2010

Evolutionists say evolution is a fact, every bit as much as gravity is a fact. That is remarkable. We see and even feel gravity everyday. Evolution, on the other hand, entails rather dramatic, one-time, events that were supposed to have occurred long ago, when no one was around to witness them. How could we be sure of such a theory? There must be some extremely powerful and compelling scientific evidence for evolution to make it a fact as gravity is a fact. That is what one would think. But, surprisingly, there is no such evidence. When evolutionists try to explain why evolution is a fact, it is a tremendous anticlimax. Consider this example from evolutionist Massimo Pigliucci:  Read more

Judge Robert W. Sweet has turned the biotech patent industry into turmoil.

See: After Patent on Genes Is Invalidated, Taking Stock By ANDREW POLLACK, March 30, 2010

Although patents are not granted on things found in nature, the DNA being patented had long been considered a chemical that was isolated from, and different from, what was found in nature.

But Judge Sweet ruled that the distinguishing feature of DNA is its information content, its conveyance of the genetic code. And in that regard, he wrote, the isolated DNA “is not markedly different from native DNA as it exists in nature.” . . . Read More ›

I had an exchange recently that brought up the subject of life on comets and its implications for ID. As I reviewed the work on comets, it brought up some surprising connections that I had not seen before. I thought it was worthy of a blog, though somewhat old material. The correspondent complained that comets carrying bacteria do not explain the origin of life. It wasn’t comets. This is like Carl Sagan saying we came from some other place. Well where did that other place come from! I tend to agree with you, comets don’t really solve the origin of life. They merely move it to a distant place. I was as surprised as you that comets had fossilized life Read More ›

I watched the video of atheist Sam Harris trying to prove that science can form a basis for morality (posted by Dr. Dembski below), and it got me to thinking.  Everyone knows the moral law. It is, as Budziszewski writes, that which we can’t not know. Therefore, like everyone else, Mr. Harris knows that his moral impulses are not arbitrary, that they are grounded on something both necessary and objective. But his atheistic metaphysical premises lead to the inescapable conclusion that just the opposite is true, because if his premises are correct, he is compelled to believe that his moral impulses are contingent and subjective, that they are mere accidental byproducts of the interaction of chance and mechanical law.

If one’s premises lead to a conclusion that one knows to be untrue, one has a choice. One can either reject those premises and try to find better ones more congruent with the facts, or one can cling to those premises in the teeth of the facts. If one chooses the latter option, it will become necessary to tell lies to oneself in an effort to reduce the dissonance that must inevitably result from that choice. Here we see Mr. Harris tenaciously clinging to premises that have been falsified by his own experience and telling himself (and everyone else who will listen) whoppers to reduce his dissonance. Let’s consider the obvious lies Mr. Harris tells himself. Read More ›

LINK About Sam Harris: Adored by secularists, feared by the pious, Sam Harris’ best-selling books argue that religion is ruinous and, worse, stupid — and that questioning religious faith might just save civilization.

Katherine Pollard’s Scientific American article from last year, about what makes humans different from chimpanzees, is an unfortunate example of the banality of evolution. Charles Darwin’s theory, updated to account for a variety of surprise evidences, is taken as fact and this leads to a remarkable level of credulity. Whatever we find in biology, it must be the product of evolution. This leads evolutionists away from a whole range of possible investigations and interesting questions. Instead, they drone on with the same, tired, evolutionary explanations that are so predictable. Here are a few passages of note from Pollard’s article:  Read more

At Biologos, Francis Beckwith has written what appears to be a biography of his interactions and considerations with Intelligent Design in two parts: Part 1 and Part 2. Thomas Cudworth has already done a wonderful job of explaining and engaging the content of the two-part blog. Since I had already started my response to Beckwith (before seeing Cudworth’s entry), I thought I would go ahead and publish my entry.

Beckwith’s definition of ID is that, at its core, ID is comprised of the arguments of irreducible and specified complexity:

At the time I was never fully at ease with the Behe/Dembski arguments that relied on notions of specified and irreducible complexity (which I now see as the essence of the ID movement).

There is, of course, the “fine-tuning of the universe, and our privileged place in it” argument that comprises ID, as propounded by Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay Wesley Richards in their book The Privileged Planet. This cosmological form of ID, along with the biological position, was what convinced Antony Flew to convert to deism from atheism. The point it that ID is not confined to biology, to begin with, nor is it confined to arguments of negations of natural causes, as Beckwith seems to assume in his assessment of irreducible and specified complexity. ID is comprised of positive arguments, not only that chance alone (non-intelligence) cannot account for the particulars in nature that appear designed, but that the formation and information of nature requires an intelligence. This is a positive argument in and of itself, regardless of how the design gets implemented (whether it’s through nature or through some other medium, doesn’t really matter to ID). It’s really an argument about intelligence v. non-intelligence.

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Scientific problems with evolution don’t really matter. This genre of thought scratches too many itches to let science bring it down. Traditionally those itches have mainly been theological and philosophical. Now, as the evolutionary narrative subsumes human nature, new itches emerge. Geoffrey Miller, an evolutionary psychologist, provides a peek into this latest addition to evolution’s appeal. This quote appears in a fancy, inside cover advertisement run by the John Templeton Foundation, in the May 2009 Scientific American:  Read more

For those of you who don’t know, TED is a convention of (usually) world-class thinkers who each give a 15-minute talk about a subject. Many of the people in TED are thought leaders. Some of them, however, get in merely because they have written a popular or controversial book. In one of this year’s TED talks, Sam Harris demonstrated that he has no grasp on the basic concepts of either philosophy or ethics.
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Given the frequent criticisms against ID by some neo-Thomists it may be useful to consider here briefly the problem of compatibility between Thomism and ID (or at least what ID is in my view). To analyze some of the neo-Thomists’ critiques I will examine for example the recent article “Intelligent Design and Me”, part I/II, by Francis Beckwith at the Darwinist Biologos site (here and here). Read More ›

From the NCSE: Congratulations to NESCent

NCSE is happy to congratulate the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent) on the renewal of its grant from the National Science Foundation. According to a March 2, 2010, press release, NESCent was awarded a five-year grant renewal in the amount of $25 million, to continue its core programs in evolution research, informatics, and education through 2014.

and NESCent Press Release

This is the second major NSF grant that NESCent has received, which brings the total funding for the Center to $40 million. The grant will enable the Center to continue its core programs in evolution research, informatics and education through 2014.

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— Below is a beefed-up version of a piece I posted here at UD  earlier this year. The version below appeared at the Chuck Colson blog. —

Evolution, Theistic Evolution, and Intelligent Design

By William Dembski

In 1993, well-known apologist William Lane Craig debated professional atheist Frank Zindler concerning the existence of the Christian God. The debate was published as a video by Zondervan in 1996 and is readily available at YouTube. The consensus among theists and atheists is that Craig won the debate. Still, Zindler presented there a challenge worth revisiting:

The most devastating thing, though, that biology did to Christianity was the discovery of biological evolution. Now that we know that Adam and Eve never were real people, the central myth of Christianity is destroyed. If there never was an Adam and Eve, there never was an original sin. If there never was an original sin, there is no need of salvation. If there is no need of salvation, there is no need of a savior. And I submit that puts Jesus, historical or otherwise, into the ranks of the unemployed. I think that evolution is absolutely the death knell of Christianity.

Zindler’s objection to Original Sin and the Fall is the subject of my just-published book The End of Christianity: Finding a Good God in an Evil World (see www.godornot.com, which includes a $5,000 video contest connected with the book). What interests me here, however, is the logic that is supposed to take one from evolution to the death of Christianity—and presumably to the death of God generally.

By evolution Zindler means a Darwinian, materialistic form of it, one that gives no evidence of God and thus is compatible with atheism (this is, in fact, what is meant by evolution and how I’ll use the term in the sequel). But Zindler is not arguing for the mere compatibility of evolution with atheism; he is also claiming that evolution implies, as in rationally compels, atheism. This implication is widely touted by atheists. Richard Dawkins pushes it. Cornell historian of biology and atheist Will Provine will even call evolution “the greatest engine for atheism” ever devised.

To claim that evolution implies atheism is, however, logically unsound (even though sociological data supports the loss of faith as a result of teaching evolution). Theistic evolutionists such as Francis Collins, Denis Alexander, and Kenneth Miller provide a clear counterexample, showing that at least some well-established biologists think it’s possible for the two to be compatible. Moreover, there’s no evident contradiction between an evolutionary process bringing about the complexity and diversity of life and a god of some sort (deistic, Stoic, etc.?) providing the physical backdrop for evolution to operate.

The reverse implication, however, does seem to hold: atheism implies evolution (a gradualist, materialist form of evolution, the prime example being Darwinian). Read More ›

Francis Beckwith is one of the more interesting commentators on Darwinism and intelligent design.  Beckwith is intelligent and independently minded, willing to move with the evidence and the arguments, and thus capable of non-partisan thought on the issues.

Originally a Protestant and a supporter of intelligent design as formulated by the major ID theorists, he has since become a Roman Catholic and a Thomist, and now believes that the best arguments for design are metaphysical arguments of a Thomist variety, rather than scientific arguments of the sort proposed by ID supporters.  In a recent two-part posting on the Biologos site, Beckwith has explained why he was uncomfortable with ID from the beginning, and how his new Thomist insights clarified for him the defects of ID as an argument for natural theology.  The articles can be found at:

http://biologos.org/blog/intelligent-design-and-me-part-i-in-the-beginning/

 and

 http://biologos.org/blog/intelligent-design-and-me-part-ii/

 There is a Comments section following each article, with some useful criticism of Beckwith’s position, notably from Mike Gene and from a poster writing under the alias of “pds”.  There is also further discussion of Beckwith articles, with more from “pds” and some responses by Beckwith, at:

 http://blog.beliefnet.com/jesuscreed/2010/03/what-role-naturalism-2—insig.html

 It would be impossible in one column to discuss both of Beckwith’s articles and all of his responses to commenters, so I will content myself with pulling out the highlights of Beckwith’s arguments from these three locations, and responding to them.

First, it is important to note that Beckwith’s criticism of ID is not on the plane of natural science.  He does not pretend to referee between Ken Miller and Michael Behe on the irreducible complexity of the flagellum; nor does he object in principle to the attempt to show, against Dawkins & Co., that Darwinian processes are incapable of producing complex organs and biological systems.  As he puts it in Comment 48 on the beliefnet.com/jesuscreed site: Read More ›

Not that Massimo — this one. And “it,” of course, is neo-Darwinism, or the Modern Synthesis: textbook evolutionary theory. There’s nothing especially novel in saying that evolutionary theory can function as a secular religion, which is Piattelli-Palmarini’s main point in his new article. Michael Ruse has said as much for years. What has changed within the past couple of years, however, is the rapid growth in the overtly religious (anti-religious, but that anti doesn’t really matter) content of the writings of prominent neo-Darwinian biologists, such as Jerry Coyne and Richard Dawkins. The Accomodationist Wars, which show no signs of slacking, illustrate that for many, the whole point of evolutionary theory is Getting Rid of God. A biologist who nonetheless professes Read More ›

By now most people know about the DNA code. A DNA strand consists of a sequence of molecules, or letters, that encodes for proteins. Many people do not realize, however, that there are additional, more nuanced, codes associated with the DNA. For instance, minor chemical modifications (such as the addition of a methyl group) to the DNA provide bar-code like signals to the protein machinery that operate on the DNA. This DNA methylation influences which genes, along the DNA strand, are read off. And this DNA methylation itself may be modified to provide additional information.  Read more