Granville Sewell

My new Discovery Institute Press book “In the Beginning and Other Essays on Intelligent Design (2nd edition),” includes an Epilogue entitled “Is God Really Good?” which attempts to deal with the “problem of pain.” Given that one of the primary criticisms of ID is the inaccurate claim that it is just an attempt to dress up theology as science, why would I include an explicitly theological chapter in a book on intelligent design? The answer is that while it is widely believed that Darwinism is good science, and that its critics just do not like its philosophical and theological implications, after writing and arguing about ID for over 30 years it is completely obvious to me by now that the Read More ›

I have written a “Theological Supplement” to my new Discovery Institute Press book “In the Beginning and Other Essays on Intelligent Design, 2nd edition.” It is theological, not scientific, so it is not part of the new book, and some may feel I should not even be introducing it here at UD. But here is how I introduced the supplement in my new book (in Section 9.4) and explained why I felt the supplementary essays were relevant to the topic of ID, even though they are explicitly (non-fundamentalist) Christian essays. I would especially like to encourage some of our angry ID critics here to take a look. You may be surprised to find you like it more than you expected; Read More ›

The following story is from Section 5.1 of my new Discovery Institute Press book “In the Beginning and Other Essays on Intelligent Design, 2nd edition.” For a more scientific version of this story, see my 2013 BIO-Complexity article, “Entropy and Evolution,” which is now Chapter 4. The new Chapter 1 is an article published by Human Events in December 2013. 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? Even most scientists who doubt the Darwinist explanation for evolution are confident that science will eventually come up with a more plausible explanation. That’s the Read More ›

Robert Marks has an article “Biological Information: New Perspectives from Intelligent Design” at Human Events today. If you have comments, please post them there.

If there are any biology teachers out there who believe, as Discovery Institute does, that the “strengths and weaknesses” of Darwinian evolution should be taught in science classrooms, below is something you can distribute to your students without fear of losing your job. If you want to play it safe, I suggest you distribute the original. On the other hand, if you don’t mind being a test case for academic freedom, just label this as a news item “Ideas on Evolution Going Through a Revolution among Scientists” that you copied from the Discovery Institute blog, and pull out the original after the school board has started proceedings aganst you. Biology’s understanding of how evolution works, which has long postulated a Read More ›

I attended and spoke at a meeting in Erzurum in eastern Turkey on May 7. Suppose I told you the topic of the meeting was “Partial Differential Equations in Geophysical Modeling,” and then I added, since the meeting was in Turkey, the majority of the speakers and attendees were Muslim. You would say, the religious views of the participants are completely irrelevant, why would you even mention this? Well, suppose I told you the topic was “The Proper Role of Theology in Politics.” Then the religion of the participants would not be irrelevant at all. Actually, the primary topic was Darwinism and Intelligent Design, here is the report I posted earlier at Uncommon Descent about this meeting, organized by a Read More ›

The first part of the video below, which is essentially my invited talk at a recent meeting in Erzurum, Turkey, is based on my 2013 BioComplexity article “Entropy and Evolution.” However, I want to focus here on the second part, beginning at the 19:40 mark, which discusses the remarkable similarities between the evolution of life and the evolution of human technology. The primary argument of Darwinists, from Darwin on down, has never been “natural selection of random variations is a reasonable explanation for evolution,” it has always been “evolution doesn’t look like the way God would have done things, therefore it must have been due to natural causes, and all other natural theories are even more far-fetched than ours.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG7KI7I7XDo Read More ›

Unsatisfied and unconvinced by what he was being taught about evolution at Marmara University in Istanbul, Turkey, 21-year old student Enes Kayan knew there was another side which was never presented in his courses. So in 2012, Enes, a member of the Marmara Young Vision Student Club, decided to organize a symposium in which he and other Marmara students could hear alternative views on evolution, including intelligent design. The idea that evidence against Darwinism, and even for intelligent design, could be freely presented at a university angered some students and professors, and about 300 of them staged a protest, which Enes said actually worked to his advantage as it brought publicity to the event, which was held on May 16-17, Read More ›

Erik Anderson, thanks for your post giving readers the opportunity to comment on my new video and Biocomplexity paper. As you noted, I usually leave comments off when I post on this topic, for exactly the reason you stated, they usually generate more heat than light. In fact, which I noticed your post this morning, I have to admit I thought, oh God, here we go again, but I was pleasantly surprised by the 100+ comments, for the first time in 13 years, I felt they generated more light than heat! I want to add one further comment myself. Some people argue that the second law only applies to heat/work, that is, they accept only the first (and oldest) of Read More ›

I have created a video which makes my June 2013 Biocomplexity paper “Entropy and Evolution” even easier to understand. The extent to which materialism has corrupted science today will be clear to anyone who reads this paper or views the video, and readers will wonder, why would smart people like Asimov, Styer and others make arguments so transparently bad that a child can see the problems? The answer is, they have to, their commitment to materialism leaves them no choice. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Ea5s1pnigk

Here is a guest column “Intelligent Design shouldn’t be dismissed” (not my title) I wrote for the El Paso Times today. Most of my writings on this topic are very simple, but this one is especially basic, written as an introduction for people who know little or nothing about the debate. This article is now posted also on Human Events, here.

Michael Egnor has a great post at ENV which diserves more attention and comment. A scientist who believes he can detect intelligence based on the behavior of a binary star system calls inferring intelligence from the information content of living things “pseudoscience”. Comments?

Below is the Preface for my new, unpublished, manuscript, Common Sense in Christian Theology: Supplement to “In the Beginning…” . The manuscript can be viewed here : My 2010 Discovery Institute Press book In the Beginning and Other Essays on Intelligent Design is a collection of short articles on Intelligent Design (ID) and related topics. That book dealt with the evidence supporting the conclusion that we are designed, and, with the exception of the “Epilogue,” which is repeated here as Chapter 13, it was an entirely scientific book, even if it reached conclusions with obvious theological implications. I have now written a Supplement to that book which deals with the question of what this Designer is like, from a non-fundamentalist Read More ›

Since my Cornell conference contribution has generated dozens of critical comments on another thread, I feel compelled to respond. I hope this is the last time I ever have to talk about this topic, I’m really tired of it. Here are two scenarios: 1. A tornado hits a town, turning houses and cars into rubble. Then, another tornado hits, and turns the rubble back into houses and cars. 2. The atoms on a barren planet spontaneously rearrange themselves, with the help of solar energy and under the direction of four unintelligent forces of physics alone, into humans, cars, high-speed computers, libraries full of science texts and encyclopedias, TV sets, airplanes and spaceships. Then, the sun explodes into a supernova, and, Read More ›

Three geologists stand at the foot of Mt. Rushmore. The first geologist says, “This mountain depicts perfectly the faces of four US presidents, it must be the work of a master sculptor.” The second says, “You are a geologist, you should know that all mountains were created by natural forces, such as volcanos and plate movements, the details were then sculpted by erosion from water and wind. How could you possibly think this was the work of an intelligent sculptor? Only a person completely ignorant of geophysics could think those faces were designed.” The third geologist says to himself, “I don’t want to be seen as ignorant, but the faces in this mountain sure do look like they were designed.” Read More ›