Keith Paterson, a fellow Torontonian, who reminds me that we met at the local lit fest The Word on the Street, writes to say,

Being familiar with your blogs, it seems that you are, like myself a science fiction fan. So I thought you might be interested to hear how ID concepts are finding their way into popular entertainment.

This week I saw the new remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still. Now I am a big fan of the original 1951 version and I own it on DVD. Read More ›

The UK’s Sunday Times has an interesting article about the forthcoming Darwin Day celebrations, taking a thoughtful angle compared to some of the Darwin hysteria seen in some of the programming from the BBC For God’s sake, have Charles Darwin’s theories made any difference to our lives? – It is the bicentenary of Charles Darwin’s birth but creationists and scientists alike may spoil the party

A number of interesting points come out of this article by Bryan Appleyard. Dr James Le Fanu has a new book out Why Us? How Science Rediscovered the Mystery of Ourselves. Le Fanu is a journalist and medical doctor and is reported in the Sunday Times as saying that “new biological discoveries have overthrown Darwin. The old man is “screwed”, he says gruffly.” Read More ›

I’m finishing a book on theodicy (titled THE END OF CHRISTIANITY) and, in trying to track down for it whether certain celebrities are atheists, found this site: www.celebatheists.com

A recent multidisciplinary study on the two-phase increase in the size of life has concluded that there must exist a “preexisting evolutionary potential” to explain the sudden increase in size and complexity which occurred twice in the history of life, both times following increases in atmospheric oxygen.

From the earliest bacteria to the largest organisms, there has been a 16 orders of magnitude increase in size. Far from the gradual progression over much time which one would expect from a Darwinian explanation, however, this increase was not incremental, but occurred in two very large steps, involving about a million times increase in size over very brief periods of time.

And things didn’t just get bigger, but much more complex as well:

Each size step required a major innovation in organismal complexity—first the eukaryotic cell and later eukaryotic multicellularity.

The investigators conclusion? There must have been a “preexisting evolutionary potential” to account for the rapid changes:
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I have been reflecting on the critical responses to my posts, which I appreciate. They mostly centre on the very need for ID to include theodicy as part of its intellectual orientation.

The intuitive basis for theodicy is pretty harmless: The presence of design implies a designing intelligence. Moreover, in order to make sense of the exact nature of the design, you need to make hypotheses about the designing intelligence. These hypotheses need to be tested and may or may not be confirmed in the course of further inquiry. Historians and archaeologists reason this way all the time. However, the theodicist applies the argument to nature itself.

At that point, theodicy binds science and theology together inextricably — with potentially explosive consequences. After all, if you take theodicy seriously, you may find yourself saying, once you learn more about the character of nature’s design, that science disconfirms certain accounts of God – but not others. Scientific and religious beliefs rise and fall together because, in the end, they are all about the same reality.

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As you’re reading this keep in mind it’s all due to a random dance of atoms. No design here. Matter, chance, and POOF it’s alive. Yeah right. From Science Daily The Ribosome: Perfectionist Protein-maker Trashes Errors ScienceDaily (Jan. 9, 2009) — The enzyme machine that translates a cell’s DNA code into the proteins of life is nothing if not an editorial perfectionist. Johns Hopkins researchers, reporting in the journal Nature January 7, have discovered a new “proofreading step” during which the suite of translational tools called the ribosome recognizes errors, just after making them, and definitively responds by hitting its version of a “delete” button. It turns out, the Johns Hopkins researchers say, that the ribosome exerts far tighter quality Read More ›

I’ve been thinking about the God of the Gaps argument today.  Proponents of naturalism (of both the philosophical and methodological stripe) use this argument in an attempt to discredit design theory as a means of explaining the physical world.  The argument usually goes something like this:  There are many things we formerly did not understand, such as the law of gravitation.  We might have been content to sit back and say “We don’t understand gravitation and we never will; God must have done it so there is no sense in inquiring further.”  But we were not content to rest in our ignorance, and scientists like Newton kept at it until they discovered the law of gravity.  There only seemed to be a gap that we needed to fill with God.  Similarly today, we can be assured that science will eventually fill in the remaining gaps of our scientific knowledge.  Thus, there is never a need to resort to “God did it” as an explanation for any phenomenon.  Read More ›

The Demiurge appears in Plato’s Timaeus as a human craftsman ([correction]demos = common people; ergo = work; hence a human craftsman). But it is interesting to note what David Hume does to the demiurge. Hume in Dialogues, through his character Philo, attacks the notion that there might be an analogy between the designer of nature and human intelligence. However, in section VII, Philo calls for a belief in copulation and generation from Hesiod’s Theogeny and Plato’s Timaeus. In other words, Hume quotes the Timaeus, in which the demiurge appears, to attack the idea that there is an analogy to human intelligence from design in nature – an apparent contradiction. David Sedley comments in Creationism and its critics in Antiquity that the demiurge should be interpreted metaphorically and gives the game away – as does Erasmus Darwin in Zoonomia. Read More ›

 I will be opening the 2009 series of lectures on ‘Darwin Reconsidered’ at the Oxford Centre for Christianity and Culture on Tuesday, 20th January, at 5 pm. My topic is ‘Darwin’s Original Sin: The Rejection of Theology’s Claims to Knowledge’. You can find out more about the series here. The talk will deal with the issues of theodicy that I have been raising in this blog.  

In this instalment, I try to make the connection between theodicy and ID tighter, not only to provide some deeper intellectual grounding but also to make quite plain why even religious people have not been rushing to support ID.

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This just in from RichardDawkins.net: Today, thanks to many Cif readers, the overall total raised for the Atheist Bus Campaign stands at a truly overwhelming £135,000, breaking our original target of £5,500 by over 2400%. Given this unexpected amount, I’m very excited to tell you that 800 buses – instead of the 30 we were initially aiming for – are now rolling out across the UK with the slogan, “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life”, in locations all over England, Scotland and Wales, including Manchester, Edinburgh, Glasgow, York, Cardiff, Devon, Leeds, Bristol and Aberdeen. Three questions: (1) What exactly is the probability that there is no God? (2) In times past the state was concerned Read More ›

Some of you may know that last year I staged a play at the annual British Association for the Advancement of Science meeting, which brought back Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin – who were both born on 12th February 1809 — to reflect on what has taken place since their time. Denyse O’Leary kindly mentioned the play here. It takes the form of a talk show, with all the show biz that entails. At the end Lincoln and Darwin were asked whether they wished to stay in the present or return to the 19th century. One stays and the other goes – but which does which?   The play’s running time is 80 minutes and it covers a host of issues common Read More ›

The BBC is getting excited about Darwin’s 200th birthday with a whole series of programmes on Darwin and evolution. Although a national broadcaster, there doesn’t seem much attempt at balance, preferring for instance to talk about creationists rather than talk to creationists (again – intelligent design is lumped in with creationism). This was the case with the Beyond Belief programme broadcast last night on BBC radio 4 (5th Jan 2009 16:30pm) Beyond Belief in which three Darwinists were brought on from Judaism, Islam and Christianity to tell us what they think creationists and intelligent design supporters believe. Alister McGrath spoke for the Christian faith, informing us that Protestant Christian creationists were in a sort of holy huddle mentality afraid of Read More ›

In case anyone cares, this item generated a dramatic uproar among third- and fourth-rate Darwinist tax burdens because – following a usual practice of file management, I had cross-posted it at the Post-Darwinist. Assuming any reasonable person cares, here it is.

I inserted into that post the following message, which should also do for this post, and justfor the record, really:

Note: This post appears to be exceedingly popular and I want to thank all the generous new donors to my PayPal button. Also, this post has garnered a large amount of attention (assuming site meter stats are accurate) and I am astonished at the number of third- and fourth-rate tax burdens who have written privately, proclaiming their faith in propositions like the Big Bazooms theory of human evolution. No wonder our economy is in the tank, and a thorough housecleaning is needed. I had no idea how bad it all was – but then I have usually had the privilege of working with productive, intelligent, and interesting people. Wow. I have always had the highest respect for my friends and colleagues, but I had no idea how lucky I have been, compared with the current Deleted Items box, mostly from Darwin’s Faithful.)

In “Darwin’s “dangerous idea: Top ten evolution articles,” the inimitable New Scientist advises us,

Scientists continue to respond to the latest attacks from creationists, and at the same time propose profound new ideas about evolution. This year has seen perceptions of the virus change from disease-causing villain to evolutionary hero, and the emergence of a new force of evolution – the absence of natural selection.

In other words, this year has seen the emergence of even more aggressive attempts to just plain make stuff up.

Put another way, everyone except the Darwinists has long since observed “the absence of natural selection.” It’s the presence of natural selection – as a source of new species – that we look for in vain.

A couple of years ago, after I had been following the controversy for several years, I found myself listening to a long lecture by a Darwinist, replete with bafflegab and pretty lame examples. Finally, sensing (correctly) that I was unconvinced, he proclaimed to me, “You just don’t understand how natural selection works, do you?”

And suddenly, the penny dropped. What he meant was that I just don’t believe in magic. I can’t make myself believe in magic; I haven’t been able to since I was a child. And I was no longer going to give the matter any attention. What I really wanted to know then and now is  – how magic became so important a principle in science? And I think I know of at least one reason.

Looking over New Scientist’s top ten evolution articles, I am struck by how paltry it all looks, how inadequate to the matter to be explained. I can’t believe that they are still fronting the peppered moth, for example, but they are, and under the windy title, “reclaiming the peppered moth for science.” (= In order to qualify as “science,” the moth must be reinstated as the notorious “peppered myth.”)

Who ever doubted that dark coloured moths might have a selective advantage over their light coloured kin in a polluted environment? The key problem, of course, was that, as Judith Hooper showed in Of Moths and Men, experimenter Kettlewell interfered with the moths’ normal behaviour during his research. So, while the legend blossomed in textbooks and popular science presentations, the very minor fact of a change in population frequencies between the two variants that Kettlewell was attempting to demonstrate may never actually have occurred. And if it did occur, it was soon reversed by widespread industrial cleanup. In other words, to the extent that natural selection does occur, it is apparently easily reversed.

The fact that so many people have put so much energy into defending the peppered myth merely shows how important the popular science myth of “evolution” is to their world view. Following the story, I learned far more about them than about moths.

So now, as to why the magic of Darwinism is so important to some people: Read More ›