Newton’s blunder regarding planetary motion is usually given as the classic “God of the gaps’ error.  Newton knew that in addition to the sun’s gravitational attraction, the planets’ affected each other.  Yet the planets orbits seemed too stable to account for this, and he suggested that God sometimes intervened to smooth the orbits out.  It was later discovered that the regularity of planetary motion can be accounted for based on a more rigorous application of Newton’s own equations.  Thus, the problem with a “God of the gaps” argument is that as scientific understanding advances, the phenomena previously ascribed to God continually narrow. We find that it was an error to “cover up,” so to speak, our ignorance by resorting to direct Read More ›

Often Intelligent Design is accused by some evolutionists of not being able to perfectly calculate the complex specified information of a system. From that accusation some ID opponents directly infer that ID has no scientific status. In my opinion this accusation and its corollary is a pure demagogical pretest, a weak excuse. See the following image (sizes are not real): The image shows, from left to right, a clothespin, a bike and a bird. To whoever uses such pretest against ID I ask this simple question: what is more complex, more organized, between a clothespin and a bike? What do you answer? Do you answer clothespin is more complex? No, you answer the bike is more complex. Did you need Read More ›

Richard Dawkins’ autobiography has been reviewed in the London Spectator: http://www.spectator.co.uk/books/9025021/an-appetite-for-wonder-by-richard-dawkins-review/. The reviewer’s verdict? “He relies just as much on a leap of faith as those religious believers he so keenly affects to despise. His theory also cannot explain how those selfish genes eventually came to evolve the one species on earth which is marked out by a unique capacity for self-obsessed egotism.”

In my last post I quoted Dr. Hart holding our naturalist friends’ feet to the fire.  But as long-time readers of these pages will know, however, Dr. Hart is no friend of Intelligent Design.  (See, e.g. here)  And in The Experience of God, Hart takes the ID movement to task at both the biological and cosmological level.  He faults us for reducing God to a cosmic tinkerer, a sort of Platonic demiurge.  Of biological ID he writes: in the light of traditional theology the argument from irreducible complexity looks irredeemably defective, because it depends on the existence of causal discontinuities in the order of nature, ‘gaps’ where natural causality proves inadequate. But all the classical theological arguments regarding the order Read More ›