The next chapter of Coyne’s book is on vestigia, atavistic throwbacks, embryonic recapitulation, topped off with alleged screw-ups in the so-called process of intelligent design. Let’s start with this last item, since we should be able to dispense with it in a paragraph or so. The structure of this argument is strange, in that Coyne …
Like Watching a Hummingbird Fly
As previously mentioned, here is my second installment on chapter two of Coyne’s book. As this chapter makes apparent, long stretches of time are essential to the project of evolutionary hand-waving, a process whereby impossible things are made more plausible to us by having them happen very, very slowly. Don’t think I can walk across …
That’s A Rabbit, You Doofus
Comes now chapter two of Jerry Coyne’s book, called Written in the Rocks. It will take a post or two to deal with this chapter, so patience, all of you. My first post will address the structure of his argumentation, and later I will look at the time involved in all this — my own …
Occam’s Shaving Kit
Jerry Coyne’s first chapter of Why Evolution Is True begins with something of a patronizing quotation from Jacques Monod. “A curious aspect of the theory of evolution is that everybody thinks he understands it” (p. 1) Well, excuse us. But after that, he starts at the right place, which is the appearance of design. Coyne …
What Plato’s Cousin Knew
Theological disputes are often matters of great moment, even when those outside the dispute cannot track with what is going on. I think it was Gibbon who once displayed his ignorance by saying that the debate over homousia and homoiousia was somehow over the letter i — which is pretty similar to saying the debate …
Mobius Strip Reason
It has been a while since I have gone through a book chapter by chapter and, weather permitting, the next one I shall attempt is Why Evolution is True by Jerry Coyne. Coyne is a big time Johnny in the world of evolution, so I will definitely be punching up out of my weight class. …
If It Were a Pancake
Steve McSwain, “Author, Speaker, Thought Leader, Spiritual Teacher,” has written a piece over at HuffPo that requires some sort of response. From the rigor of argument displayed in his piece, one guess could be that he is most likely a mentor of spiritual formation at a place somewhere in LA with a name something like …
Debate As a Christian Duty
For many Christians, it seems a reasonable question to ask whether it is profitable for us to engage in public debates at all. Whoever changed his mind because of some public argument? Why wrangle about words? Logomachies just make my head hurt. In contrast to this, I want to argue that such a quietist position …
Nothing Worse Than an Analytic Fairy
Yesterday I was having a good discussion on apologetics with my friend Will Little, and the discussion dislodged in me a few thoughts on the subject that I thought would be good to note here. We were talking about presuppositionalism. I think it is crucial for us to distinguish between presuppositionalism as a foundation for …
Heliocentric Worship
In an earlier post, I used the phrase “God-centered,” and there was at least one challenge that concerned what I meant by it. Let me have a quick go at explaining. First, let me note what I do not mean. I do not some form of Stoicism, where we try to pretend that how it …