William Dembski

The lesson is this: The myth of invincibility is just that — a myth. Also bear in mind that Darwinism’s record isn’t nearly as good as the New England Patriots’ going into Super Bowl XLII.

Two interesting articles in the Southern Baptist Texan about Ben Stein’s EXPELLED:

Baptist Professors Featured in New Film
Written by Jerry Pierce | Managing Editor
Posted Monday, January 28, 2008

DALLAS­ — Two professors with ties to Baptist higher education are featured in an upcoming big-screen documentary that aims to expose the scientific establishment’s scorn toward academics who question Darwinian evolution.

“Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed” is scheduled for theaters in April and stars comedic actor and conservative activist Ben Stein as he travels the world interviewing intelligent design (ID) proponents whose careers have been threatened, as well as prominent neo-Darwinists who hold ID in contempt, including Richard Dawkins, author of the best-selling book “The God Delusion.”

A rough cut of the film, screened Jan. 10 in Dallas, featured interviews with William Dembski, a research professor of philosophy at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and a leading ID proponent whose books include “The Design Inference” and “No Free Lunch,” and Robert Marks, who holds the title of distinguished professor of engineering at Baylor University.

Marks is a co-laborer of Dembski’s whose ID research raised the ire of Baylor’s administration last year.

Dembski’s trials at Baylor from 1999-2005 are not documented in the film­among other things, he drew the wrath of the science, philosophy and religion departments early in his tenure there when it was learned that he was heading up an ID think tank on campus­but Dembski appears several times on screen as an ID apologist.

Dembski told the Southern Baptist TEXAN that those who most need to see the movie are “parents of children in high school or college, as well as those children themselves, who may think that the biological sciences are a dispassionate search for truth about life but many of whose practitioners see biology, especially evolutionary biology, as an ideological weapon to destroy faith in God.” Read More ›

Here’s an addendum, dated 2.1.08, to Ian Musgrave’s challenge (go here for the original challenge): Dear Dr. Dembski There has been some confusion about the wording of the original challenge. I’ve re-written the contest rules slightly as some people were confused as to what designer they were supposed to detect. A reminder, to win, you have to: 1) Identify which sequences have been produced by a human designer 2) Describe how you identified the sequence as being designed (eg. I used PKZip to compress the sequences and ordered the output according to the following criteria) 3) Describe what the sequence does (eg. “This is the active site of a triose phosphate isomerise engineered into a riboprotein — this due to Read More ›

I received the following email dated 1.31.08 from Ian Musgrave: Dear Dr. Dembski Determining where a genome has been produced or altered by an intelligent designer is a matter of some importance. Consider the claims that the HIV virus was engineered as a biowarfare weapon, or the concern that virulence genes from other organisms could be inserted into viruses and bacteria to “weaponise” them. For example the engineered mouse pox virus that turned lethal (Nature. 2001 May 17;411(6835):232-5 see also Nat Genet. 2001 Nov;29(3):253-6) and limits on the sequencing of the 1918 strain of the flu to stop flu from being weaponised (Fed Regist. 2005 Oct 20;70(202):61047-9,). A method that could reliably detect the action of human intelligent design in Read More ›

“The temperature in Harbin reaches forty below zero, both Fahrenheit and Celsius, and stays below freezing nearly half the year. The city is actually further north than notoriously cold Vladivostok, Russia, just 300 miles away. So what does one do here every winter? Hold an outdoor festival, of course! Rather than suffer the cold, the residents of Harbin celebrate it, with an annual festival of snow and ice sculptures and competitions.” So says a news report. But of course the images below from this so-called Harbin “snow festival” depict merely the detritus of a snow storm. Snow festival indeed! When are people going to get over their teleocentrism and stop trying to see everything as designed?

DEBATE: Atheism vs. Theism and The Scientific Evidence of Intelligent Design Sunday, January 27th at 4pm PST, Stanford University WHAT: Stanford University will play host to a debate entitled Atheism vs. Theism & the Scientific Evidence for Intelligent Design. This debate is being organized by student groups at Stanford: IDEA Club at Stanford,The Stanford Review and Vox Clara: A Journal of Christian Thought at Stanford. WHO: Chirstopher Hitchens vs. Jay Richards Christopher Hitchens — Contributing editor to Vanity Fair; visiting professor, New School in New York; author of God is Not Great. VS. Jay W. Richards — Research Fellow and Director of Acton Media at the Acton Institute; co-author, with astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez, of The Privileged Planet: How Our Place Read More ›

A producer from one of the national talking heads programs is discussing with FTE’s PR firm whether to interview me or Jonathan Wells regarding our new book THE DESIGN OF LIFE. The producer has some reservations about interviewing us: Hi [snip], As I’m sure you know, one of the main claims any scientific theory can make is predictive prowess. In other words, if a theory is true, then other things should also be verifiable experimentally, or by research. Before we make a call on your clients, can you or they provide any samples of things that intelligent design theory has predicted, which researchers have later determined to be true? Thanks. [snip] I have my own list of answers, but I’d Read More ›

My wife’s family is from Iowa, and we got to listen to a lot of the presidential candidates in person during our visit there this December. Here’s our daughter with two of the more successful candidates: The lesson of tonight is that people are tired of business as usual. How far does that disaffection extend? To the uncritical teaching of Darwinian evolution?

In my last post, I mentioned the prospect that THE DESIGN OF LIFE would, with the help of our Darwinist friends, become a companion volume to Ben Stein’s EXPELLED: NO INTELLIGENCE ALLOWED (www.expelledthe movie.com — check out also www.getexpelled.com). In the event that THE DESIGN OF LIFE becomes such a companion volume, a colleague sent me a sticker that could be put on it. Here is that sticker: I like it, but frankly I think we can do better. I’m therefore offering a $100 prize to anyone who can come up with a better sticker (receipt of payment for the prize cedes copyright to me). The sticker needs to be posted online as a jpeg with a link in the Read More ›

THE DESIGN OF LIFE is being shamelessly manipulated by the Darwinists at Amazon (go here). Not only are they posting negative reviews that give no indication that the reviewers have read the book but they are also voting up their negative reviews so that these are the first to be seen by potential buyers. The following 1-star review, posted 8 hours ago, illustrates the Darwinists’ level of discourse at Amazon: By E. Duran (San Jose, CA USA) – See all my reviews I just finished reading this book without vomiting. I had to go back and read Darwin’s “Origin of Species” again to remove the bad taste out of my mouth. This is the whole review, unedited and unabridged. Even Read More ›

A friend of mine emailed me the following quotes from Mike Gene’s new book THE DESIGN MATRIX, available from Amazon.com here. “The vast majority of scientists do not view Intelligent Design as science and I happen to agree with them.” (pg. xi) “I should make it explicitly clear from the start that I did not write this book to help those seeking to change the way we teach science to our kids. I do not argue that design deserves to be known as science. At best, Intelligent Design may only be a nascent proto-science and thus does not belong in the public school curriculum. Nor does this book argue that evolution is false and deserves to be criticized in the Read More ›

Watch the faces of the judges as this fellow walks on the stage. Based on his looks and the fact that he is a cell phone salesman, they initially misjudge him. Sometimes you have to stop believing what everyone is telling you and start listening to your passion. Click here: Phone Salesman Amazes Crowd – Video

As you read this article from the Washington Post, ask yourself how far such research would get without enzymes and a host of other materials “borrowed” from existing life-forms. “From scratch” properly should mean “made only with chemicals available in a realistic prebiotic environment.” That’s not what we’re dealing with here. And even if we were getting back to chemicals available in a realistic prebiotic environment, could the same be said for the investigator inteference of Craig Venter and his colleagues? Wouldn’t it be safer to say that they are acting as intelligent designers and not as mere accelerators of existing blind evolutionary processes? Synthetic DNA on the Brink of Yielding New Life Forms By Rick Weiss | Washington Post Read More ›

Chris Comer’s firing was briefly discussed on this blog here. Today the Dallas Morning News had a front page (above the fold) about her case (go here). Below is the offending email that got her fired. As you read it, keep in mind that The Center for Inquiry is a virulently atheistic organization (see here for a conference they did in November). In reading the email below, ask yourself: What if someone in the same position as Chris Comer forwarded an email about a forthcoming talk by Ken Ham at a “fundamentalist church” in which he would recommend teaching creationism in public schools?

The case of Nathaniel Abraham — a biologist who does not “believe” in evolution, got fired for it, and is now suing his erstwhile employer — is getting some play in the press (see Boston Globe and Chronicle of Higher Education). The question this raises is whether it is legitimate to fire someone who knows all that he needs to know about evolution to successfully practice his discipline but still does not believe in evolution. More generally, to be a member of the guild, do you have to believe something that you are capable of successfully applying? One of the commenters at the Chronicle of Higher Education remarked that you can’t continue to employ a mathematician who believes 1 plus Read More ›