Bill Dembski

Freedom, Technology, Education

Freedom, Technology, Education
Only the educated are free — Epictetus

Casey Kasem’s Classic American Top 40 Countdown — 1970 to 1988

by


From 1970 to 1988, Casey Kasem (aka Shaggy on Scooby-Doo) hosted a weekly radio countdown program featuring the week’s top 40 songs. It came on Sunday mornings. I was attending a Catholic high school away from home (Portsmouth Abbey in RI; I was from Chicago), and after mass Sunday mornings, we’d have to clean up our dorm, and invariably we’d do it to the sound of Kasem’s top 40 songs.

This is entirely an exercise in nostalgia. The immediate prompt for me listing all these songs on this blog (the lists can be found elsewhere on the internet, though perhaps not as conveniently as on the links here to the Web Archive) is watching the Marvel movies with my college-age kids during this time of pandemic, and finding fun songs from the 70s showing up at unexpected places in these films. So, without further ado, here goes the trip down memory lane:

[Read more…] about Casey Kasem’s Classic American Top 40 Countdown — 1970 to 1988

The Faces of Miracles — Chapter 8

by


Danila Castelli ­and the face of healing shrines

Even though most Americans believe in miracles, only a handful believe that miracles happen more often at a shrine than anywhere else. Eighty-one percent of our survey participants said miracles happen (other polls consistently report 75 percent or more). Yet only 13 percent believed that shrines have special healing power.

Though they seem a world apart from the high-octane faith healers considered earlier in this book, healing shrines face the same challenge of proving their authenticity. How can we know they’re for real? Most miracle claims are dismissed as the result of natural healing processes or other physical changes that would have happened anyway, so that no actual miracle was required.

The effects of asthma and ulcers can vary based on a patient’s psychological state. Arthritis and multiple sclerosis are two of many diseases with symptoms that naturally improve from time to time without any outside medical (or miraculous) intervention.

So how can anyone, even if favorably disposed toward miracles and healing shrines, know for sure that a dramatic improvement or cure was thanks to a pilgrimage to a healing site and not due to natural healing, psychological factors, or some unexpected change that could still be explained in naturalistic terms? [Read more…] about The Faces of Miracles — Chapter 8

The Faces of Miracles — A Serialized eBook by Bill Dembski and Alex Thomas

by


The Faces of Miracles is an eBook written by Bill Dembski and Alex Thomas. It will be presented on this blog, BillDembski.com, over the next five months (November 2019 thru March 2020), with new installments typically appearing every week or every other week.

Table of Contents

0 Introduction [below, posted 11/4/19]
1 Christopher Gunderson: The Face of Documented Medical Miracles [posted 11/11/19]
2 Benny Hinn: The Face of High-Octane Faith Healers [posted 11/27/19]
3 Thurman Scrivner: The Face of Bible Extremism [posted 12/4/2019]
4 Eben Alexander: The Face of Near-Death Experiences [posted 12/15/2019]
5 William Nolen: The Face of Medical Scrutiny [posted 1/6/2020]
6 James Randi: The Face of Expert Skeptics [posted 1/22/2020]
7 André Kole: The Face of Professional Stage Magicians [posted 3/2/2020]
8 Danila Castelli: The Face of Healing Shrines [posted 4/7/2020]
9 Eric Metaxas: The Face of Miracles Next Door
10 Matt Stanford: The Face of Faith-Science Integration
11 Hank Hanegraaff: The Face of Careful Bible Reading
12 Joni Eareckson Tada: The Face of Patient Endurance
13 John MacArthur: The Face of Cessationism
14 Craig Keener: The Face of Overwhelming Evidence
15 C.S. Lewis: The Face of Christian Apologetics
16 Epilogue
A1 Appendix 1: What People Believe
A2 Appendix 2: Miracle Survey
A3 Appendix 3: Hume and Spinoza

***

Introduction

Most books on miracles reach one of three conclusions: Miracles happen. Miracles don’t happen. Miracles can’t happen.

This book takes a different tack. Rather than settle the existence or nonexistence of miracles, we ask why we’re talking about miracles in the first place. Why do we make such a big deal about them? What makes them an endless topic of debate? If miracles do indeed happen, why isn’t the evidence for them more convincing and obvious? If miracles don’t happen, why isn’t their absence equally convincing and obvious?

Miracles are neither like horses nor like unicorns. Horses have made themselves so clearly evident that no one can deny their existence. Unicorns have hidden themselves so well that no one is justified asserting their existence. Miracles occupy a middle ground that gives reasons to think that they exist but also raises doubts to question whether they exist.

Miracles cannot be dismissed as the ravings of an unhinged or uneducated or unscientific fringe. Many normal, feet-on-the-ground, well-informed people believe that they or their loved ones have personally experienced a miracle, that they have good reasons for believing in miracles, and that miracles play an important role in the world.

As just one of countless examples, take Nobel laureate writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s description of his cure from cancer while a prisoner in the Soviet Gulag:

In autumn 1953 it looked very much as though I had only a few months to live. In December the doctors—comrades in exile—confirmed that I had only three weeks left… I did not die, however. With a hopelessly neglected and acutely malignant tumor, this was a divine miracle. I could see no other explanation. Since then, all the life that has been given back to me has not been mine in the full sense: it is built around a purpose. [Solzhenitsyn 1975, pp. 3-4]

Solzhenitsyn lived another fifty-five years. [Read more…] about The Faces of Miracles — A Serialized eBook by Bill Dembski and Alex Thomas

The Passing of Jon Buell

by


I learned with sadness yesterday that my good friend and colleague Jon Buell passed away on Saturday (3/14/20). I had been Jon’s academic editor for The Foundation for Thought and Ethics (FTE), a Dallas publisher of books aimed at un-indoctrinating high school and college students. He hired me in 1997 and I stayed on in that position until my family’s move from Texas to Iowa in 2012.

We didn’t produce a lot of books at FTE, but it was quality work and it articulated without apology a broadly Christian worldview against a materialist biology, a relativist ethics, and a revisionist historicism. In short, FTE served as an antidote to the PC and progressivist culture.

Given how this culture has unfolded and seemingly prospered since FTE’s founding by Jon in 1980, one might be tempted to say that our efforts were unsuccessful. But Jon’s motives were always to be faithful and true, and he measured success in terms of quality of work, not popularity. And we did have a significant impact, as evident among those who used our books with profit and those who virulently opposed them (such as the ACLU and the NCSE).

Jon’s role in the intelligent design movement was seminal. He was the moving force behind the publication of The Mystery of Life’s Origin, which appeared first in 1984 and appeared as a 35th anniversary edition greatly expanded and updated in January of this year. [Read more…] about The Passing of Jon Buell

Conversation about the Primacy of Information for Science

by


Last Thursday, February 27, 2020, my good friend Fred Skiff, chair of the physics department at the University of Iowa, and I discussed themes in my book BEING AS COMMUNION as they relate to the primacy of information for science. The two sponsors of the event were the campus ministries Ratio Christi (thank you James Klopfenstein) and Geneva (thank you Thomas Wolthuis).

Below is a lightly edited version of the conversation, which James Klopfenstein graciously gave me permission to post on YouTube:

The conversation examines why information is the most basic object of study in science and how Conservation of Information naturally leads to the conclusion that intelligence is the ultimate source of information.

Below is the flyer distributed for this event:

The Faces of Miracles — Chapter 7

by


André Kole and the face of professional stage magicians

World-renowned magician, illusionist, and skeptic André Kole believes that the faith healers who promise miracle cures to millions are in the same business he is — magic and illusion. They use the power of suggestion, distraction, sleight-of-hand, and emotional appeal to create the perception of healing when all they’ve done is play tricks on the audience’s senses the same way magicians do. The key difference is that magicians freely admit they’re there to entertain while the healers insist their powers are real and use that false claim to deceive desperate people.

Kole knows all the tools the miracle healers use to create the impression that they’re healing the sick. A key tool is the power of suggestion. In an interview with the authors, Kole explained, “People get caught up in the excitement, the entertainment, the methods used to lead people down that road that what they are witnessing is legitimate and real. Add that to the fact that many of these people are actually healed! But as most doctors will tell you, somewhere between 80 percent and maybe even 90 percent of sickness is psychological. When there is real legitimate organic disease involved, those people are not healed by these fakers, and what may be worse is what they then go through trying to figure out why others were healed and why they were not.”[1] [Read more…] about The Faces of Miracles — Chapter 7