Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Dennett on Competence without Comprehension

[In response to Daniel Dennett’s appeal to computer scientist Alan Turing as reductionist materialism’s greatest champion next to Darwin:] …  at first blush one would think that because Turing had “invented” a “machine,” this might give even Dennett pause and lead him to take a second look at his claim that competence precedes comprehension. For any competence exhibited by a Turing machine would, on its face, presuppose comprehension by, in this case, a mathematician named Turing, who understood the nature of computability and invented a machine (albeit an abstract one) that could perform any and all computations. And one would be wrong — atheists like Dennett have a knack for turning even the most damning evidence against their position into Read More ›

For record: A comment on the issues raised by Dr Fuller (HT: Gregory and Nullasalus), and onward concerns in the wider context of debates over design theory

I have just now commented in the recent thread on Dr Fuller’s thought, and think it useful to headline for record (especially given some continued abusive misbehaviour at Anti- Evo and linked sites that has come to my attention in recent days): ____________ >> Let me clip a few thought-sparker cites from Dr Steve Fuller: “The failure of intelligent design theory to specify the intelligent designer constitutes both a rhetorical and an epistemological disadvantage…The epistemological disadvantage is subtler, namely, that intelligent design theory is unnecessarily forced to adopt an instrumentalist philosophy of science, whereby its theory is treated merely as a device for explaining particular phenomena (i.e. as products of intelligent design) without allowing inferences to the best explanation (i.e. Read More ›

Steve Fuller in ID & Philosophy News

UD regular Gregory asked me to pass this on. A collection of quotations on ‘intelligent design’ by American-British philosopher and sociologist of science and invited Dover Trial witness Steve Fuller from the past 7 years has not long ago been published here: http://social-epistemology.com/2012/05/06/gregory-sandstrom-in-steve-fullers-words-intelligent-design/ If Uncommon Descent blog would wish to discuss these things I (Gregory) will be available on a limited basis to respond and will contact Dr. Fuller with any specifically poignant, relevant or challenging questions to him. Fuller is one of the founders of ID theory and has written and spoken in recent years on science, philosophy and religion dialogue, in addition to his new work on trans-humanism (Humanity 2.0), which is sympathetic to ID in a way Read More ›

Evolution Professor: Special-Creation “Effectively Eliminated”

In his book Inside the Human Genome evolution professor and National Academy of Science member John Avise continues with the usual evolutionary religious claims that the evil and inefficiency of biological designs—at the molecular level in this case—necessitate evolution, for such designs would never have been designed or created by a loving higher intelligence. As usual, it’s all about religion.  Read more