I had the privilege of attending Michael Behe’s talk at Westmister Chapel in London on Monday evening.   The talk was organised by Premier Christian Radio, so it is safe to assume that most of those in attendance were Christian listeners of that radio station. The hall was almost full as Professor Behe began his talk by illustrating how we intuitively recognise design. He contrasted a ‘natural’ mountain range in Idaho with the famous sculptures of four US Presidents at Mount Rushmore, before explaining how his ground-breaking concept of irreducible complexity provides a more rigorous method of establishing whether a particular structure is the product of purposeful design by an intelligent agent. This was illustrated by his famous mousetrap and bacterial flagellum.    The workings of the latter are Read More ›

Many members of the ID community will no doubt have been relieved to see the back of 2009. The secular establishment took the opportunity provided by the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth, and the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species, to launch a defence of their hero’s largely discredited theory. The popular science bookshelves were crammed with the uncritical, credulous hagiography that is the hallmark of the evolutionary genre, with their hysterical denunciations of ID inadvertently providing a fascinating insight into life on the wrong end of a paradigm shift. However, a careful scrutiny of those bookshelves would also have revealed a slim volume by the British science journalist, James Le Fanu, entitled Why Us? Read More ›

I’ve been trying to obtain a full transcript of last year’s Vatican conference on evolution, if only to confirm my fears that it had been hijacked by the ‘Darwin was right but that doesn’t mean that God doesn’t exist’ brigade. So far I have had to make do with a summary of the papers presented to the Conference, and, sure enough, it makes grim reading. Full details are available at www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0902/S000427, but suffice to say that they include contributions by the  likes of Douglas Futuyma and Francisco Ayala. On this evidence, the Pontifical Academy of Culture (which organized the conference) is worryingly unaware of both the latest developments in biochemistry, information theory and cosmology, and the authoritative teaching of Pope Pius XII in this Read More ›