Paul Nelson will be giving a seminar on ID at the Autonomous University of Guadalajara (UAG) on Friday the 18th of this month:

This website was down for a while and is now back up: http://www.biola.edu/id.

The Epicurean trilemma (see Hume’s Dialogues) tries to reconcile: (1) God is good, (2) God is all-powerful, (3) Evil exists. Ian Bibby just sent me this Darwinian trilemma: Science cannot test the proposition that biological features are designed. Darwinism explains the appearance of design in biology not as actual design but as the product of natural selection and random variation. Darwinism is science.

As you read this riff on Kuhn, ask yourself why ID should or shouldn’t fit into this characterization of the scientific enterprise: http://www.the-scientist.com/2005/11/7/10/1.

The first mention of the Vise Strategy appeared on this blog here. I devised the Vise Strategy to aid the Thomas More Law Center in interrogating the ACLU’s expert witnesses in the Dover Trial. Since all witnesses in that trial have now been called (all that remains is for Judge Jones to render his verdict), I am making available the full-blown Vise Strategy here.

[As one of my colleagues has put it:] “The Grantsburg school board deserves congratulations. Finally, a local school district has adopted the kind of policy we’ve all been recommending for so long. This policy appears to be bullet-proof from a legal perspective. It will be interesting to see how the ACLU/NCSE/Americans United crowd will respond to this policy. It will also be interesting to see how –or if– the legacy media will cover this victory for quality science education.”

‘Teaching the controversy’ in Wisconsin
By Lawrence Hardy
http://www.asbj.com

It will be deer season soon in Northern Wisconsin.

Winter will come, the nights will grow long, and the ice-fishing shacks will appear like matchboxes on the frozen glacial lakes.

The forests that teem with wildlife — sandhill cranes and eagles, grouse and ospreys, thousands of ducks and geese — will seem quieter now that the brief summer is over.

But in the town of Grantsburg, five miles from the winding St. Croix River and the Minnesota border, the turmoil isn’t over, even though school officials say they very much want it to be.

“It’s done. I don’t have anything more to say,” says Cindy Jensen, a board member for the 1,000-student Grantsburg Schools. “Hopefully, the waters are calmer now.”

It’s been almost a year since the school board approved a curriculum that will require science teachers to ask students to think critically about evolution — to “teach the controversy,” as the board puts it. Read More ›

http://www.arn.org/mm/mm_movies.htm

Green Gray Areas — Books that question the conventional wisdom on the environment.

BY MICHAEL CRICHTON
Saturday, October 29, 2005 Read More ›

My political views seem to be a matter for discussion at the Panda’s Thumb (go here). In line with their discussion, let me offer the following 1907 quote by Theodore Roosevelt: Theodore Roosevelt on Immigrants and being an AMERICAN “In the first place we should insist that if the immigrant who comes here in good faith becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed, or birthplace, or origin. But this is predicated upon the man’s becoming in very fact an American, and nothing but an American…There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who Read More ›

http://www.idthefuture.com/2005/11/testifying_in_dover_trial_was.html

[Excerpt:] Religions continue both to render their special services and to exact their heavy costs. Can scientific humanism do as well or better, at a lower cost? Surely that ranks as one of the great unanswered questions of philosophy. It is the noble yet troubling legacy that Charles Darwin left us. [For complete article, go here.]

http://www.dc-connect.org/s/117/index.aspx?pgid=13&cid=97&sid=117&gid=1&event_id=77

Visit http://www.mutationengineer.homechoice.co.uk and you will see how a simple molecule could dramatically accelerate evolution in a way which might allow design without intelligence.

Fuel’s paradise? Power source that turns physics on its head · Scientist says device disproves quantum theory · Opponents claim idea is result of wrong maths Alok Jha, science correspondent Friday November 4, 2005 The Guardian It seems too good to be true: a new source of near-limitless power that costs virtually nothing, uses tiny amounts of water as its fuel and produces next to no waste. If that does not sound radical enough, how about this: the principle behind the source turns modern physics on its head. http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/story/0,3605,1627424,00.html