Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

An Eye For An ‘I’: Fighting The Twisted Fables Of The Anti-ID Lobby

Review Of Intelligent Design 101: Leading Experts Explain The Key Issues
ISBN 978-0-8254-2781-7

The debate over whether or not our universe was designed with a purpose is one that centers not around philosophical questions but over “competing scientific explanations of the data”. That is the central argument expounded by Phillip Johnson in Intelligent Design 101, a book that aims to bring into sharp focus the central tenets of the intelligent design (ID) movement. Contrary to a popular misconception, the modern day controversy over design in biology is not one that arose from some push to force Judeo-Christian beliefs into the science classroom. It is instead one that extends back thousands of years to the time of Plato and Xenophon in ancient Greece.

Today the educational literature defines all aspects of biology in purely naturalistic terms. What is more, evolution has become the “monolithic fact” that we must all embrace. Even though there is incontrovertible evidence that defies such a factual status, evolutionists have bent over backwards to make naturalism fill in the glaring inconsistencies in the data. As a vociferous opponent of the macro-evolutionary aspects of Darwinism, Johnson has attempted a “divide and conquer” approach to break such a stronghold. By separating philosophical naturalists such as Richard Dawkins from scientists with a sound objective outlook, Johnson’s much-publicized Wedge Strategy has sought to prize neo-Darwinism away from its “pedestal of philosophical naturalism”. Attacks on Johnson’s initiative have focused on the religious backgrounds of its supporters rather than on the sound scientific arguments that they put forward. Still, as Johnson remarks those who today maintain that ID is all about religion ignore the counter claim that the theory of evolution is not exactly all about science. Read More ›

Another Day, Another Embarrassment for the IPCC

The United Nations’ expert panel on climate change based claims about ice disappearing from the world’s mountain tops on a student’s dissertation and an article in a mountaineering magazine. The revelation will cause fresh embarrassment for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which had to issue a humiliating apology earlier this month over inaccurate statements about global warming. The IPCC’s remit is to provide an authoritative assessment of scientific evidence on climate change. In its most recent report, it stated that observed reductions in mountain ice in the Andes, Alps and Africa was being caused by global warming, citing two papers as the source of the information. However, it can be revealed that one of the sources quoted was Read More ›

New book “In the Beginning…”

My new book, “In the Beginning and Other Essays on Intelligent Design” has just been released by Discovery Institute Press and is available here. The book is described as “wide-ranging” on the back cover, because it has chapters on the big bang, the fine-tuning of the laws of physics, and quantum mechanics, as well as the evolution-design debate, and it does outline most of the usual arguments for design. However, no doubt my most “original” contribution to the origins debate—perhaps my only original contribution—is outlined in a video here. Well, this material is not new to anyone who has followed my posts here, but it will be new to most everyone else. The video has improved somewhat since the last Read More ›

Reverend Jerry Coyne Thus Saith

At the First Church of Darwin, at the University of Chicago, Reverend Jerry Coyne preaches on evolution. Reverend Coyne’s preaching is very much in the Darwinian wisdom literature tradition, explaining all manner of religious doctrines that, as evolutionists have explained many times, we all must accept. As a service, Reverend Coyne has gathered those theological dictates he has deemed most important to the Church of Darwin in his book Why Evolution is True. These truths need to be preached to all peoples, and so here we begin. Here is, then, the Word of Coyne:  Read more

Falk’s fallacy

Over on the Biologos Website, Dr. Darrel Falk has posted a response to Dr. Stephen Meyer’s claim in “Signature in the Cell,” that only intelligent agents have demonstrated the capacity to produce large amounts of functionally specified information. Dr. Falk cites a counterexample: “Consider the generation of antibody diversity for example. When a bacterium invades the body, a process results in a whole lot of random rearrangements of DNA sequence, and this eventually produces trillions of highly specific antibodies which specifically recognize and bind to the invading bacterial cells. The antibodies are highly specified. They bind only to that one type of bacteria. We go from a state of lower complexity to higher complexity—higher specified complexity!”   As I understand it, Read More ›

IPCC Caught in Another Lie

The chairman of the leading climate change watchdog was informed that claims about melting Himalayan glaciers were false before the Copenhagen summit, The Times has learnt. Rajendra Pachauri was told that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment that the glaciers would disappear by 2035 was wrong, but he waited two months to correct it. He failed to act despite learning that the claim had been refuted by several leading glaciologists. The IPCC’s report underpinned the proposals at Copenhagen for drastic cuts in global emissions. Dr Pachauri, who played a leading role at the summit, corrected the error last week after coming under media pressure. He told The Times on January 22 that he had only known about the error Read More ›

James Shapiro at Fermilab: Richards Dawkins “lives in a world of fantasy”

Thought I’d whack the hornets’ nest with that deliberately provocative title.

But Dawkins isn’t the only person who can pack a lecture hall to capacity these days. Last Friday evening (1/22), molecular biologist James Shapiro of the University of Chicago spoke to a standing room-only (800+) audience in Ramsey Auditorium at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. His topic was “Evolution in the 21st Century,” and you can see his slides here. I don’t know if an audio file will eventually be made available, but here are some observations about the lecture and Q & A:
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Climate Change developments – call for honest dialogue

The UK Government’s chief scientist has called for honest dialogue on climate change. Quoted from the Timesonline Science chief John Beddington calls for honesty on climate change 27/01/10 “” “The impact of global warming has been exaggerated by some scientists and there is an urgent need for more honest disclosure of the uncertainty of predictions about the rate of climate change, according to the Government’s chief scientific adviser. John Beddington was speaking to The Times in the wake of an admission by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that it grossly overstated the rate at which Himalayan glaciers were receding. Professor Beddington said that climate scientists should be less hostile to sceptics who questioned man-made global warming. He condemned Read More ›

A Walk Through Nature: Expanding ID’s Global Influence

2010 sees the beginning of a new series in Spanish exploring key findings from contemporary science that support the intelligent design inference. The series Passeos Por La Naturaleza (A Walk Through Nature) aims to further strengthen the global influence that the Intelligent Design movement already enjoys and raise awareness of important academic resources that are today challenging orthodox Darwinism and revitalizing the call for a fresh perspective on scientific discourse. First installment can be found at: Paseos Por La Naturaleza Evolucion de la comunicacion en las ballenas? Los darwinistas deberian estar preocupados, by Robert Deyes and Carolina Deyes (transl: Whale Evolution? Darwinist ‘Trawlers’ Have Every Reason To Be Concerned)

Jingjing decoded in part

The first species to have its genome decoded by ‘next-generation-sequencing’ (NGS) machines is the giant panda (Ailuropoda melanoleuca). The individual animal was known previously to the world as the mascot of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. Scientists have been excited by the report because the NGS approach is significantly cheaper and faster than other methods. [. . .] The estimated size of the giant panda genome is said to be 2.40 Gb (compared with 2.45 Gb for the dog genome and 3.0 Gb for humans) making up about 21,000 genes (similar to humans). “Overall, we found that the quality of the predicted panda genes was comparable to that of other well-annotated mammalian genes.” Although the panda eats only bamboo leaves, Read More ›

Chaperonins: Open and Shut Case

A protein is created in the cell by copying its DNA gene, making any necessary edits to the copy, and passing the copy to the ribosome machine which uses the genetic code to translate the copy (a series of nucleotides) into the protein structure (a series of amino acids). But the story does not end here. The final step, after translation, is to fold the protein into its three dimensional structure. It is a step that is difficult to monitor and difficult to predict. The chain of amino acids folds up in a tiny fraction of a second and the final shape it assumes is not obvious. And sometimes the folding process is literally hidden as the nascent protein chain Read More ›

Dawkins is back from playing Father Christmas

Dawkins is back from his Christmas break – a shame he didn’t listen to the message of Christmas about peace and goodwill to all men but launches into another ill informed attack on religion. Dawkins in the Times Of course for Dawkins a world without religion would be a better one. But when ever atheism has been tried out it leads to great tyranny – a shame he doesn’t mention Hitler, Stalin, Lennin, Pol Pot in his article. But Dawkins is a man of doubt and depressing hopelessness for all mankind. Atheism destroys the basis on which to make value judgements about right and wrong and leads to the tyranny of relativism in ethics. Out of the frying pan into Read More ›

“Overwhelming Scientific Evidence” yet again

Whenever I hear the phrase “overwhelming evidence” or “overwhelming scientific evidence,” my antennae go up and I know that someone is trying to sell me something. Last night, if you were watching the networks, you heard the following remark: I know that there are those who disagree with the overwhelming scientific evidence on climate change. But even if you doubt the evidence, providing incentives for energy efficiency and clean energy are the right thing to do for our future — because the nation that leads the clean energy economy will be the nation that leads the global economy. I’d like to encourage people to post in the comments to this thread other examples where the phrase “overwhelming [scientific] evidence” is Read More ›

METHODOLOGICAL NATURALISM, REVISIONIST HISTORY, AND MORPHING DEFINITIONS

Whenever I tune in to any discussion on the subject of “methodological naturalism,” I often marvel at the extent to which Darwinists will rewrite history and manipulate the language in their futile attempt to defend this so-called  “requirement” for science. In order to set the stage, we must first try to understand what methodological naturalism could possibly mean.

First, we have what one might call the “soft” definition, characterized as a preference for identifying for natural causes, a position which makes no final judgment about a universal  line of demarcation between science and non-science. Second, we have the “hard” definition as used by all the institutional Darwinists. In the second context, methodological naturalism is an institutional “rule” by which one group of researchers imposes on another group of researchers  an arbitrary, intrusive, and non-negotiable standard which states that scientists must study nature as if nature is all there is.

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