What Do Evolutionists Really Believe?

JBsptfn has cited more propaganda from his chief source of pseudo-scientific bullshit, Pogge, who runs the creationist site Science Against Evolution.  The article he cited was written by Pogge in response to a commenter some years ago, who noted his poor grasp of scientific facts.  It attempts to dispel the notion of abiogenesis by providing a distorted view of scientific thinking on the topic and complaining that they teach this stuff in schools.  And where does Poggie get his information about what they teach in biology class?  From CliffsNotes, of course.

But, in the interest in fairness, we will quote the foremost authority on Biology (and English literature, too) most widely read by high school and college students in America. No matter what textbook is used in class, you can be sure that what the students really read is Cliffs Notes! - Pogge

The synopsis for this CliffNotes educational resource describes it as:

what you'd expect-—and want—from CliffsNotes: a no-nonsense quick review of biology that high school and Biology 101 students can use to review biology. - Cliffs Quick Review Biology Synopses & Reviews

Obviously, Pogge never took biology himself.

Hinman's Incoherency Problem

Joe Hinman has just published another example of his muddled theistic thinking.  The article, called Do God's Omniscience ,Omnipotance, and free will Contradict? purports to answer the problem often posed by atheists of how God's omni qualities can co-exist without contradiction.  The problem, as he states it, is this:

God is asserted to be all good, all loving, all knowing, all powerful, in possession of free will and having imparted free will to human beings as well as being eternal and uncaused as well as outside of space and time while acting in a time sequence of events within space and time.  Sorry, one simply cannot make rational sense to reconcile all these asserted properties. They contradict each other in various ways making the whole package incoherent by it's own theistic definitions. (highlight in original)

Joe castigates atheists for their shallow thinking on this subject.  But he fails to answer that question, and in the process, reveals his own shallow thinking.

The Argument From Non-Causality

Don McIntosh has taken on quantum mechanics in his recent article Why a Quantum-Mechanical Universe Still Requires a Cause.  This article tries to answer the question posed in its title by refuting the validity of a supposed argument made by atheists (actually a straw man) that the universe is uncaused.  And in doing so, Don commits a logical fallacy of his own.

Don's argument may be stated this way:

1.  Atheists argue that the universe is uncaused.
2.  The atheist argument is not logically valid.
3.  Therefore, the universe is not uncaused (and hence, the title of the article).

Let's examine this in more detail.

Ruminations on a Trump Presidency

Now that things have calmed down a bit, it's time to reflect on the outcome of the election.  I heard Trump's gracious sounding remarks the other day, and I thought there might be some hope that this guy isn't as much of an asshole as he made himself out to be during the campaign.  It just might be the case that it was all a facade designed to get the votes of millions of bumpkins who don't know the first thing about government, or economics, or world affairs, or science, but are outraged that gay people can get married.  People who would vote for a man whose whole life history exemplifies everything they say they despise, because he's now singing their tune.

Why Don't Scientists Believe in God?

Mikey at Shadow to Light is stumped once again by the views expressed by atheist scientists.  He has dug up a three year old a video compilation of fifty scientists (actually one of a series of similar videos) making brief comments about their views on atheism or agnosticism as proof of his contention that the scientists' atheism is unjustified.  The problem is that this video doesn't make any claims about providing arguments to justify atheism.  It merely contains brief snippets of scientists talking about belief.  The video was compiled by Dr, Jonathan Parajasingham, who says:

I do not claim that this video demonstrates there is no God. It is not an argument against God in itself ... Parajasingham

So what is Mikey's beef?  It seems that no matter what atheists say or do, he is bound to find fault with it.  But that has no bearing on the truth of what they say.  He either fails to understand or he deliberately misinterprets everything that doesn't agree with his ideological beliefs.

Misrepresenting Science

Elaine Ecklund from Rice Universtiy has stirred the pot again, with the publication of yet another paper, which appears in the journal Public Understanding of Science, about a study that makes questionable use of data relating to scientists' views of the compatibility of science and religion.  The data includes a number of opinions by Dawkins opponents in the scientific community.  The study is titled "Responding to Richard: Celebrity and (mis)representation of science".  That title alone should alert readers to the potential for bias in its findings.  Ecklund has revealed her own bias by tweeting: "British scientists really, really dislike Richard Dawkins, our new study discovers".  This appears to be the biased opinion of Ecklund herself, rather than the actual majority view of scientists.  Her view is not supported by the data in her own study.

Hinman's "Argument From God Corrolate [sic]"

After some discussion about the merits of Joe Hinman's use of empirical data to make claims that belief in God has scientific justification, Joe presented a succinct version of his argument for God belief based on empirical observation.  I'll review and critique his argument here.  This argument is a distillation of the material he presents in his book The Trace of God: a Rational Warrant for Belief.  I will not discuss the book, which I have yet to read.  I will limit my discussion to the argument as presented by Joe in this post.

Joe starts out from a very reasonable position, which is basically that if God interacts with the physical world in some way, then we should be able to observe the effects of that interaction.  If we can know that some observed evidence is the result of divine interaction with the world, then we can infer the existence of a divine being.  The pertinent question is:

How do we know this is the effect, or the accompanying sign of the divine?

All this is quite reasonable, and Joe's argument purports to answer that question.  But of course, the devil is in the details, as we shall see.

Skeptical About Skepticism

At Shadow to Light, Mikey has outdone himself.  Turned a news story about the zealotry of Christian Trump supporters into a full-blown conspiracy theory about hoaxers trying to make the Christians look bad.  And he does this in the name of skepticism.  It seems that the story, after appearing in a number of news outlets, was repeated by Hermant Mehta, at his blog, The Friendly Atheist.  What's the problem with that?  According to Mikey, Mehta should have been more skeptical about the story, because he didn't raise the question of its being a hoax.  No, what he did was to report it pretty much the way the initial news reports did, without embellishing the facts with speculation about what might really have happened.

Christians in Love

Love to faults is always blind,
Always is to joy inclin’d,
Lawless, wing’d & unconfin’d,
And breaks all chains from every mind.

Deceit to secresy confin’d
Lawful, cautious & refin’d
To every thing but interest blind,
And forges fetters for the mind.

    - William Blake

If you try to tell a man in love that his beloved is not the most beautiful, the most intelligent, the most wonderful thing that has ever graced this planet, you will likely be met with resistance, and you just might get punched in the face.  Love is blind, they say.

Children of the Lack of Objectivity

Joe Hinman raises an issue that is worth considering.  It is the question of how we can relate to something for which we have no familiarity and no experience.  It may not be easy to understand something that you've never seen or never experienced.  He asks the question:

How could someone born blind understand the difference in blue and green or yellow?

After calling atheists' theorizing about religious belief "simplistic an totally wrong headed", and "shallow and senseless", He sums it up this way:

Religion doesn't exist because people tried to explain why it rains. It exits because people sense the numinous. They sense this aspect of something, the sublime, the spiritual, the nether regions but something that is special and beyond our understanding.

What Hinman wants us to think is that atheists have no understanding of Christians' belief in God because they haven't experienced it for themselves.  Of course, this is the same old trope that we hear over and over again.  And it's just not true.