2007

The Baylor President, Provost, Dean of Engineering, and Baylor legal counsel need to get their story straight:

Not so fast: Baylor’s treatment of an ID-advancing research lab has shifted from friendly to fire | Mark Bergin
WORLD Magazine, September 15, 2007, Vol. 22, No. 33
http://www.worldmag.com/articles/13312

Last month, as John Gilmore flew home from Waco, Texas, after apparently resolving a dispute at Baylor University over a faculty member’s website supporting intelligent design, the Minnesota attorney sipped a glass of wine, looked out the window, and wondered to himself, “Was this too easy?” Read More ›

For Immediate Release Sept. 6 Press Contact: Anika Smith (206) 292-0401 x155 asmith@discovery.org Baylor University Denies Research Scientists’ Academic Freedom “Baylor University has proven yet again that academic freedom has been thrown off campus and academic persecution is now the norm,” said Discovery Institute’s Casey Luskin in reaction to Baylor University’s deletion of a professor’s research website that focused on evolutionary systems and informatics. “It is simply unconscionable that a major university would so trample a scientist’s right to freedom of scientific inquiry,” Baylor University has taken offline the Evolutionary Informatics Laboratory website that had been administered by Robert Marks, Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Baylor, because the administration claimed there were anonymous complaints linking the lab Read More ›

Edward Rubin again finds hard evidence supporting a front loaded evolution. Front loading is a design engineering term generally used to describe design elements inserted for possible use in the future (contingency) as opposed to immediate use. The mechanism of random mutation and natural selection is incapable of contingency planning. RM+NS can build based on experience but can’t build based on an abstract future. It is reactive not proactive. The front loading hypothesis in essence says the complex specified information necessary to construct the more complex machinery of life has been around since life appeared on the earth but much of it was preserved for expression in the far distant future. Natural selection cannot preserve unexpressed information for long against Read More ›

Oxford historian Alister McGrath, author of Twilight of Atheism and formerly an atheist himself, reflects on his debates with Richard Dawkins, who seems to have retired from his science career to bash religion. Simpleminded? I am disappointed. I would have expected an Oxford professor to use a much more careful, scholarly approach, always trying to see an opponent at his best, and not using simplistic generalizations. I can entirely understand why Michael Ruse and many other atheists are embarrassed by The God Delusion. What concerns me most, however, is what this book shows us about today’s atheism. I think this book is being read primarily by atheists who want to bolster their faith, when all around them God is being Read More ›

Three cheers for an editor with courage: “Editor: Lebanon Daily News In the words of the brilliant investigative-journalist and four-time Gold Medallion winner, Lee Strobel, “My road to atheism was paved by science … but, ironically science became my later journey to God.” The public needs enlightenment on the truth of intelligent design as increasing numbers of the world’s greatest scientists are yielding to the compelling and mounting evidence of this burgeoning movement. In recent years the erroneous teaching of Darwinism and life by random chance is becoming unraveled and exposing itself for what it really is: a bankrupt philosophy masquerading as a science with the aid of fake fossil mills loose in the world. . . . Full article Read More ›

In her remarks to the Baptist Press, Lori Fogleman (well beloved Baylor sports personality who regularly comments on “Inside Baylor Sports” for the Lady Bears) offers the following argument against allowing Robert Marks’s Evolutionary Informatics Lab to continue at Baylor: Lori Fogleman, director of media communications at Baylor, told Baptist Press Sept. 5 that the school’s objection to the website involves standards by which something can or cannot attach its name to Baylor. “This isn’t about the content of the website. Really the issue is related to Baylor’s policies and procedures of approving centers, institutes, products using the university’s name,” Fogleman said. “Baylor reserves the exclusive right to the use of its own name, and we’re pretty jealous in the Read More ›

I.D. rift hits Baylor again
http://www.bpnews.org/BPnews.asp?ID=26372

Posted on Sep 5, 2007 | by Erin Roach

WACO, Texas (BP)–Baylor University officials ordered the shutdown of a personal website of one of a handful of the school’s distinguished professors because of anonymous concerns that the site, hosted on the university’s server, supported Intelligent Design.

Robert Marks, distinguished professor of electrical and computer engineering at Baylor, launched a website called the Evolutionary Informatics Lab in June to examine whether Darwinian processes like random mutation and natural selection can generate new information.

Marks’ conclusions, as explained on the website, placed limits on the scope of Darwinism and offered scientific support for Intelligent Design.

In July, a podcast interview with Marks appeared on a website run by the pro-ID the Discovery Institute, and a week later Benjamin Kelley, dean of engineering at Baylor, told Marks to remove the Evolutionary Informatics website immediately.

“This is a big story, perhaps the biggest story yet of academic suppression relating to ID,” William Dembski, a research professor in philosophy at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, told Baptist Press.

Read More ›

Here’s a podcast interview where I reveal key secrets of the evil conspiracies I am part of, while discussing The Spiritual Brain . I also Wedge “the Edge“, and explain why I don’t drink coffee while reading materialist interpretations of spirituality – because choking with laughter while drinking coffee is, like, a bitter experience. I take mine without sugar. Also: Should tenure disappear?, The Scientist asks ID friendly TV pastor dead at 76. Why you will more likely succeed if you are easy to indoctrinate How things change in science Research stuff, resources, or fun that somebody threw over the transom

Once again I direct our readers to First Things.  This time Amanda Shaw discusses how imaginary numbers, once rejected as “Impossible, irrational, delusionary, absurd, untrustworthy, fictitious, imaginary,” are now a staple of everyday math.  See http://www.firstthings.com/ Is there an analogy to ID here?  The fact that imaginary numbers were not part of the math “system” did not mean they were not out there waiting to be used by those who were willing to look beyond the blinders of the existing paradigm.  Now, as has been argued at this site before, ID can be fit within the existing scientific paradigm; but even if this were not the case, the point is should we cling to a limiting paradigm that prevents us Read More ›

“In science, parsimony is preference for the least complex explanation for an observation. This is generally regarded as good when judging hypotheses. Occam’s razor also states the ‘principle of parsimony.’”  See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parsimony In the post below (“Multiverse of the Gaps”), I point to a recent paper in which a Darwinist attempts to get around the extremely small probability (less than 1 in 10 raised to the negative 1,018) of life emerging by chance by invoking an infinite “multiverse.”  The question for the class today is which is the most parsimonious hypothesis:  One designer or infinite universes?

Chronicle of Higher Education, Tuesday, September 4, 2007 chronicle.com/daily/2007/09/2007090406n.htm Baylor U. Removes a Web Page Associated With Intelligent Design From Its Site By ELIZABETH F. FARRELL Another controversy over the study of intelligent design is brewing at Baylor University. Officials at the institution, in Waco, Tex., have removed from the university’s Web site a personal Web page created by Robert J. Marks II, a professor of engineering, that outlined his work in an “evolutionary informatics” laboratory. A lawyer representing Mr. Marks said Baylor’s actions amount to viewpoint discrimination and a suppression of his client’s academic freedom. A mirror site of the laboratory’s Web page describes evolutionary informatics as merging the theories of evolution and information, and “investigating how information makes Read More ›

“Never shrinking from controversy, and sometimes deliberately provoking it, this book serves as a lively introduction to a field where neuroscience, philosophy, and secular/spiritual cultural wars are unavoidably intermingled.” — Publishers Weekly

The belief that the mind does not exist apart from the brain dominated the twentieth century. But can we really dismiss our thoughts and feelings, or furthermore, our religious and spiritual experiences, as simply outcomes of the firing synapses of our brain? In THE SPIRITUAL BRAIN, authors Dr. Mario Beauregard and Denyse O’Leary present the groundbreaking evidence that the mind cannot be simply reduced to physiological reactions in the brain. Read More ›

Irony again.  I love it.  How many times have ID proponents been accused of resorting to the “God of the gaps” to explain the hard questions? For years Darwinists have said, essentially, “yes, the questions are hard, but we’re working on them and the answer is just around the corner.  No need to invoke design, especially if you believe God may have been the designer.”  (O’Leary’s “promissory materialism”) Now the Darwinists appear to be giving up and invoking a gap filler of their own.  I call it the “multiverse of the gaps.”  This article is an example:  http://www.biology-direct.com/content/2/1/15 The author, an avowed Darwinist, gives up on Darwin to ever explain the origin of life.  He admits: “to attain the minimal complexity Read More ›

On Thursday (12.07.06) I learned it was definite that Baylor University was revoking a postdoctoral fellowship that I held in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Last month (11.06) I was appointed as Senior Research Scientist in that department to work on a project in information theory with Prof. Robert Marks. That project was funded through a grant that he procured specifically for me to work with him. Here are the facts: Read More ›

I mentioned My retreat from public view, but I have a few loose ends to tie up.