February 2009

If you got a bit of birthday money, Ben Wiker’s 10 Books That Screwed Up the World: and 5 Others That Didn’t Help would be a good use of your dimes.

Wiker, senior fellow at St. Paul Center for Biblical Theology, is also the author of Moral Darwinism: How We Became Hedonists.

Wiker makes clear that he is not saying that the books he criticizes should be censored, still less that you shouldn’t read them. He encourages us all to read them – critically appreciating the fundamental defects, warps, and wrongness of the ideas. These ideas underlie and help to explain many disorders of popular culture today. Unfortunately, however, they are usually treated with sanctified solemnity in hushed lecture halls, presided over by establishment figures who may be alarmed by criticism.

For example, we often hear people say “If it feels good, do it!”, “Feelings matter way more than facts,” or “He can’t help doing that, it’s his genes/hormones/upbringing/society.” One aspect of fixing the problem is exploring the origin of such ideas and asking people to think critically about them.

It is amazing how many of these key works relate to the intelligent design controversy.

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FAQ1 has been revised in response to comments.  The floor is now open on FAQ2 2] No Real Scientists Take Intelligent Design Seriously Yes, they do. For simple instance, in telecommunications work, we start by distinguishing the intelligent signal from the naturally occurring noise that tends to garble it. Indeed, simply by reading this web page, you implicitly recognize that a sense-making message is far more likely to be the result of deliberate action, not noise. But, strictly speaking, it is physically possible – though vastly improbable — for this page to be the result of noise garbling and mimicking signals. In short, you are using a simple form of The Explanatory Filter used by Design Theorists to discriminate chance Read More ›

Some of you may find interesting a couple of articles in the latest issue of Spontaneous Generations, a peer-reviewed journal founded and run by graduate students at the Institute for History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Toronto.   One article documents the activities of a philosopher of science in the American South who teaches the next generation of teachers who will have to deal with evolution/creation/ID in the classroom. It’s quite a thoughtful piece and well worth a read.   The other article is a piece I was asked to write in response but which turned out to be a stand-alone piece that attempts to justify my participation in these matters (since this is a question that arises Read More ›

brainz.org/15-coolest-cases-biomimicry

Andrew Halloway offers his review of David Attenborough’s recent BBC1 prime time documentary ‘Charles Darwin and the Tree of Life’ highlighting the out of date material and poor reasoning. Andrew comments ‘I’m astonished that the BBC still included this [material about the Tree of Life], and what’s more made it the title of the programme, considering that only last month the country’s leading scientific journal, New Scientist, carried a major article called “Why Darwin was wrong about the Tree of Life” (21 January). The article clearly stated that there is “no evidence at all” for the Tree of Life, and this was even backed up by the editorial of the journal, despite the fact that the New Scientist is known Read More ›

Today there was a great article in the OU Daily about the controversy surrounding the Darwin 2009 Project at OU. Not only were all parties fairly represented (at least as best as I could tell), but they even got the definition of ID right!

[google 14997924975209807 nolink] Google Link

Kirk Durston‘s Thoughts on Intelligent Design

In this thread, I would like to lay out my own thinking regarding a method to detect or identify examples of intelligent design. I then would like to unpack my thinking in a slow, meticulous (pedantic perhaps?) way and, if we can get that far, apply it to a few examples, including a protein, and the minimal genome. Read More ›

According to a Theos report, highlighted in the UK’s Telegraph, “More than half of the public believe that the theory of evolution cannot explain the full complexity of life on Earth, and a “designer” must have lent a hand, the findings suggest.” Rather amusingly, Richard Dawkins thinks it acceptable to insult half the population expressing “dismay at the findings of the ComRes survey, of 2,060 adults, which he claimed were confirmation that much of the population is “pig-ignorant” about science” ‘Pig Ignorant’ over Darwin . Adam Rutherford follows Dawkins into use of insulting language to describe his fellow human beings. Rutherford’s response  – “Another day, another creationism survey. Godly thinktank Theos have conjured yet another set of figures that reveal just how dim Britain Read More ›

Judge Jones, whose distinction prior to the Dover case was running the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board, now has multiple honorary doctorates for rendering his decision, which he cribbed from the ACLU’s Proposed Findings of Fact and Conclusions of Law. Ben Stein, who is an acclaimed actor, author, and economist, on the other hand, has just been denied an honorary doctorate at the University of Vermont: “This is not, to my mind, an issue about academic freedom or the openness of the campus to all points of view. Ben Stein spoke here last spring to great acclaim,” UVM President Dan Fogel said. “It’s an issue about the appropriateness of awarding an honorary degree to someone whose views in many ways ignore Read More ›

1] ID is “not science” On the contrary, as Dr William Dembski, a leading Intelligent Design researcher, has aptly defined: “Intelligent Design is . . . . a scientific investigation into how patterns exhibited by finite arrangements of matter can signify intelligence.” In turn, science at its best is an unfettered (but ethically and intellectually responsible) progressive search for the truth about our world; based on empirical evidence and reasoned analysis. If instead one assumes or asserts the prior constraint that scientific explanations must be “naturalistic” or even — as Lewontin openly said – “materialistic,” that mistakenly imposes materialistic conclusions before the facts can speak. This blatantly begs the question, but such a blunder is now all too common; even Read More ›

When critics of ID try to define it out of existence by calling it religion or pseudoscience, it’s worth remembering that to this day scientists and philosophers have yet to settle on what is science and what isn’t. Critics who try to use such “demarcation” arguments against ID invariably end up excluding not only ID but also other things that they would like to count as science. Steve Meyer has written cogently on this very point. These articles by him have been out for a while, but they are well worth reviewing periodically: www.discovery.org/a/2834 www.discovery.org/a/3524 www.discovery.org/a/1696

… it’s because we didn’t take advantage of the incredible resources available to us:

Anthony Sacramone on how NDE works. BTW, Strange Herring is one of my daily stops. Fun and wise, a rare combination.