William Dembski

http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/newsandevents/audio. Scroll down to the bottom of the page to download this interview/debate.

The Huxley Memorial Debate held at Oxford Union on 2/14/86 pitted two creationists (Edgar Andrews and A.E. Wilder-Smith) against two evolutionists (Richard Dawkins and John Maynard-Smith). They debated whether “the doctrine of creation is more valid than the theory of evolution.” For further information and to order an MP3 CD of the debate (3 hrs. and 49 min.) see http://www.tonguesrevisited.com/oxford_union_debate.htm. See also http://www.creationresearch.org/creation_matters/pdf/2003/cm08_04_rp.PDF. I regard this debate as relevant to ID because A.E. Wilder-Smith employed information-theoretic ideas to argue that intelligence is required to originate biological complexity.

I saw this parody ad (from Adbusters) years ago when I was a postdoc at Notre Dame and nearly busted a gut. Turns out it’s difficult to track this down on the web. I’ve therefore posted it here for my future reference and your amusement.

Source: http://www.statesman.com/news/content/news/stories/local/01/6perry.html

Perry: Add intelligent design to teaching
Theory has a place in Texas schools, he says; most rivals disagree
By W. Gardner Selby
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Friday, January 06, 2006

Gov. Rick Perry, a Republican who has made outreach to Christian conservatives a theme of his gubernatorial portfolio, thinks Texas public school students should be taught intelligent design along with evolutionary theory, his office said Thursday. Read More ›

Robert Frost is sometimes cited as being critical of design and theism generally. For instance, one finds the following quote at http://www.pharyngula.org/infidelquotes.php: Read More ›

Bradley Monton, a Princeton-trained philosopher on the faculty at the University of Kentucky, has an important piece on Dover here. Though Monton is not an ID proponent (he is a philosopher of physics who in his professional work is quite critical of fine-tuning as evidence for God), he exhibits little patience for the reasoning in Judge Jones’s decision. Note especially the following paragraph from his article: There is a problem with this idea that science should change its methodology in light of empirical confirmation of the existence of a supernatural being [[a point that Pennock had conceded in testimony]]. How does this empirical confirmation take place, if not scientifically? By Pennock’s lights, there must be some other epistemic practice that Read More ›

By popular demand this blog is back in operation, though with only limited participation in the future from me. Past contributors to this blog have decided they are willing to shoulder the responsibility of maintaining this blog, namely, DaveScot, Bombadill, Crandaddy, and Gumpngreen. Unlike in the past, when they were limited to commenting on my postings, they now have full posting privileges. They will be in charge of the day-to-day business of this blog, everything from keeping it interesting to approving comments to booting recalcitrant commenters. Of these four, DaveScot has been the designated blogczar — the buck stops with him.

I’ve decided to put Uncommon Descent into mothballs indefinitely. Although I’ve enjoyed blogging, I find it distracts from more pressing work that I need to get done. On those few occasions when I will need to blog, I’ll probably do it at www.idthefuture.com. If you want to keep track of my work, consult www.designinference.com, which has always been my main website. Also, watch for www.overwhelmingevidence.com, which I expect will provide a suitable antidote to the Dover trial (stay tuned). Two loose ends: The winning entry of the technological evolution prize competition is comment #2 at https://uncommondescent.com/index.php/archives/341 (I awarded it $150). I still want those OSC letters in the Sternberg case and am willing to pay $1000 for them (thus doubling Read More ›

My book The Design Inference is now out in paperback (I just received 6 copies via FedEx from Cambridge University Press). It might interest readers of this blog to see the difference in the back covers between the paperback edition and the original hardcover edition (after the first two printings, Cambridge omitted the jacket cover of the hardback edition, so it is no longer widely available): Read More ›

Fuz Rana and Hugh Ross, who head up Reasons to Believe (RTB), have issued a press release in which they extol Judge Jone’s decision in the Dover case in coming down against ID: go here for the press release. I’ve already commented on RTB’s distancing itself from ID before on this blog (go here).

Rana and Ross seem happy enough to see ID guillotined by Judge Jones’s ruling, but seem not to appreciate that their own necks are equally in danger. Read More ›

Case in point — Michael Ruse for his anti-ID article in Playboy:

Ken Miller and I had a brief five minute radio debate on the BBC on Friday, December 16th. He made two point which I could not address because the BBC host did not give me the opportunity, but which I wish to address briefly now: (1) The main weakness of evolution is that it is science (yes, Miller actually did say this and went on so long about it that the BBC host could not give me my closing comment as he had intended to) and (2) ID’s main fault is that it proceeds by negative argumentation. Read More ›

The problem with this headline is that it’s dated not 1859 but 2005: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/story.cfm?c_id=2&ObjectID=10361302 In what other science do its scientists have to do so much cheerleading for their theory?

Question: When Venter and Co. create the first synthetic life form, will it have been by intelligent design? Follow-up question: Will they do it from scratch, i.e., from non-biosynthesized materials as had to have happened when life originated, or by generously helping themselves to enzymes and a host of other biosynthesized materials?

Creating first synthetic life form
By CAROLYN ABRAHAM
Monday, December 19, 2005
Globe and Mail Update

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20051219.wxlife19/BNStory/specialScienceandHealth

Work on the world’s first human-made species is well under way at a research complex in Rockville, Md., and scientists in Canada have been quietly conducting experiments to help bring such a creature to life. Read More ›