominently, by China in the form of Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis (PGD), allowing for the selection of preferred babies and the disposal of others. Ostensibly intended to combat disease, it’s equally possible to pick embryos for life for other reasons entirely. The technique is ripe for abuse, to say the least.

Wesley explains that, as a tyranny, China is a Wild West of sorts for unethical science, with the government and its researchers answering to no one. And he worries of an international “race to the bottom” as other countries bow to pressure and follow Chinese scientists where they lead. It’s chilling — human life as a “resource,” available to be exploited.  Listen to the new podcast here.

And yet more primeval tech v. Darwin.

Telescope-Like Eyes in a “Simple” Mollusk
Evolution News | @DiscoveryCSC

You may not eat scallops with quite the same gusto again. The humble shellfish of the phylum Mollusca, a staple seafood delicacy, could have seen the fishermen coming — with hundreds of elegantly designed eyes. Now that scientists have had a detailed look at the tiny eyes of scallops, superlative adjectives are rising to the surface. Phys.org  says:

Scallops may look like simple creatures, but the seafood delicacy has 200 eyes that function remarkably like a telescope, using living mirrors to focus light, researchers said Thursday

Like a telescope? Yes! The eyes of Pecten maximus use biological concave mirrors, like the Newtonian telescope design. And there’s more design to talk about.

Scientists have known since the 1960s that these shellfish that inspired the Shell Oil logo had “eyes” of some sort, but it was difficult to dissect them. Now, new imaging techniques that freeze them before they can dry have allowed researchers from Lund University and Weizmann Institute to see them in detail and model how they work.

One thing that is interesting about the paper in Science by this team of ten researchers is that there is no mention of evolution. No, not even phylogeny, ancestor, mutation, or natural selection. The focus is on its unique functional design.

Although multilayered retinas have infrequently been observed in other animals, in these cases, they are used to enhance light sensitivity or act as spectral filters. In contrast, in the scallop, the upper and lower parts of the retina seem to be specialized for discriminating different fields of view. Thus, at the highest hierarchical level of organization, the complex 3D shape of the scallop eye mirror appears to be controlled to focus light from a broad field of view onto two retinas placed at different heights above its surface.

How Is the Scallop Eye Constructed?

Unlike other eyes in the animal kingdom, the scallop’s visual system uses mirrors in addition to a weakly refracting lens. The light path passes through a cornea, then an iris, then a lens, then through crystals of guanine stacked like tiles. The crystals form a biological concave mirror that reflects the light back through the system and onto a unique two-layered retina.

Some other animals, including spiders and beetles and even silver-haired monkeys, use guanine crystals for spectacular visual displays. This instance, though, deserves a new kind of design prize for the ultimate in functional art:

Perhaps the most complex optical function of guanine crystals in nature is in image formation. This function demands an extremely high degree of ultrastructural organization because light must not only be reflected but also focused. The hierarchal organization of the scallop mirror is finely tuned for image formation, from the component guanine crystals at the nanoscale to the overall shape of the mirror at the millimeter level. The scallop controls the crystal morphology and spacing to produce a tiled multilayer mirror with minimal optical diffraction aberrations, which reflects wavelengths of light that penetrate its habitat and are absorbed by its retinas. The mirror forms functional images on both retinas, which appear to be specialized for different functions.

What can you say but “Wow! That’s amazing”? We tend to think of vertebrate eyes as the best, but for its needs, the “simple scallop” has achieved optical nirvana.

Even Jerry Coyne was impressed. Over at  Why Evolution Is True, he posted some of the best pictures and videos of scallops and their amazing eyes. But when it came to explaining them, all he could say was:

The mirror reflecting light onto an image-detector is precisely the way reflecting telescopes work, though human-constructed mirrors are very different from those of the scallop. In fact, I don’t think humans are capable of making mirrors like this bivalve does. As Leslie Orgel once said, evolution is cleverer than you are.

Ring the gong for that show!

The electron micrographs show tile-like crystal squares arranged like roof tiles in stacks. Everything in this arrangement is for a purpose, they explain:

The key to the functionality of the mirror lies in the regular square plates of β-guanine, which constitute the mirror’s basic building blocks. This unusual square morphology differs markedly from the theoretically predicted prismatic growth form of guanine. In this morphology, the crystal face with the highest refractive index (n = 1.83) is preferentially expressed, as is also the case in many other highly reflective natural photonic systems. The crystals are arranged so that the high-refractive-index faces are oriented toward the direction of the incident light across the mirror (fig. S1), creating a highly reflective surface. The square-plate morphology is also optimized for tiling. Each layer of the mirror is formed from an almost perfectly tessellated mosaic of two-dimensional (2D) squares — closely resembling the segmented mirrors used in reflecting telescopes. In Euclidean geometry, there are only three possible ways to completely tile a surface using regular congruent polygons: with equilateral triangles, with hexagons, or with squares. Crystal tiling minimizes surface defects at the crystal interfaces that would cause optical diffraction effects (which would result in a reduction in the image contrast) and optical loss owing to transmission of light through the mirror. Thus, at the lowest hierarchical level of organization, the scallop controls crystal growth to produce a crystal morphology that minimizes surface defects in the mirror and enables the formation of a highly reflective surface.

There’s more. The surface of the concave mirror is not perfectly spherical, but has a variable curvature with a flattened base. This sends the reflected light off-axis in two directions, to the proximal retina for the lower visual field, and to the distal retina for the upper visual field. “The nonspherical symmetry and tilt of the mirror produce more complex vision than was previously imagined,” they explain. “A simple on-axis, spherical mirror would not result in opposite sides of the visual field being focused as distinctly separate images at different heights above the mirror.”

How Does It Work?

Although it’s impossible to know for sure what the creature actually perceives, ray-trace models indicate that the scallop obtains more finely focused vision for nearby objects that move (triggering defense or escape behaviors), along with a wide field of peripheral vision that “could provide useful information to control and guide its movement while swimming with jet propulsion or to assess static features of its habitat.” The two types of focus also expand the dynamic range of vision, similar to how rods and cones overlap in brightness sensitivity in vertebrates.

One more question: Why does the scallop need 200 of these light detectors? For that, we have to consider the brain of this creature:

What benefit does the scallop receive by having up to 200 eyes located on the periphery of its semi-circular mantle, spanning ~250°? Ray tracing reveals that the images formed on both retinas of one eye vary substantially in focal quality across their visual fields. Interestingly, the optic nerves from nearly all of the eyes project on to the lateral lobes of the parieto-visceral ganglion (PVG), the site of visual processing in scallops. We speculate that neural processing in the PVG can combine the visual information from the substantially overlapping and differently focused views from multiple eyes, allowing the scallop to improve visual acuity relative to the isolated eye and potentially to determine the depth of features in the environment. This would offset the drawback of limited areas of well-focused vision in individual eyes.

This is a complete system, in other words, with all the contributing parts working together to optimize visual acuity. A short video by the AAAS (see the top of this post) puts the whole picture together.

It’s so good, the authors conclude, human engineers would do well to imitate it:

The crystal morphology, multilayer structure, and 3D shape of the scallop’s eye mirror are finely controlled to produce functional images on its two retinas. Understanding the strategies that organisms use to control crystal morphology and arrangement for complex optical functions paves the way for the construction of novel bio-inspired optical devices. In particular, the resemblance of the scallop’s tiled, off-axis mirror to the segmented mirrors of reflecting telescopes provides inspiration for the development of compact, wide-field imaging devices derived from this unusual form of biological optics.

So is design science a science stopper? Does scallop vision not make sense except in the light of evolution? We rest our case.

Russia's assault on religious liberty continues.

Hearing to Begin on State Seizure of Witnesses’ National Office in Russia

Russian authorities are moving forward in their efforts to seize properties used by the Administrative Center of Jehovah’s Witnesses, located in Solnechnoye, near St. Petersburg.

The April 20, 2017, Supreme Court decision ordered all of the Witnesses’ legal entities liquidated and their properties confiscated, including the properties used by the Administrative Center. However, the property in question is owned by a U.S. entity—Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania (WTPA). The prosecutor is therefore attempting to invalidate a 17-year-old contract that legally transferred the property to WTPA. The contract was never in question prior to the Supreme Court decision, and WTPA has been paying taxes on the property since the transfer. The authorities are now stooping to subterfuge in order to legitimize their ultimate goal of seizing the property.

At the preliminary hearing on November 29, 2017, the judge dismissed all motions filed by the Witnesses’ attorneys, paving the way for the prosecutor’s case. Beyond the potential loss of the property, worth millions of dollars, the Center was home to nearly 400 Russian citizens and foreign nationals, some of whom have lived there for 20 or more years. The move from their home and the disruption in their volunteer religious service in behalf of their fellow Russians have been traumatic.

The hearing on the merits of the case will begin on December 7, 2017, at 2:00 p.m. in the Sestroretskiy District Court in St. Petersburg.

On the nations:The Watchtower Society's commentary.

NATIONS

In the broad and general sense, a nation is made up of people who are more or less related to one another by blood and who have a common language. Such a national group usually occupies a defined geographic territory and is subject to some form of central governmental control. According to the Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament, “Hebrew evidences a tendency for goy to describe a people in terms of its political and territorial affiliation, and so to approximate much more closely to our modern term ‘nation.’ ʽam [people], conversely, always retains a strong emphasis on the element of consanguinity as the basis of union into a people.” (Edited by G. J. Botterweck and H. Ringgren, Vol. 2, 1975, p. 427) The Greek terms eʹthnos (nation) and la·osʹ (people) are used similarly. In the Scriptures the plural forms of gohy and eʹthnos usually refer to Gentile nations.

Origin. The first notice of the forming of separate nations appears in the post-Flood period, in connection with the building of the Tower of Babel. Those sharing in this project were united in their opposition to God’s purpose. The principal factor facilitating united action was that “all the earth continued to be of one language and of one set of words.” (Ge 11:1-4) Jehovah took notice of this and, by confusing their language, “scattered them from there over all the surface of the earth.”—Ge 11:5-9; MAP Vol. 1, p. 329.

Separated now by communication barriers, each linguistic group developed its own culture, art, customs, traits, and religion—each its own ways of doing things. (Le 18:3) Alienated from God, the various peoples contrived many idols of their mythical deities.—De 12:30; 2Ki 17:29, 33.

There were three great branches of these nations stemming from the sons and grandsons of Noah’s sons Japheth, Ham, and Shem, and these were reckoned as the founding fathers of the respective nations called by their names. The listing in Genesis, chapter 10, therefore might be termed the oldest tabulation of nations, 70 in number. Fourteen were Japhetic, 30 Hamitic, and 26 Shemitic in origin. (Ge 10:1-8, 13-32; 1Ch 1:4-25) For more information regarding these national groups, see CHART, Vol. 1, p. 329, as well as articles on each of the 70 descendants of Noah.

Many changes, of course, came with the passing of time. Some nations were absorbed by their neighbors or disappeared altogether, because of weakness, disease, or war; others came into existence through new migrations and population increases. The spirit of nationalism at times became very strong among certain groups, and this, coupled with great military exploits, gave ambitious men the necessary thrust to build world empires at the expense of weaker nations.

A Father of Nations. God told Abram to leave Ur and move to a land He would show him, for as He said, “I shall make a great nation out of you.” (Ge 12:1-4) Later, God enlarged on his promise, saying, “You will certainly become a father of a crowd of nations. . . . And I will make you very, very fruitful and will make you become nations, and kings will come out of you.” (Ge 17:1-6) This promise was fulfilled. Abraham’s son Ishmael fathered “twelve chieftains according to their clans” (Ge 25:13-16; 17:20; 21:13, 18), and through the six sons of Keturah, other nations traced their ancestry back to Abraham. (Ge 25:1-4; 1Ch 1:28-33; Ro 4:16-18) From Abraham’s son Isaac sprang the Israelites and Edomites. (Ge 25:21-26) In a much larger, spiritual sense Abraham became “a father of many nations,” for persons of many national groups, including those of the Christian congregation in Rome, by reason of their faith and obedience could call Abraham their father, “the father of all those having faith.”—Ro 4:11, 16-18; see ISRAEL No. 2.

How God Views the Nations. As the Creator and Universal Sovereign, God is within his absolute rights in setting the nations’ territorial boundaries (if he chooses to do so), as he did with Ammon, Edom, and Israel. (De 2:17-22; 32:8; 2Ch 20:6, 7; Ac 17:26) The Most High and Lofty One over all the earth is not to be compared in greatness with nations of mankind. (Jer 10:6, 7) Actually the nations are as but a drop from the bucket in his sight. (Isa 40:15, 17) So when such nations rage and mutter against Jehovah, as when they put Jesus to death on a torture stake, He only laughs at them in derision and confounds and destroys their presumptuous counsel against Him.—Ps 2:1, 2, 4, 5; 33:10; 59:8; Da 4:32b, 34, 35; Ac 4:24-28.

Yet for all of Jehovah’s superlative greatness and power, no one can rightly charge him with being unjust in his treatment of national groups. It makes no difference whether God is dealing with a single man or a whole nation, he never compromises his righteous principles. (Job 34:29) If a nation is repentant, as were the people of Nineveh, he blesses them. (Jon 3:5-10) But if they turn to doing bad, even though in a covenant with him, he destroys them. (Jer 18:7-10) When an issue arises, Jehovah sends his prophets with a message of warning. (Jer 1:5, 10; Eze 2:3; 33:7) God is not partial toward any, great or small.—De 10:17; 2Ch 19:7; Ac 10:34, 35.

Therefore, when whole nations refuse to recognize and obey Jehovah, or they cast him out of their minds and hearts, Jehovah executes his judgments upon them. (Ps 79:6; 110:6; 149:7-9) He devotes them to destruction and turns them back to Sheol. (Ps 9:17; Isa 34:1, 2; Jer 10:25) In descriptive language God says that the wicked nations will be turned over to his Son, the one called “Faithful and True . . . The Word of God,” to be dashed to pieces.—Ps 2:7-9; Re 19:11-15; compare Re 12:5.

The New Nation of Spiritual Israel. For centuries Jehovah God dealt exclusively with natural Israel, time and again sending his prophets to the nation so that the people might turn from their wayward course. Finally he sent his Son, Christ Jesus, but the majority rejected him. Therefore, Jesus said to the unbelieving chief priests and Pharisees: “The kingdom of God will be taken from you and be given to a nation producing its fruits.”—Mt 21:33-43.

The apostle Peter clearly identified that “nation” as one composed of persons who had accepted Christ Jesus. (1Pe 2:4-10) In fact, Peter applied to fellow Christians the very words that had been directed to natural Israel: “You are ‘a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for special possession.’” (1Pe 2:9; compare Ex 19:5, 6.) All of them recognized God as Ruler and his Son as Lord and Christ. (Ac 2:34, 35; 5:32) They possessed heavenly citizenship (Php 3:20) and were sealed with the holy spirit, which was an advance token of their heavenly inheritance. (2Co 1:22; 5:5; Eph 1:13, 14) Whereas natural Israel was constituted a nation under the Law covenant, the “holy nation” of spirit-begotten Christians became such under the new covenant. (Ex 19:5; Heb 8:6-13) For these reasons it was most appropriate that they be called “a holy nation.”

When God’s spirit was first poured out upon about 120 disciples of Jesus (all natural Jews) on the day of Pentecost in the year 33 C.E., it became evident that God was dealing with a new spiritual nation. (Ac 1:4, 5, 15; 2:1-4; compare Eph 1:13, 14.) Later, beginning in the year 36 C.E., membership in the new nation was extended to uncircumcised Gentiles, who likewise received God’s spirit.—Ac 10:24-48; Eph 2:11-20.

Regarding the preaching of the good news to all nations, see GOOD NEWS.

Gog and Magog. The Bible book of Revelation (20:7, 8) states that, after Christ’s Thousand Year Reign, Satan “will go out to mislead those nations in the four corners of the earth, Gog and Magog.” Evidently such nations are the product of rebellion against Christ’s administration.—See GOG No. 3.

How evangelists of the new gods(Chance,necessity and matter.) are distorting science.

Mock at Your Peril! Naturalism Is a Jealous Fraud
Denyse O'Leary

The scientific discoveries that might have supported the naturalist view of the universe, life, and the human mind have never actually occurred. Stubborn problems, old and new, make such discoveries less likely than ever. New technology in neuroscience, for example, has enabled unexpected new findings that point unambiguously in a non-naturalist direction, raising the suspicion of more such findings to come.

Naturalists are not taking it well; fighting superstition is easier than fighting magnetic resonance imaging. For some decades, we have simply been informed that “science would find the answer” to stubborn problems. But what happens if “stubborn problems” are signals that our ideas are incomplete and new insights are needed?

Today, “science” means naturalism. Whether current directions are fruitful or not, no non-naturalist approach may be entertained in principle. Karl Popper called this stance promissory materialism. It is the basic editorial position of most popular science magazines. It is less open to doubt than the laws of mathematics. Much popular culture passionately agrees. In 2005, a Darwin-in-the-schools activist advised her lobbyists to portray ID sympathizers “‘in the harshest light possible, as political opportunists, evangelical activists, ignoramuses, breakers of rules, unprincipled bullies, etc.” The strategy may have backfired in recent years due to a number of conflicts with evidence. But many naturalists seem to see themselves as she did, fighting an existential evil. To entertain doubt about such a cause is a sin.

Popular science literature offers the pious naturalist a steady stream of lessons and tales in the form of articles in support of key doctrinal positions, only occasionally challenged by informed skepticism arising from decades of failure. Here are three common themes:

Artificial Intelligence: If HAL or Colossus Really Existed, Why Would They Want to Do Anything in Particular?

We have no idea what consciousness is but naturalism’s  only possible model is: an evolved natural phenomenon. That’s a dogma, not a finding. As dogmas are prone to do, it generates assumptions. One assumption is that human beings can create conscious machines.

Stephen Hawking has taken, in recent years, to warning that artificial intelligence can destroy society: “Computers can, in theory, emulate human intelligence, and exceed it,” he said. “Success in creating effective AI, could be the biggest event in the history of our civilization. Or the worst. We just don’t know. So we cannot know if we will be infinitely helped by AI, or ignored by it and side-lined, or conceivably destroyed by it.” There Hawking reprises the theme of Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970) in which immensely powerful American and Soviet defense computers (Colossus and Guardian) merge to run the world as the ultimate total state.

The plot illustrates a longstanding confusion between consciousness (which we don’t really understand) and intelligence (whose operations we can incorporate into machines as extensions of ourselves). A powerful computer cannot have more insight or different intentions from its programmer’s ability for the same reasons as characters in a novel cannot have more insight or different intentions from the author’s conception. And, in the absence of consciousness, why would computers wish for power or anything else? If they lack wishes of their own, massive computers add nothing to the risks already posed by proliferating nuclear weapons.

Rodney Brooks, former director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT, hints at the confusion:

I am told that I do not understand how powerful AGI [artificial general intelligence] will be. That is not an argument. We have no idea whether it can even exist. I would like it to exist — this has always been my own motivation for working in robotics and AI. But modern-day AGI research is not doing well at all on either being general or supporting an independent entity with an ongoing existence. It mostly seems stuck on the same issues in reasoning and common sense that AI has had problems with for at least 50 years.

In a recent edition of Technology Review, we hear the worry,“Is AI Riding a One-Trick Pony? Just about every AI advance you’ve heard of depends on a breakthrough that’s three decades old. Keeping up the pace of progress will require confronting AI’s serious limitations.”

Some keep the faith and add to it. Dan Brown of Da Vinci Code fame tells audiences that AI-induced collective consciousness will replace God: “Our need for that exterior god, that sits up there and judges us…will diminish and eventually disappear.” Given that naturalism considers consciousness as such an illusion, God will be a collective illusion. An organized religious enterprise, “Way of the Future” (WOTF), founded by Silicon Valley lightning rod Anthony Levandowski, is currently seeking non-profit status as a religion of technology “to develop and promote the realization of a Godhead based on artificial intelligence and through understanding and worship of the Godhead [to] contribute to the betterment of society.” Way of the Future’s site  explains, “While biology has evolved one type of intelligence, there is nothing inherently specific about biology that causes intelligence. Eventually, we will be able to recreate it without using biology and its limitations.”

Sarah Jones asks at The New Republic, Does Silicon Valley religion show that “The final end of science is the revelation of the absurd,” as John Gray suggests in The Immortalization Commission (2012)? One wants to ask, absurd in relation to what, exactly? Naturalists dismiss consciousness, reason, free will , and any ethics that arise from a non-natural source. Absurdity is a meaningless category if there is no truth to defy.

ET Must Exist if Only as a Perpetual Act of Faith

Traditional religions are sometimes defaced by faked or debunked miracles. But they also feature many events that cannot be disproven, only denied in principle as violations of  naturalism.

Naturalism is different. It tends to encourage a belief in extraterrestrial intelligences when we have no shred of evidence for any non-terrestrial life forms at present, not even of the simplest possible type.

Carl Sagan, of enduring Contact and Cosmos fame, was an ardent believer. Longtime Sagan fan Robert Tracinski has mixed feelings about the naturalist trend to which his hero contributed so much: Fact gets dwarfed by narrative. “As the decades pass, Sagan’s imitators become less thoughtful and more propagandistic, less interested in conveying the actual scientific method and more concerned with just telling the public what to think.” That is a familiar trajectory for the popular expression of any state religion. Ironically, the paranormal that Sagan opposed, now freed from the restraints posed by demands for evidence and reason, has  gone mainstream.

Naturalism, as expressed in popular culture, turns away from the facts about life beyond Earth for good reason. Hoped-for water flow on Mars appears, from a recent report, to be  sand and dust. Dashed hopes for life on nearby Mars probably diminish the chances for similar exoplanets in galactic habitable zones. Exoplanet experts, who have much to gain from optimism, don’t think extraterrestrial life of any sort will be found  by 2040.

Over the years, pop ET science coverage has begun to sound stale, unreal. Astrobiology tells us that Darwinian evolution can reveal how alien life forms ought to look, as if there were evidence that they exist. Some brood over the ethics of colonizing other planets, disrupting a “natural” environment, when we know of no other genuinely reachable and habitable planet. Others wonder how traditional religion would survive a space alien landing, though no pressing theological problem has surfaced among adherents. We are told at Live Science that  famous people believe in space aliens, including space entrepreneur  Robert Bigelow who is “absolutely convinced” as if strong belief made the aliens’ existence surer. It’s unclear whether popular naturalist culture can grapple with the idea that might not be out there,  possibly because if he doesn’t exist, it is more difficult to maintain that humans are not special.

The 98 Percent Chimpanzee Reflects on the 100 Percent Chimpanzee and Concludes Humans Are Not Special

A third naturalist doctrine advanced non-stop in pop science writing today is more ominous, that humans are just another animal in nature and an especially destructive one. Claims about AI and ET are usually addressed to non-experts, so we are not asked to violate our own everyday knowledge in accepting them. But we must dismiss the most unambiguous everyday evidence in order to see humans as mere evolved animals. Our acceptance of the doctrine in defiance of evidence establishes our commitment to naturalism.

Faithful readers are not expected to ask obvious questions, make obvious inferences, or reflect on everyday experiences in order to assess claims.

Don’t ask obvious questions? We are told by the BBC that apes are entering the Stone Age, which would be historic if true. But no one expects a thorough examination of the claims, lest the naturalist miracle be openly debunked instead of, as usual, quietly ignored.

Don’t make obvious inferences? We are told that intelligence tests are unfair to apes (NPR) because they never seem to be done right: “All direct ape-human comparisons that have reported human superiority in cognitive function have universally failed to match the groups on testing environment, test preparation, sampling protocols, and test procedures.” We must not suspect that the apes are just not up to the task. Similarly, we are told at Aeon that Homo naledi buried their dead, which “disrupts the whole conventional thinking about the distinction between modern humans and earlier species and, by extension, the distinction between us and the rest of nature.” We are not to suspect that the find casts doubt on current efforts to see naledi as the long-sought Darwinian missing link (half-human), now that floriensis and neanderthalensis have not answered that need.

Don’t reflect on everyday experiences in order to assess claims? Bonobos, we are told, help “without being asked” (“long thought to be unique to humans”). In reality, helping is well-known even among non-primates, and that includes helping other species when there is no apparent risk. Turtles will right upended turtles, though they cannot easily right themselves.

Most of what we hear about human beings does not check out but we risk being thought  “anti-science” if we say so. We hear that romantic love evolved because it improves reproduction rates even though, as Australian philosopher David Stove noted in Darwinian Fairytales (2007), human experience generally shows that passionate romance is not especially likely to result in large families. And how did loneliness? “Like thirst, hunger or pain, loneliness is an aversive state that animals seek to resolve, improving their long-term survival.” It has nothing to do with explicitly human concerns or emotions.  Meanwhile, carefully planned human activity, carried out over  tens of thousands of years can be portrayed as a natural happenstance, “putting us on a par with the natural world, where we have species like ants that have domesticated fungi, for instance.” At times, we may need to remind ourselves that ignoring what we know from experience is an act of naturalist faith.

The claims we hear are often ridiculous but then the believer is not a critic. Gender theory, we hear, is harmful for dogs, as if dogs could care about such things. Sheep recognize images of human faces (BBC), which “shows that sheep possess similar face recognition abilities to primates.” One is tempted to break with propriety and observe that sheep would probably learn to recognize any part of human anatomy if fodder was the familiar reward. If anything, this finding should cast doubt on the significance of facial recognition in primate apes but we are not supposed to infer that, are we?

Mock at your peril! Naturalism is a jealous fraud; its believers build their world around its tenets. And it is becoming a more dangerous world. British philosopher Roger Scruton asks, why do we think it a crime to kill an innocent human but not an innocent tapeworm? “These questions lie at the center of philosophical inquiry today, as they have since the ancient Greeks. In a thousand ways we distinguish people from the rest of nature, and build our life accordingly.”

Well, we used to. As Wesley Smith often documents in these pages, that distinction is beginning to blur. Humans can be seen in polite circles as infections like tapeworms. Along those lines, we might want to keep an eye on the trajectory of “critical plant studies,”which “challenges the privileged place of the human in relation to plant life and examines this through a series of lenses: ethical, political, historical, cultural, textual, and philosophical.”

It’s not just that media-darling disciplines ruled by naturalism tend to fail the facts. They fail the facts at precisely the points where they should succeed if naturalism were true. Einstein’s modernist theory passes stringent tests while naturalist cosmology flirts with abandoning them. Amputees can control increasingly sophisticated prostheses using only their thoughts but consciousness is an illusion? In the midst of a flurry of pop science claims that  free will  does not exist, Google’s truthbots prove  no match for humans who lack confidence in what Google employees think is fake news

It doesn’t help that science journalism is uniquely bad. One problem is that, relative to news writers in other fields, science journalists tend to adopt the role of “defenders” of science. I call it pom-pom waving. To see the difference pom-pom waving makes, consider how you would feel if your local sports columnist was a defender of “sports” in general and too driven by ideology to be a reliable source of stat and play analysis. You’d do best to go elsewhere for eye-openers and for the bigger picture.

Others have noticed a problem with science journalism. From a March editorial in Nature.

There has been much gnashing of teeth in the science-journalism community this week, with the release of an infographic that claims to rate the best and worst sites for scientific news. According to the American Council on Science and Health, which helped to prepare the ranking, the field is in a shoddy state. “If journalism as a whole is bad (and it is),” says the council, “science journalism is even worse. Not only is it susceptible to the same sorts of biases that afflict regular journalism, but it is uniquely vulnerable to outrageous sensationalism.”

But the “sensationalism” to which the editors refer is hyped-up monochromatic naturalism. If, due to historic commitments, Nature’s editors simply cannot address the underlying weaknesses of naturalism, as demonstrated by growing distaste for evidence and reason their attempt to  gloss over the bad news on procedural grounds will quite properly be seen as an admission of helplessness. In that case, it is not clear how public respect for science can come out a winner here.