Bill Pratt | January 12, 2011
Post Author: Bill Pratt In the previous post, I explained atheist Dan Barker’s argument in a debate he had with Christian Matt Slick. If you don’t remember what I said, please go back and quickly remind yourself, as this post won’t make sense otherwise. Below I pick up where I left off. What I don’t [...]
Bill Pratt | January 10, 2011
Post Author: Bill Pratt This week I’ve been listening to a debate between Matt Slick (Christian) and Dan Barker (atheist) on whether humans can be good without God. Barker’s argument during the debate struck me as illogical, and here’s why. Barker explained that moral values are merely natural inclinations that are built into human beings [...]
Bill Pratt | December 23, 2010
Post Author: Bill Pratt Many journalists confuse the Intelligent Design (ID) movement with young earth creationism. Some of this confusion is nothing more than intellectual laziness, but some of it is caused by ID opponents repeating the assertion over and over again as a rhetorical strategy. Here is an interview excerpt from Thomas Lessl, a [...]
Bill Pratt | November 19, 2010
Post Author: Bill Pratt One of the most common arguments you will hear that Darwinian evolution must be true is the “Junk DNA” argument. It goes like this: There are significant stretches of the human genome that appear not to code for any biological function. This is what you would expect if millions of years [...]
Bill Pratt | November 8, 2010
Post Author: Bill Pratt I just finished reading a book called Evolution by Donald Prothero, a paleontologist. The book’s main purpose is to chronicle the fossil evidence for the evolution of animal life. Prothero, as an expert in this field, seems to do a reasonable job of this throughout the book, although every tenth sentence [...]
Bill Pratt | October 29, 2010
Post Author: Bill Pratt A recurring misunderstanding I have seen in the intelligent design (ID) debate is the ignorance that many on the anti-ID side have of historical science. So, what is historical science and how is it different from the sciences which study currently operating phenomena? Philosopher of science Stephen Meyer lists four criteria [...]
Bill Pratt | July 17, 2010
Post Author: Bill Pratt I’ve been reading Donald Prothero’s book Evolution, which is a book meant to show how powerful the evidence for evolution is. Prothero, a professor of geology, certainly seems to know a lot about fossils, but he seems to know remarkably little about intelligent design (ID), a theory he maligns early in [...]
Bill Pratt | July 1, 2010
Post Author: Bill Pratt You may recall that in January of this year, we posted about the California Science Center, a public institution, reneging on the screening of a pro-intelligent design (ID) movie. The Discovery Institute, a pro-ID organization, filed a lawsuit when the Science Center refused to turn over all documents related to the [...]
Bill Pratt | June 24, 2010
Post Author: Bill Pratt Christians believe that a supernatural being can be reasoned to by working backward from effect to cause. We observe ourselves and we observe the world around us (those are the effects) and we reason that a supernatural cause is the best explanation for the things we observe. This is how almost [...]
Bill Pratt | April 19, 2010
Post Author: Bill Pratt Continuing from part 1, below are 5 more reasons you should doubt a scientific consensus, taken from Jay Richards’ article on the topic. 8. When the subject matter seems, by its nature, to resist consensus. An an engineer, this point has always bothered me about both evolution and climate change. Richards [...]
