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TagDarwin

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Half dome, Yosemite, California

Materialism Can’t Account for Beauty

Concepts like truth, beauty, and goodness can't be derived from the material world

Is the world a good place? Is truth relative? Can beauty be defined? On a classic episode of ID the Future, host David Klinghoffer speaks with biologist Dr. Ann Gauger, a Senior Fellow with Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture, about her article “The Transcendental Treasury of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness” for Evolution News.  These abstract concepts don’t derive from the material world, yet we feel impoverished without them; they’re foundations of a life worth living. Truth, says Klinghoffer, has fallen on hard times these days. Gauger calls truth a correspondence with reality and says we must have it to thrive. “Truth is essential for our lives,” says Gauger. “We can’t function in a society that isn’t based on truths. It’s Read More ›

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Conceptual art, concept of problem mind psychology freedom and solution, surreal painting,  jigsaw puzzle on human head.

Kenneth Miller on Consciousness and Evolution

Despite Miller's claims, neither human reason nor free will evolved because neither are generated by material processes

Kenneth Miller is a biologist at Brown University who has been very active in his written and vocal support for Darwin’s theory of evolution. He’s neither a materialist nor an atheist – he is a Catholic, and in being one of the rare Darwinists who doesn’t subscribe wholeheartedly to the materialist/atheist paradigm, he allows himself to be used as a token theist by the Darwinists. It helps his career, no doubt, but doesn’t advance the truth. Not an admirable place to be. Miller’s New Book and What it Misses In his 2018 book The Human Instinct: How We Evolved To Have Reason, Consciousness, and Free Will, Miller manages a feat uncommon even for Darwinists – even the title of the Read More ›

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Eugenics, Transhumanism, and Artificial Intelligence

If we were to succeed at creating an ethical decision-making AI, whose ethics would it abide by?

In his article for the Digital Journal, Saratendu Sethi argues that to build a sustainable global supply chain requires the humanization of AI. This technological revolution, he says, includes “truly autonomous and self-correcting supply chains” that will replace the flawed capital-driven decision making of humans. Sethi defines this utilitarian mission of serving the “greater good” through what he calls a “sustainable, ethical and responsible world that puts equity for all at the center.” His motive of helping everyone while protecting the environment is commendable, yet the larger question remains, whose ethic will drive the logic used by this AI? When resources are limited, how will this AI decide who gets food and who gets medicine? Based on my own study, Sethi’s Read More ›