William Dembski

Certain individuals associated with the Templeton Foundation see it as their duty to put as much distance as possible between the foundation and intelligent design. The most recent case is Billy Grassie’s explanation of how the Templeton Foundation could have been in their right minds when they awarded me a $100,000 book grant back in 1999: “The Case of the Missing Book: Setting the Record Straight on William Dembski, the Templeton Foundation, and Intelligent Design.” (Go here and here for earlier posts on this topic at UD). Grassie was responding to a piece by Joseph Campana at ResearchID.org (go here), and Campana has now provided a detailed reply (go here). I therefore don’t see the need to offer a detailed Read More ›

In response to the post at ResearchID.org on Templeton’s funding of ID (go here), their Newsroom put up the following on its website: In response to errors and misrepresentations stated in the February 28, 2007 ResearchID.com blog post: The John Templeton Foundation has never made a call-for-proposals to the ID Community. The Henry Schaefer grant was from the Origins of Biological Complexity program. Schaefer is a world’s leading chemist, and his research has nothing whatsoever to do with ID. Bill Dembski’s grant was not for the book “Free Lunch”. Dembski was given funds to write another book on Orthodox Theology, which was not on ID, however he has never written the book. From our FAQ… Does the Foundation support I.D.? Read More ›

In the recent discussion on this blog and elsewhere about the Templeton Foundation distancing itself from ID, there’s been no mention that in 1999 the Templeton Foundation had a brief dalliance with ID. That year, in Santa Fe, Paul Davies convened a private conference titled “Complexity, Information, and Design: An Appraisal.” In attendence at the conference were Sir John Templeton himself, Charles Harper, Paul Davies, Charles Bennett, Gregory Chaitin, Niels Gregersen, Stuart Kauffman, Harold Morowitz, Ian Stewart, Laura Landweber, and yours truly. The proceedings of that conference then appeared with Oxford in 2003, edited by Niels Gregersen, under the new title From Complexity to Life: On the Emergence of Life and Meaning. Design, however, figured centrally in the discussions of the original conference. Moreover, the original title of the conference, “Complexity, Information, and Design,” was mine — I recommended it to Charles Harper, who then mentioned it to Paul Davies, who then ran with it.

At the time, I was in regular touch with Charles Harper, a senior administrator with the Templeton Foundation and currently a public voice of the foundation expressing disapproval of ID. He had received a preprint of my book The Design Inference, had it vetted in-house (notably by British statistician David Bartholomew), and found it not entirely without merit. Indeed, at the time we discussed expanding Templeton’s “portfolio” to include some representation of ID. A year or two later, Templeton interest in ID dried up. The official story has always been that ID is bad science, bad theology, and bad politics. But I would suggest that the real reason is Templeton’s craving for respectability among the scientific elites, and ID, for now, is too iconoclastic for Templeton’s comfort.

It might interest readers of this blog to know that Charles Harper and I had explored a much bigger follow-up conference to the 1999 conference in Santa Fe. What follows is a conference proposal that I sent to Harper in 1999. At the time, he was interested in making this conference happen. I would still be interested in doing a conference like this and would welcome Templeton’s involvement. Read More ›

Here’s a pro-ID cartoon that appeared in the Tokyo Sekai Nippo:

Remember to use the secret handshake whenever you need to get an ID paper past the Darwinian goalies: “Although these observations do not undermine Darwin’s theory, …” ABSTRACT: According to classical evolutionary theory, phenotypic variation originates from random mutations that are independent of selective pressure. However, recent findings suggest that organisms have evolved mechanisms to influence the timing or genomic location of heritable variability. Hypervariable contingency loci and epigenetic switches increase the variability of specific phenotypes; error-prone DNA replicases produce bursts of variability in times of stress. Interestingly, these mechanisms seem to tune the variability of a given phenotype to match the variability of the acting selective pressure. Although these observations do not undermine Darwin’s theory, they suggest that selection Read More ›

Here’s a just released report that gives the lie to claims that the Templeton Foundation has uniformly eschewed support of ID research: In the past few years, the media has created confusion about the scholarly track record of the intelligent design (ID) research community, as related to funding from the John Templeton Foundation (JTF). The JTF is a philanthropic organization that funds research exploring science, philosophy, spirituality, theology, and their interplay. Charles L. Harper Jr., senior vice president of the JTF, was a central figure in this media drama, as he was falsely reported in the New York Times as claiming that ID scholars failed to respond to requests for grant proposals from the JTF. This false claim has been Read More ›

How much more difficult will it be to get an endowed ID chair at a major state university? Thanks to a more than $1-million donation from a gay male couple who hope one day to marry in California, UCLA’s law school is planning to establish what is described as the nation’s first endowed academic chair in sexual orientation law. The cash gift from John McDonald and Rob Wright will help fund the research of a still-to-be-named professor at UCLA Law School’s Williams Institute on Sexual Orientation Law and Public Policy. That 5-year-old think tank investigates such topics as anti-homosexual discrimination, the impact of the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policies and the demographics of same-sex couples who have adopted children. Read More ›

Here’s a new take on the problem of vestigiality from a colleague: Here are two examples of a “convergent, vestigial structure” — It’s the Chrysler PT cruiser and the Chevy HHR. Two different families of car have converged onto the same “vestigial running board”: Hey, design can converge and design can diminish.

Just as Darwinism has inveigled itself into every aspect of life, so is ID: www.idarts.org.

Vestigial structures in biology are commonly cited as evidence for evolution, and it may well be that they did evolve. But if it is evidence of evolution, it is evolution in the wrong direction — it’s not the sort of function enhancing/innovating evolution that is supposed to give evolutionary theory its bite. Vestigial structures, after all, are structures that have lost their function. If all of evolution proceeded in this fashion, we’d quickly descend to a world of nonfunctionality.

But vestigiality need not evolve by purely material means — it can also be designed. I was delighted to be informed (after my recent debate with Michael Shermer at Bridgewater College) of a nifty example of vestigial structures that arise not through “devolution” but rather through design, to wit, vestigial running boards on older automobiles. Look at the following Ford models: Read More ›

On a list I moderate, there’s been some discussion about whether ID should stay with the bacterial flagellum as its mascot or switch over to the ribosome. Staying and switching both have merit (though note that a switch would not signal that Darwinists have explained how the flagellum originated — they are as clueless as ever). In the meantime, take your pick: For ribosome mascot paraphernalia, go here. For bacterial flagellum mascot paraphernalia, go here.

A new journal is coming out that wouldn’t be necessary if we weren’t so much trouble: Outreach and Education in Evolution, published by Springer Verlag. As a seminary professor (among other things), I usually associate the word “outreach” with proselytizing and missionary zeal. For people who aren’t religious, those Darwinists sure have learned a lot from religion. . . . A father-and-son team — a world-renowned evolutionary biologist and a highly skilled and sophisticated science high school teacher — have decided it’s time to help science educators fight back against the strong pressure creationists are exerting on public education. In the new journal Outreach and Education in Evolution, to be published by Springer starting in March 2008, editors-in-chief Niles and Read More ›

Go here and you’ll be able to download a “Comparison Document” that shows how the new Kansas Science Standards deviate from the old. The change that particularly struck me was the following: Old characterization of science: “scientific knowledge describes and explains the natural world.” New characterization of science: “scientific knowledge describes and explains the physical world in terms of matter, energy, and forces.” Besides defining intelligent design out of existence, this new definition defines what have traditionally been regarded as distinctly human traits, such as free will and consciousness, which science studies, also out of existence. It’s all to the good that the scientific materialists have introduced this ideologically charged definition of science, perhaps not for the Kansas students who Read More ›

Here the latest from Carl Woese. The abstract is short but telling: Biology’s Next Revolution Nigel Goldenfeld and Carl Woese [posted February 8, 2007] ABSTRACT: The interpretation of recent environmental genomics data exposes the far-reaching influence of horizontal gene transfer, and is changing our basic concepts of organism, species and evolution itself. SOURCE: arxiv.org/PS_cache/q-bio/pdf/0702/0702015.pdf. So here’s the deal: When trying to derail ID in the court of public opinion, say that there is NO controversy over evolution. Say that scientists have achieved a consensus and that evolution is as well established as the earth going around the sun. But when out of the public eye, feel free to publish on how the entire field of evolutionary biology is in disarray Read More ›

“Evolution und Schöpfung” (go here) is the first German blog focused on origins-questions with multiple authors. It criticizes materialistic evolution and is sympathetic to ID. The blog was started by Cristoph Heilig. With the exception of Klaus Lange (who is in his 30s and motivated), the contributors are young (some in their teens) and motivated. [[Okay, I’ve edited the last sentence so that no one feels slighted about age or motivation!]]