Michel Henry: True Life and Biological Life

If you’ve been following my blogs on Henry, you know that he is concerned with phenomenality and that he posits two basic types of phenomenological truth – the outward truth, which manifests or appears by being thrown outside of us (separated from the perceiver), and the inward truth, which manifests through immanence. Now we want to turn our attention to a particular truth, True Life. I’ve thought about how best to convey that concept, and... Read more

The Language and Translation of the Codon

Douglas Hofstadter, in his book, “Metamagical Themas – Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern” gives a wonderful description of how the language of the DNA molecule is translated by the RNA into proteins. It’s important to understand the language and the process, because if any evidence of Intelligent Design is to be found, it will be within the language and its interpretation. So I will attempt to summarize Hofstadter’s article here.... Read more

God of the Gaps, Part III: Hox Genes Not the End of the Story

In my blog God of the Gaps, Part II, I compared the hyraoctherium with its closest descendent, the Orohippus. My point was to describe the differences and ask if there was sufficient time between the appearances of the two versions of the horse to allow for their development by random mutation. The differences I listed were 1) the disappearance of vestiges of toes; 2) increase of crests in teeth, creating molars and 3) longer legs. Any answer to the... Read more

Intelligent Design Must Provide More Than ‘God of the Gaps’

I’ve read enough now about Intelligent Design now to see that the arguments for complexity are compelling. Behe describes organic mechanisms so complex that it is very hard to see how they could have randomly evolved. And indeed, science hasn’t worked out an answer, either. I.D. theorists say they never will; evolution scientists say it’s just a matter of time. But, is this all that I.D. is able to do – say that here we have a very complex... Read more

God of the Gaps, Part II

Several weeks ago here, I suggested that I.D. must do three things in order to overcome the perception that it is nothing more than an appeal to some unknown unexplained power when encountering the unexplainable: Given a species and its closest descendent which is at the same time supposedly a “transitional species”, provide a description of the biological differences and the time span between the two life forms. Demonstrate that this time is... Read more