Granville Sewell

I recently wrote a short story at Evolution News, I think a lot of people thought it was just a silly story, but it did have a point, even if I didn’t do a very good job of getting the point across. The point is that the reason Darwinism seems even remotely plausible depends entirely on the incredible ability of living things to reproduce, generation after generation, without significant degradation over time. Darwinism seems plausible to many people against the backdrop of real living species which, while awaiting accidents which might lead to further advances, incredibly, somehow, are able to maintain their current complex structures and pass them on for many generations. We are so used to seeing reproduction without Read More ›

Wolf-Ekkehard Loennig, who studied mutations for 25 years as a research scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research in Koln, Germany, is now retired but still writes often on the topic of Darwinism and Intelligent Design. He is one of those old-school scientists who believes evidence matters even when it comes to questions of biological origins. Charles Darwin famously offered the following suggestion as to how his theory could be falsified: “If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.” Dr. Loennig has repeatedly offered examples which defy a gradualist explanation, for example, listen to this interview where Read More ›

In the video “Why Evolution is Different,” highlighted in a June 7 Evolution News post and embedded below, I try again to make the usual simple point that to not believe in intelligent design, you have to believe that the four fundamental, unintelligent forces of physics alone (the gravitational, electromagnetic and strong and weak nuclear forces) could have rearranged the fundamental particles of physics into encyclopedias and science texts and computers and airplanes and Apple iPhones. As usual, I try to show that this belief runs contrary to the more general statements of the second law of thermodynamics, even if the Earth is an open system. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpEXXNxjWYE Whether or not it has anything to do with the second law, I Read More ›

While preparing a talk for May I created a video which I would like to share. The first 12 minutes are based more or less on an ENV post Why Should Evolutionary Biology be so Different? and the second part is based on Why Similarities Do Not Prove the Absence of Design. This video was updated 5/14/2017: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpEXXNxjWYE

On “Compensating” Entropy Decreases, Physics Essays, 2017, is my latest, and probably last, article on this topic. It is actually quite easy to understand, but for an even more user-friendly treatment, see Why Should Evolutionary Biology be so Different?

Para nuestros lectores bilingues (se que tenemos algunos), un video que demuestra que el debate no es nada complicado: Here is the English version, highlighted earlier at UD: Y en el caso poco probable que alguien se interesa en saber en que he trabajado los ultimos 40 anos, puede verlo aqui. Hey, I’m from El Paso, we all switch languages en medio de una frase aqui. And as long as I’m pushing my Youtube videos, here is my most entertaining and recent one, the only one with any chance to go viral, “Isaac has to wait” (essential to turn on closed captions, CC): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tycSRzBy5zc

Chapter 6, “Is God Really Good?” of my new Wipf and Stock book Christianity for Doubters is almost the same as the “Epilogue” of my 2015 Discovery Institute Press book In the Beginning and Other Essays on Intelligent Design. What does the problem of pain have to do with intelligent design? A lot, I think, because after 40 years of promoting intelligent design, it is obvious to me that many of the strongest opponents of design, for all their talk about defending science, are completely immune to scientific arguments, they will never look objectively at the scientific evidence until they can find answers to some very legitimate theological questions they have, three of which I try to address in chapters Read More ›

The following is section 2.3 of my new book  Christianity for Doubters. As the title indicates, much of this book is explicitly theological, but the first two chapters are about intelligent design. In the preface, I wrote “Of course, you do not have to believe anything in chapters 3-6 of this book or anything in the Bible to believe in intelligent design…. In fact, some intelligent design advocates are uncomfortable with a book that combines chapters on intelligent design with explicitly Christian chapters, because it might encourage those who claim that ID proponents do not understand the difference between science and religion. Most of us do understand the difference, we are just interested in both. And so are ID critics.” Read More ›

My 2015 Discovery Institute Press book In the Beginning and Other Essays on Intelligent Design, 2nd edition included a section entitled “A Theological Supplement,” where I wrote: It is widely believed that Darwinism is based on good science, and that those who oppose it simply do not like its philosophical and religious implications. The truth is exactly the opposite. In a June 15, 2012 post at Evolution News and Views, Max Planck Institute biologist W.E. Loennig said “Normally the better your arguments are, the more people open their minds to your theory, but with ID, the better your arguments are, the more they close their minds, and the angrier they become. This is science upside down.” The case for Darwinism Read More ›

The following story is excerpted from chapter 2 of my new book Christianity for Doubters. As the title indicates, much of this book is explicitly theological, but the first two chapters are about intelligent design. Used by permission of Wipf and Stock Publishers. In the current debate between Darwinism and intelligent design, the strongest argument made by Darwinists is this: in every other field of science, naturalism has been spectacularly successful, why should evolutionary biology be so different? Joseph Le Conte, professor of Geology and Natural History at the University of California, and (later) president of the Geological Society of America, provides an insight into the way most scientists think about evolution, in his 1888 book Evolution. In reviewing the Read More ›

When someone asks “Do you believe in evolution?” they probably want a short answer, and don’t have the patience to listen to a 15-minute lecture on the different meanings of “evolution” and how you stand on each. So how do you answer this trick question? Here’s a very short answer that works for me: Yes, I believe in the evolution of life, and I believe in the evolution of automobiles. Optionally, to make sure they get the point, you could add “but I don’t believe either could have happened without design.” It is actually a pretty good analogy, see my April 2,2015 post at ENV, In Biology as in Technology, Similarities Do Not Prove Absence of Intelligent Design

A little timeline on the second law argument, as applied to evolution (see my BioComplexity article for more detail): 1. Scientists observed that the temperature distribution in an object always tends toward more uniformity, as heat flows from hot to cold regions, and defined a quantity called “entropy” to measure this randomness, or uniformity. The first formulations of the second law of thermodynamics stated that thermal “entropy” must always increase, or at least remain constant, in an isolated system. 2. It was realized that the reason temperature tends to become more uniformly (more randomly) distributed was purely statistical: a uniform distribution is more probable than a highly non-uniform distribution. Exactly the same argument, and even the same equations, apply to Read More ›

The leadership of the United Methodist Church (but not the majority of its members or pastors, most of us are disgusted by this move) have decided to ban Intelligent Design from their general meeting, see here. They have apparently signed on to the unwritten treaty with materialists which says, basically, we will accept without question anything you claim “science says,” and won’t ever even look for anything in science which supports our faith, just please, please, leave us a little safe corner over here called “faith” and don’t attack us as ignorant for anything we say there. Attack the fundamentalists, they are much more ignorant than we are; in fact, we’ll help you attack them. Does this remind anyone of Read More ›

I ran into an old friend from grad school the other day, who told me about an experience he had recently while attending a mathematics meeting at an Ivy League university. During the lunch break, my imaginary friend recounted, I ran into two mathematicians who were debating the results from a talk just given by Dr. A. “Dr. C here believes he has found an error on page 17 of the proof of my main theorem,” explained Dr. A. I looked at the theorem a while, then pointed out that if you transform everything into another coordinate system things are much simpler, and in the new coordinate system it is obvious that the theorem is false. “Oh” said Dr. A, Read More ›

Since several of the chapters and sections of my new Discovery Institute Press book “In the Beginning and Other Essays on Intelligent Design, 2nd edition” have previously appeared elsewhere, you can read much of it for free using the following links: Chapter 1 – What is Intelligent Design? (also published by the El Paso Times and Human Events, Dec 2013) Chapter 2 – A Mathematician’s View of Evolution published by The Mathematical Intelligencer, 2000. Chapter 3 – How the Scientific Consensus is Maintained (also published by Human Events, July 2014) Chapter 4 – Entropy and Evolution published by Bio-Complexity, June 2013. Section 5.1 – Why Evolution is Different excerpt from Section 5.3 – Similarities Do Not Prove the Absence of Read More ›