William Dembski

In an earlier post (go here), I relayed to UD readers two programs that had been emailed to me by someone named Oxfordensis. After careful scrutiny, my colleagues and I at the Evolutionary Informatics Lab concluded that these are by far the best candidates that we have to date for Dawkins’s original WEASEL program(s) (as I note in the previous UD post, it appears that there were in fact two programs, one described by Dawkins in his book THE BLIND WATCHMAKER, the other appearing in his BBC video about the book). Are these in fact the original WEASELs? When I contacted Richard Dawkins to confirm their authenticity, he replied, in an email dated 9.21.09, “I cannot confirm that either of them is mine. They don’t look familiar to me, but it is a long time ago. I don’t see what more I can say.”

In that email, Dawkins rightly raised the question of these program’s provenance and the fact that UD had issued a reward for them. Yet the reward was so small (a mere book) that this hardly seems sufficient for someone to write these programs as a hoax. The question of provenance is more worrisome, but then again so is the failure of Dawkins to keep copies of the program, especially when they are of such historical interest in ongoing debates over evolution. Are, then, the programs listed in my previous post in fact the originals? Even if this question cannot be answered with iron-clad certainty, we submit that they deserve to be taken as originals. Why? Three reasons:

1. They are written in PASCAL and they compile in the PASCAL compilers available in the mid- to late-80s.

2. These programs were widely circulated at the time. Charles Thaxton informs me, in an email dated 8.27.09, “As for the Dawkins program, I picked up a copy in 1989 at Princeton from a physics grad student after my talk there.” Like Dawkins, he adds, “But Bill, I have no idea where it is.” Presumably, these programs are still out there on people’s computer memory (or floppy disks). So why can’t an anonymous person like Oxfordensis have the originals?

3. Their performance is precisely what we would expect given the historical record that we have of these programs.

This last point has been the main sticking point keeping critics from embracing these programs as the originals. As Wesley Elsberry put it to me in an email dated 9.21.09: “Putting mutation on a per-copy basis rather than per-base would be rather unlike the biology.” And yet, Dawkins does indeed seem to have made this non-biological assumption in programming his WEASELs. In what follows, I draw from my consultation with a programmer colleague: Read More ›

Darrell Falk, one of the key people at Francis Collins’s BioLogos Foundation, has a remarkable piece arguing that Darwinian evolution is the only way to preserve Christian orthodoxy in the face of intelligent design (go here). His line is that a micro-managing designer would be responsible for all the nasty designs we find in biology, so natural selection must have done all the creative work in producing biological complexity and diversity. I’ve seen this line increasingly taken by Christian Darwinists. Until this piece by Falk, Francisco Ayala’s DARWIN’S GIFT TO SCIENCE AND RELIGION was the most extreme form of it. But Falk has taken it to a new level:

Some of the by-products of natural selection are intricate structures that can fashion cellular machines that are able to harm us, just like the machines that we humans make. It happens in the context of freedom–God-granted freedom. However, the notion that irreducibly complex structures are built and put in place by a meticulous detail-driven intelligent designer is not consistent with Christian theology and should not have been embraced by Christians. With all due respect to my friends who hold this view, I would venture to say it borders on the heretical–certainly it is scientifically heretical, but I wonder if it is not theologically so as well. God is not the engineer that built these intricate little terror machines. And the Satan that we know from Christian theology is not a designer of life’s machinery. Those who wish to believe this are free to do so, but they have moved onto an island of scientific fantasy and perhaps even theological heterodoxy. The greatest beauty in the universe emerges through processes that arise through God-ordained freedom. Let us celebrate that beauty, even as we, in the presence of God’s Spirit, grit our teeth, and endure the hardships that come as a by-product.

For Falk and fellow Christian Darwinists ID is bad science and bad theology and Darwinian evolution is the key to reforming the faith. As an antidote to Christian Darwinism, let me suggest reading my book THE END OF CHRISTIANITY: FINDING A GOOD GOD IN AN EVIL WORLD. Here is a relevant passage from ch. 20 (titled “What about Evolution?” — substitute “Falk” for “Ayala” when reading it):

I want next to turn to the charge made by some theistic evolutionists that Christian theism requires God to create indirectly by evolution rather than directly by intervention (as in special creation). Theistic evolutionists worry that a God who creates by direct intervention renders the problem of evil insoluble. Such a God would be responsible for all the botched and malevolent designs we find in nature. By letting Darwinian natural selection serve as a designer substitute, theistic evolutionists can refer all those botched and malevolent designs to evolution. This, in their view, is supposed to resolve the problem of natural evil and thereby help validate Christian theism. Read More ›

On August 26th last month, Denyse O’Leary posted a contest here at UD asking for the original WEASEL program(s) that Richard Dawkins was using back in the late 1980s to show how Darwinian evolution works. Although Denyse’s post generated 377 comments (thus far), none of the entries could reasonably be thought to be Dawkins’s originals.

It seems that Dawkins used two programs, one in his book THE BLIND WATCHMAKER, and one for a video that he did for the BBC (here’s the video-run of the program; fast forward to 6:15). After much beating the bushes, we finally heard from someone named “Oxfordensis,” who provided the two PASCAL programs below, which we refer to as WEASEL1 (corresponding to Dawkins’s book) and WEASEL2 (corresponding to Dawkins’s BBC video). These are by far the best candidates we have received to date.

Unless Richard Dawkins and his associates can show conclusively that these are not the originals (either by providing originals in their possession that differ, or by demonstrating that these programs in some way fail to perform as required), we shall regard the contest as closed, offer Oxfordensis his/her prize, and henceforward treat the programs below as the originals.

For WEASEL1 and WEASEL2 click here: Read More ›

I know both Robert Wright and George Johnson. I invited Wright to the NATURE OF NATURE conference at Baylor back in 2000, where he debated Michael Shermer. And I met Johnson at a Templeton event in Santa Fe back in 1999. Go here for their Bloggingheads discussion, which really amounts to a confessional in which Wright is the penitent and Johnson the confessor. Wright can’t fall enough over himself for giving ID too much place at his Bloggingheads forum. Discourse in our culture has become truly pathetic. Johnson, when he’s not intoning “yeah” and “umh,” comes across as a condescending prig. He dismisses Michael Behe’s views on design because they “conveniently dovetail with his religious belief.” These atheists and agnostics Read More ›

The following two books are complete and will be out early next year: … The first is coming out with InterVarsity, the second with Baker. They’ll serve as a nice counterblast to the theistic evolutionism promoted by Denis Alexander, Karl Giberson, Francis Collins, and others. P.S. Barbara Forrest in her book against ID complains that I publish too many books. Deal with it Barbara — they sell well and they get read, especially in the Christian community. In any case, Barbara, please make sure to cite these two in your next edition.

Interesting slide show at Discover Magazine titled “Intelligent Design’s 8 Biggest Fails,” the guiding intelligence behind it being Ken Miller (go here). I receive a mention next to one of the slides — apparently the emergence of nylonase is supposed to provide empirical disconfirmation of my theoretical work on specified complexity (Miller has been taking this line for years). For my response about nylonase, which the critics never cite, go here. As you look at these slides, ask yourself for all of the systems in question just how Darwinian evolution explains them. Why wasn’t this slide show called “Darwinian Evolution’s 8 Biggest Successes”?

So how did these nitric oxide-producing enzymes arise? By Darwinian processes? …Nudler’s team found that many antibiotics kill bacteria through the production of harmful charged particles known as reactive oxygen species, otherwise called oxidative stress. “Antibiotics cause bacteria to produce a lot of reactive oxygen species. Those damage DNA, and bacteria cannot survive. They eventually die,” Nudler said in a telephone interview. “We found nitric oxide can protect bacteria against oxidative stress.” He said bacteria produce nitric oxide to resist antibiotics. The defense mechanism appears to apply broadly to many different types of antibiotics, he said. Nudler said many companies are testing various nitric oxide-lowering compounds called nitric oxide synthase inhibitors for use as anti-inflammatory drugs. He thinks a compound Read More ›

In case you missed this blog (and now that The Brites are no longer in existence): http://satirizingscientism.blogspot.com

With my new book THE END OF CHRISTIANITY coming out shortly and with the publisher positioning it as a counterblast to the neo-atheist literature, I’m boning up on that literature as well as on the responses to it. Dinesh D’Souza’s response has much to commend it, but he drops the ball on evolution. Not only is his scholarship sloppy on this point (for instance, he fails to distinguish the younger C. S. Lewis, who largely had no problem with evolution, from the later C. S. Lewis, who did), but he justifies taking the side of evolution on the basis of an argumentum ad populum: I am not a biologist, but what impresses me is that virtually every biologist in the Read More ›

Congressman Pete Stark is an MIT and Berkeley graduate as well as a former banker. He regards himself as an expert on economics and is one of the main guiding forces behind ObamaCare. This interview demonstrates the perverse effect on one’s thinking of residing too long in a fevered swamp, in this case, Washington DC. His unbridled contempt for Jan Helfeld reminds me of the Darwinists’ contempt for lay people when they ask simple probing questions about their theory. Darwinism has a similar addling effect on even the best-educated minds. It too is a fevered swamp. SOURCE

[Update 8.31.09: The McWhorter-Behe interview is back online at Bloggingheads; Robert Wright, who heads Bloggingheads, was incommunicado during the interview’s removal and on his return to wired reality decided to put the dialogue back up. For his explanation of what happened, go here: bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/22075] [Update 8.28.09: Michael Behe has just posted his take on the bloggingheads matter — behe.uncommondescent.com] Isn’t the Internet wonderful. Bloggingheads takes down the Behe-McWhorter discussion one day. A few hours later it’s back up: View on ExposureRoom

The TimesOnline (go here) has an extract from Dawkins’ latest book, THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH. Here’s an extract of the extract: …Evolution is a fact. Beyond reasonable doubt, beyond serious doubt, beyond sane, informed, intelligent doubt, beyond doubt evolution is a fact. The evidence for evolution is at least as strong as the evidence for the Holocaust, even allowing for eye witnesses to the Holocaust. It is the plain truth that we are cousins of chimpanzees, somewhat more distant cousins of monkeys, more distant cousins still of aardvarks and manatees, yet more distant cousins of bananas and turnips . . . continue the list as long as desired. That didn’t have to be true. It is not self-evidently, tautologically, Read More ›

A new day is dawning when philosophers of William Lycan‘s stature start questioning materialism and making conceptual room for dualism: I mean to have shown here that although Cartesian dualism faces some serious objections, that does not distinguish it from other philosophical theories, and the objections are not an order of magnitude worse than those confronting materialism in particular. There remain the implausibilities required by the Cartesian view; but bare claim of implausibility is not argument. Nor have we seen any good argument for materialism. The dialectical upshot is that, on points, and going just by actual arguments as opposed to appeals to decency and what good guys believe, materialism is not significantly better supported than dualism…. Yet, I am Read More ›

Interesting that DNA can exhibit such fine-grained usefulness in engineering design when, by Darwin’s lights, it is cobbled together by a sloppy unguided evolutionary process. It would seem that when the instruments we use are more refined than the things we are designing, the instruments themselves are likely to be the product of design. Building circuit boards using DNA scaffolding By Darren Quick There have been a few breakthroughs in recent years that hold the promise of sustaining Moore’s Law for some time to come. These include attaching molecules to silicon and replacing copper interconnects with graphene. Now IBM are proposing a new way to pack more power and speed into computer chips by using DNA molecules as scaffolding for Read More ›

Hunter Baker, formerly a colleague of mine at Baylor and now associate provost at Houston Baptist University, has just published a book with Crossway titled THE END OF SECULARISM (go here for the Amazon.com listing). It provides a far-sweeping historical analysis of secularism within western culture. His critique of secularism is solid: Secularism is not neutral, nor is it something that simply happened thanks to the growing maturity and rationality of human beings. It is an understandable reaction to the various tragedies of church-state alliances in Western history. It is not, however, necessarily more rational nor more harmonious than any number of alternatives. It cannot claim the authority of science. It cannot escape the need to look beyond materialism in Read More ›