GilDodgen

In the DVD Case For A Creator, in the Q&A section, Michael Behe was asked, How would you respond to the claim that intelligent design theory is not falsifiable? Behe responded: The National Academy of Sciences has objected that intelligent design is not falsifiable, and I think that’s just the opposite of the truth. Intelligent design is very open to falsification. I claim, for example, that the bacterial flagellum could not be produced by natural selection; it needed to be deliberately intelligently designed. Well, all a scientist has to do to prove me wrong is to take a bacterium without a flagellum, or knock out the genes for the flagellum in a bacterium, go into his lab and grow that Read More ›

For a great, free, downloadable MP3 lecture series visit: http://www.maclaurin.org/mp3_group.php?type=MacLaurin+Campus+Lectures There’s lots of interesting stuff on ID, Darwinism and related topics by such people as Denyse O’Leary, Mustafa Akyol, Michael Behe, Del Ratzsch, John Angus Campbell, Alvin Plantinga, and more.

My shortest UD post ever. The link says it all. http://blasphemychallenge.com/ “There’s only one catch: We want your soul.”

Judge Jones — by accepting widespread praise for the most salient and important part of his decision in its written form, without acknowledging the true authors — has implicitly taken credit for what was not his. In my view, this constitutes de facto plagiarism, and it should be called what it is. What say you?

I was an atheist, brainwashed by the establishment, into my 40s. I got a triple dose of indoctrination: from the public schools, from the secular environment in which I grew up (a small college town, surrounded by intellectual university types), and from the university itself. There was no doubt in my mind that God was a human fabrication and that we were the product of purposeless Darwinian mechanisms. In retrospect, however, I realize that I accepted these conclusions completely uncritically, which is ironic, because educated intellectual types supposedly take pride in critical thinking.

I was once debating “evolution” with a friend, and I was spouting all the platitudes I had been taught. He said, “Look, rather than debating me, why don’t you read a book, Evolution, A Theory in Crisis, by Michael Denton”? I assumed that it would be some nonsensical religious hogwash, but I was in for a big surprise.

I devoured the book in a couple of days, and when I was finished I slapped myself on the forehead and thought, “I’ve been conned all my life!” My atheism was quickly unraveling.

This is what the hysterical anti-ID folks fear: Once the evidence of modern science is evaluated without the blinders of a passionately materialistic worldview, design screams at us from every corner.
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For those who are not aware of this resource, check out: http://intelligentdesign.podomatic.com/ I particularly enjoyed the following interview by Casey Luskin with Thomas Woodward, author of the book listed above. http://intelligentdesign.podomatic.com/entry/2006-11-29T22_39_10-08_00 On this episode of ID The Future, CSC’s Casey Luskin interviews Dr. Thomas Woodward and they discuss his new book Darwin Strikes Back: Defending the Science of Intelligent Design, which analyzes the rhetoric used by Darwinists in their critiques of intelligent design. Woodward documents how Darwinists often use ad hominem attacks and promote “fantasy themes” about the supposed “theocracy” of intelligent design to avoid discussing the scientific issues. Did you know that, according to Niall Shanks, Phillip Johnson is like the guy who hangs around schoolyards peddling soft drugs, Read More ›

Check out this essay by Jack Woodall in The Scientist: Intelligent Design: The Clincher — A butterfly explodes the theory Follow Woodall’s argumentation to its inevitable implications: If I were the perfect designer I would invent a perfect world in which nothing could possibly ever go wrong or present any challenges or adversity. But then my world would be hideously boring and meaningless (and there would be nothing to learn, because learning takes effort, and effort means challenge and adversity), so I would no longer be the perfect designer of a perfect world. I couldn’t win for losing, and in either case (a “perfect” world or an “imperfect” world) my design would be imperfect, and therefore would not be designed.

In this UD thread, Mentok brought up something that, it seems to me, is quintessentially behind the ID versus materialism controversy: Is there, ultimately, any purpose or meaning behind anything, especially our lives?

With thanks to William Lane Craig, the author of Ecclesiastes, and Carl Sagan, I offer the following:

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Check this out: The Strange Case of Dr. Darwinist and Mr. Creationist What a hoot! This guy is as dumb as the guy who robs a liquor store and leaves his ID behind. Inspector Clouseau would be proud to have such a proficient protégé. With clumsy enemies like this, who needs friends?

Want to hobnob with Lee Strobel, Craig Hazen, Jay Richards, JP Moreland, John Bloom, William Lane Craig, Jonathan Wells, Steve Meyer and Michael Behe on December 7? There is no charge and attendees will be offered a free copy of the new Illustra Media DVD, The Case For A Creator. Contact: 1-888-332-4652 http://www.biola.edu/academics/scs/apologetics/events.cfm#formation I’ll be there.

I work for an aerospace R&D company. One of our projects was functioning as a subcontractor for the recent Stardust mission. You can read about it here: http://stardust.jpl.nasa.gov/home/index.html As a result of the data collected from the Stardust mission, previous assumptions about the formation of the solar system are being overturned. Today, the Stardust program manager copied all the Stardust research contributors with a congratulatory note that included the following comment: A week and a half ago the science team met — 120 of the more than 200 scientists around the world working on the particles brought back, and they are already rewriting the texts on how the solar system formed, with the discovery of refractory minerals that require very Read More ›

I am Richard Dawkins’ worst nightmare — a former militant atheist and Darwinist, who finally realized that everything he believed about everything that mattered was wrong. My conversion came from many sources, too numerous to outline in a brief post, but one of them was reason and examination of the evidence. Since my conversion I have come to know many wonderful people whose lives have been transformed for good in truly miraculous ways through their religious faith. One of them is the pastor of our church, Gary Kusunoki, who is a true saint in the traditional sense of that word. Gary founded Safe Harbor, an international relief organization. He has repeatedly risked his life to help “the least, the last, Read More ›

ID proponents are often accused of using “God-of-the-gaps” arguments. Of course, there are positive arguments for inferences to design in the natural world, but Del Ratzsch makes an interesting point about gap arguments in this interview.

He comments:

…the SETI program is a gap-searching project — trying to find signals which nature alone couldn’t or wouldn’t produce, then constructing alien-civilizations-of-the-gap arguments. Further, it is nowhere written in stone that nature has no causal or explanatory gaps of the relevant sort… gaps and gap arguments as such are unproblematic in principle.

[…]

…gaps have to do with e.g. mechanical causal histories, whereas design has to do with intentional histories. Those are in many cases intimately related issues. Gaps can be important clues to design, since depending on the context an actual mechanical, causal gap could suggest agency as a causal factor, and it is a relative short step from there to design. But the issues are distinct, and the ritual allegation that design views are all God-of-the-gap theories is inaccurate philosophically, as well as historically and contemporarily.

…It is also worth noting that if nature is designed and if it does contain causal or explanatory gaps, then any prohibition on gap theories will nearly guarantee that science — discarding one failed non-gap theory only by replacing it with another (not yet failed) [non]-gap theory — will not self-correct in the usual advertised way, and that science will never correctly understand the relevant phenomena.

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Sorry for the serial posts, but so much is happening. David Quinn, a well-known Catholic commentator and journalist in Ireland recently debated Richard Dawkins on Irish radio. Dawkins comments in the debate: “I’m not interested in free will… Just as before Darwin, biology was a mystery — Darwin solved that…” David Quinn is one sharp cookie. (I love that Irish accent!) Check it out: http://origins.swau.edu/misc/Dawkins2.mp3

For those who are convinced that Darwinism has no meaningful philosophical or theological implications I offer the following quotes from biology textbooks. Special thanks go to ID colleague Casey Luskin.
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