William Dembski

For whatever reason, the people at richarddawkins.net put me on their mailing list and sent me an invitation some time back to write a birthday greeting for Richard Dawkins, who celebrates his 66th birthday today. Go to richarddawkins.net/happybirthdayRD, and you’ll find birthday greetings from Dan Dennett, Sam Harris, P.Z. Myers, Michael Shermer, etc. But my birthday greeting is nowhere to be found. Here’s the panegyric I sent in a few weeks back (yes, I’ve posted it at UD before; note that I cribbed from Harry Jaffa, Daniel Dennett, and Barbara Kingsolver). I figure just in case the ID thing doesn’t work out, I’ll have a backup . . . . There are rare times and places, in the illustrious history Read More ›

Two days ago I commented on a post at evolutionnews.org that seemed to catch Ken Miller red-handed in misrepresenting my work on specified complexity (go here for my post). Specifically, on a BBC program titled THE WAR ON SCIENCE, Miller is seen, right after I was shown speaking on probabilities, commenting on the use of probabilities by ID proponents to underwrite ID. Given what I’ve written on this topic and given what Miller said on the program, if he were commenting on my work, there’s no question it would be a blatant misrepresentation. Now Miller is claiming that he was not commenting on my work at all. Rather, this was all the BBC’s fault. Miller claims that through bad editing, Read More ›

SMU appears upset about the Darwin vs. Design conference taking place in April and reported here yesterday (go here). The article below in today’s Dallas Morning News says that the anthropology department at SMU wrote to the administration: “These are conferences of and for believers and their sympathetic recruits…” Doesn’t the “M” in SMU refer to “Methodist” and aren’t Methodists believers in God? Is SMU’s anthropology department committed to hiring anti-God faculty?

SMU profs protest intelligent design conference
11:40 AM CDT on Saturday, March 24, 2007
By JEFFREY WEISS / The Dallas Morning News
jweiss@dallasnews.com
SOURCE: www.dallasnews.com

Professors opposed to the Bush library aren’t the only angry faculty members at Southern Methodist University this week.

Science professors upset about a presentation on “Intelligent Design” fired blistering letters to the administration, asking that the event be shut down.

The “Darwin vs. Design” conference, co-sponsored by the SMU law school’s Christian Legal Society, will say that a designer with the power to shape the cosmos is the best explanation for aspects of life and the universe. The event is produced by the Discovery Institute, the Seattle-based organization that says it has scientific evidence for its claims.

The anthropology department at SMU begged to differ:

“These are conferences of and for believers and their sympathetic recruits,” said the letter sent to administrators by the department. “They have no place on an academic campus with their polemics hidden behind a deceptive mask.”

Similar letters were sent by the biology and geology departments.

The university is not going to cancel the event, interim provost Tom Tunks said Friday. The official response is a statement that the event to be held in McFarlin Auditorium April 13-14 is not endorsed by the school:

Read More ›

At the Panda’s Thumb (go here), PvM suggests that I quoted Darwin’s remarks about the Irish out of context in a recent blog entry (go here for the quote). Darwin, quoting a certain Mr. Greg with approval, refers to “the careless, squalid, unaspiring Irishman.” Mr. Greg goes on to say that the Irish multiply like rabbits whereas the more civilized Scot doesn’t. What I didn’t quote is Darwin’s subsequent qualifications, in which he sees factors as lowering Irish birthrates and raising Scottish birthrates. Thus, in my quote, I didn’t provide the proper nuance to Darwin’s theory as it applies to Irish and Scottish birthrates. Hello, Everyone. Have you had your morning coffee? The point of the quote was not to Read More ›

In response to the upcoming Darwin vs. Design seminar at Southern Methodist University April 13th and 14th (featuring Lee Strobel, Steve Meyer, Mike Behe, and Jay Richards — go here), the university is set to issue the following statement in response: Under SMU’s procedures for making appropriate campus facilities available for community events, McFarlin Auditorium has been rented by the Discovery Institute April 13-14 for a program titled “Darwin vs. Design.” SMU policy requires that groups using campus facilities must have a University organization as a co-sponsor. In this case, the Christian Legal Society, a student group in SMU’s Dedman School of Law, is co-sponsoring the event. Although SMU makes its facilities available as a community service, and in support Read More ›

Below is a recent post from evolutionnews.org describing Ken Miller’s criticism of my approach to detecting design as he gave it on a recent BBC program. I was interviewed for the program, but had no idea that Richard Dawkins would be narrating it or that Ken Miller would be given the final word in assessing my contribution to the ID debate (I was not given a chance to see Miller’s response prior to the program’s release, much less the opportunity to respond to it in the program). In fact, I didn’t even know what the title of the program was until I received the DVD from the BBC. Titled “The War on Science,” it was immediately clear where this was Read More ›

If you’ve been part of the ID debate, none of this is news: Here is the film’s website: www.indoctrinate-u.com.

British paper currency — the 10-pound note — features Charles Darwin. (The custom is that the notes all have the Queen on one side and a famous Briton on the other. The notes are in denominations 5, 10, 20, and 50; there are no 1-pound or 2-pound paper notes, these are coins). A couple of days ago the Bank of England issued a new 20-pound note, using new security features, and took the occasion to change the “famous person.” This is a news-worthy cause for British Darwin-doubters, who should urge that Darwin be dumped from the 10-pound note whenever there is a new security-upgrade version, on grounds that he is the chief prophet of the materialist religion, and his presence Read More ›

Every now and again when I want to feel good about our shared humanity, I curl up with Darwin’s DESCENT OF MAN and read passages like the following: The reckless, degraded, and often vicious members of society, tend to increase at a quicker rate than the provident and generally virtuous members. Or as Mr. Greg puts the case: “The careless, squalid, unaspiring Irishman multiplies like rabbits: the frugal, foreseeing, self-respecting, ambitious Scot, stern in his morality, spiritual in his faith, sagacious and disciplined in his intelligence, passes his best years in struggle and in celibacy, marries late, and leaves few behind him. Given a land originally peopled by a thousand Saxons and a thousand Celts — and in a dozen Read More ›

Remember those disclaimers such as “this paper in no way endorses intelligent design” or “this article in no way challenges evolutionary theory” (see here for instance). Well here’s a disclaimer that appears right at the start of a forthcoming book on evolutionary computation — one that is being published through a recognized academic outlet: Disclaimer: The Editors are not endorsing evolution as a scientific fact, in that species evolve from one kind to another. The term “evolutionary” in the evolutionary computation (EC) simply means that the characteristics of an individual changes within the population of the same species, as observed in the nature. Way to go!!

Physicist John Baez has some interesting observations about string theorists who become defensive when their theory is questioned that’s relevant to our debate: . . . [S]ome people have tried to refute the claim that string theory makes no testable predictions by arguing that it predicts the existence of gravity! This is better known as a “retrodiction”. Others say that since string theory requires extra assumptions to make definite predictions about our universe, we should – instead of making some assumptions and using them to predict something – study the space of all possible extra assumptions. For example, there are lots of Calabi-Yau manifolds that could serve as the little curled-up dimensions of spacetime, and lots of ways we could Read More ›

Actually, we’re already there. Many Darwinists critical of ID no longer reside in the culture of rational discourse. They know they are right as much as any religious dogmatist. But the alarmism takes this one step further. Because denial poses a danger to the body politic, deniers must to rooted out. Moreover, those who root them out, as the defenders of virtue against evil, thus require additional powers to root them out. After that, persecution Soviet-style is not far away. “A former professor of climatology at the University of Winnipeg has received multiple death threats for questioning the extent to which human activities are driving global warming. ‘”Western governments have pumped billions of dollars into careers and institutes and they Read More ›

Over a year ago I urged readers of UD to provide me with behind-the-scenes correspondence showing that the NCSE (National Center for Science Education) and others had attempted to derail Richard Sternberg’s career after The Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington published an article on intelligent design by Stephen Meyer while Sternberg was still its managing editor (go here and here). I was finally sent that information. The following link takes you to the Congressional Report on the Sternberg Affair along with that correspondence, which is given in the appendix (the file is 3Mbytes): www.uncommondescent…/Sternberg_Cong_Rep_App.pdf Note especially Eugenie Scott’s role in this affair.

William Crawley, with whom I attended Princeton Theological Seminary in the mid-90s, did a bang-up job interviewing Richard Dawkins for the BBC earlier this year. Crawley probes Dawkins’s views on religion as well as his religious background:

Ken Miller continues to tour the U.S. giving his lecture “The Collapse of Intelligent Design.” Moreover, the bicentennial of Darwin’s birth and the sesequicentennial of his ORIGIN OF SPECIES is coming up in 2009. Together these have convinced me it’s best that all of us here at UD hone our skills at sucking up to “The Big D.” Here’s my ode to the man. I encourage others to try their hand at this in the comments of this thread (if I really like what you’ve written, I’ll send you one of my books as a prize): Dembski’s Entry in the “Suck up to Darwin” Contest There are rare times and places, in the illustrious history of science, when outbursts of Read More ›