As iron sharpens iron,
one person sharpens another. (Proverbs 27:17)
Most of us are familiar with the distinction between facts and the interpretation of facts. Objective facts are often interpreted based upon the worldview, paradigms, assumptions, culture, and even personality of the interpreter. Facts do not change. Our interpretation of facts may.
“ ‘Finding a galaxy without any [dark matter] is completely unexpected; it challenges standard ideas of how galaxies work,’ Allison Merritt, one of the researchers, said in a statement. A paper describing the discovery appears in the journal Nature.” BPNews
“According to a Jan. 10 article in the journal Science Advances, volunteers for experiments as diverse as intelligence tests and pain sensitivity studies have been found to respond differently when they are dealing with a researcher of the opposite gender.” BPNews
From DBSJ. Read the series. Part 2 continues the Spectrum of Views on Creation begun in Part 1.
Compared to biblical creation views, scientific creationist views expand the role of science in the understanding of creation. The views that fall under this heading are normally connected with a uniformitarian view of earth history that extends billions of years, punctuated by occasional catastrophic events.9 These are old-earth understandings of creation. The scientific views are different in another way from biblical creation: most do not posit a completed creation. The processes of creation (evolution) are ongoing today in most of the following views and therefore there is no “completion” or “cessation” of creation as there is in the biblical creation views.
The day-age view is an old-earth explanation that teaches that the six days of creation were not regular days but rather were a sequence of geological ages, giving time for the several-billion year age of the earth taught by secular science.
“Diagnostic tools that chart the frequency and intensity of tropical cyclones globally and regionally — such as their number and the energy associated with them — show a cyclic pattern to hurricane activity but no long-term trend.” Climate Change and the Christian Faith
Shibuya Mirai is an AI chatbot designed to interact as a seven-year-old boy. Mirai was granted residency status in Tokyo, marking another milestone in the journey to the development of consciousness in machines. Cognitive scientists Dehaene, Lau, and Kouider suggest that “consciousness arises in the only physical system that undoubtedly possesses it: the human brain,”1 and they essentially consider consciousness to be computations, report, and self-monitoring.
Mirai possesses at least computational aspects of consciousness and even personality, and gives occasion for inquiry into whether or not these attributes ultimately require a divine spark, or whether they can be demonstrated simply through natural processes. In short: if humanity can create machines that can fulfill core human functions, perhaps that would be evidence that no supernatural creator is necessary at all.
The pursuit of artificial intelligence is an incredible one, and significantly worthwhile, even if only for different reasons. Mirai’s existential setting illustrates the value of the process, and evidences some vital truths:
“A seemingly ethical new technique for creating stem cells, described in Nature Biotechnologyin September, could be the most promising alternative approach to date.” WORLD
“For the first time, a primitive movie has been encoded in – and then played back from – DNA in living cells.
Readers of Stephen Meyer’s two important books, Signature in the Cell and Darwin’s Doubt, will know the name of Douglas Axe. Axe’s work on probability theory and gene folding feature quite prominently in those works. This book is a compliment to Meyer, but it is also a companion to William Dembski’s books, like The Design Inference and No Free Lunch. I suppose the nearest thing to it is Dembski’s book Intelligent Design.
But Undeniable is not simply a repetition of the type of arguments one will find in those books. In the first place, Axe’s main concern is to provide Joe Public with an assuring and accessible guide on his own ability to detect invention no matter what the Science pundits tell them.
This book tries to get behind the sane intuition all of us have that incredibly complex functionality is not, and can never be, a result of any kind of unguided randomization. It never is, in our day to day experience of living. Only in the imaginings of those who cannot see the difference between a scientific pronouncement and a metaphysical one does the idea gain currency and the power to veto competing ideas.
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