William Dembski

Let’s hope that the Nickelodeon Channel picks this up as its next children’s animation series. For a newspaper article about this animation, go here.

Tonight my friend Frank Turek will be interviewing me as well as other Christian apologists (such as William Lane Craig and Josh McDowell). Below are the details.

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This Tuesday, January 19th I’ll be hosting a live radio and internet simulcast event called Church Dropout:  Overcoming the Youth Exodus.  The producers tell me that this program will draw an audience of over 200,000 to hear and see evidence for Christianity. The program is intended to help reverse the trend that 75% of Christian youth leave the church after high school.   

My guests will be some of the top Christian apologists in the world:  

We’ll start the evening with the man who is currently the best debater on our side, Dr. William Lane Craig (http://www.ReasonableFaith.org).  Bill does scores of college events every year, and he provides great resources on his website. You need to hear Bill’s evidence for the existence of God– irrefutable! 

We’ll then turn to one of the founding fathers of the Intelligent Design movement– Dr. Bill Dembski (http://www.designinference.com).  Bill has two PhD’s, but he’ll show us very simply how life points to an intelligent designer, and how most of the so-called “evidence” for macroevolution is based on materialistic and counter-factual philosophical assumptions.   Read More ›

I did two phone debates at Justin Brierley’s UK radio-program UNBELIEVABLE. Below is an email describing both debates as well as some programs of related interest. The debate with Lewis Wolpert was previously noted here at UD. The other debate with former Christian Norm Hansen focused on God’s goodness and my book THE END OF CHRISTIANITY. ====================== Hello, you may be interested in three recent shows of my radio show “Unbelievable?” that touch on the issue of Intelligent Design. All the shows are available at the show archive at www.premier.org.uk/unbelievable though I include permanent direct links below Also please note that in light of its UK release on DVD, I shall be hosting a Premier Radio screening of “Expelled” the Read More ›

I’m heartened to see our tax dollars working to such good effect: Date: Jan.11, 2010 Contacts: Maureen O’Leary, Director of Public Information Luwam Yeibio, Media Relations Assistant Office of News and Public Information 202-334-2138; e-mail FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Eugenie C. Scott to Receive Public Welfare Medal, Academy’s Most Prestigious Award WASHINGTON — The National Academy of Sciences Council has selected Eugenie C. Scott to receive its most prestigious award, the Public Welfare Medal. Established in 1914, the medal is presented annually to honor extraordinary use of science for the public good. The Council chose Scott for championing the teaching of evolution in the United States and for providing leadership to the National Center for Science Education (NCSE). Scott, a physical Read More ›

A week ago I described here at UD my debate with atheist Lewis Wolpert. A blogger who goes by “Manic Street Preacher” sent me three unsolicited emails about his reaction to the debate, which was not positive. Denyse O’Leary briefly adverted to this blogger here. I finally had a look at what this blogger wrote. I can’t say I was impressed with the argumentation or erudition, but I do have to credit him for chutzpah. He writes (go here): //////////////////////////////\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\ Dembski repeated the common straw man that scientists in Darwin’s day knew nothing about the inner workings of the cell, and thought that they were mere “blobs of protoplasm”. Well, Dembski should take a look this drawing out, which was Read More ›

I just received this email from the Templeton Foundation. It is fascinating for what it includes and leaves out. On the one hand, it admits that evolutionary theory is incomplete and it even tacitly consents to evolution being a telic process (evolution is a “search mechanism” — Bob Marks and I have been arguing that evolution is a search right along at the Evolutionary Informatics Lab — www.evoinfo.org). And there’s even an admission that there might be limits to evolvability (a dominant theme in ID research). At the same time, intelligent design is given no mention and the solution to evolution’s incompleteness is said to lie in “cooperation,” which is supposed to complement the competition usually associated with Darwinism. I tried to find this announcement on the web, but it appears not to be up yet, so I’m reprinting the newsletter here without a link.

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The Next Revolution in Biology [from “Templeton Report” newsletter, 6jan10]

“In every field of science, when it’s successful, you think you understand all of it,” says Martin Nowak, professor of mathematics and biology at Harvard University. “In classical mechanics,” he explains, “there was a time when physicists thought, “‘Well, that’s all there is. If I know the place of the particles in the universe, I can predict the future.’ But then came quantum mechanics and relativity theory. There was a total revolution.” Nowak is hard at work trying to launch another revolution, this time in evolutionary biology. “Our understanding of evolution,” he says, “is very incomplete.”

Thanks to a five-year, multipart grant of more than $10 million from the John Templeton Foundation, researchers will be able explore some of the Foundational Questions in Evolutionary Biology (FQEB) that have yet to be answered. For instance, Nowak explains, “evolution does not explain the origin of life because evolution presupposes populations of reproducing individuals.” The origin of life, what he calls “prevolution,” needs more research. This would include examining the transition in which chemistry finally gave rise to biology.

Established in 2009 to mark the Darwin double anniversary (Darwin’s 200th birthday and the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species), FQEB is offering fellowships of up to $75,000 for up to two consecutive years of research for both junior and senior scholars in a variety of fields. The deadline for applications for the first round of fellowships is February 1, and the fellows will begin work in September.

The scholars who win fellowships will do research at Harvard or other academic institutions in the Boston area. They will be expected to participate in the creation of new research networks, to attend regular meetings, and to work across disciplinary boundaries. Priority will be given to work that has significant philosophical implications for evolutionary biology and scientific understanding more broadly.

What kind of research meets that standard? Nowak offers another example. Evolution, he says, is a kind of “search mechanism.” “It searches for constructions, for solutions, for particular cell shapes, particular organs. Evolution is always searching, but there is a space of possibilities that is being searched.” He asks, “What is that space of possibilities? How can we describe a theory of that space that is being searched?” Read More ›

As part of the promotion for my book THE END OF CHRISTIANITY, the publisher has arranged a $5000 video contest in which participants upload an up-to-2-minute video explaining why they believe that God is good. The contest has just started and the deadline for submissions is April 5, 2010. The contest is operated by Memelabs, which allows online voters to judge the contest. Go to GodorNot.com for details. Interestingly, THE END OF CHRISTIANITY is receiving most of its criticism not from atheistic and theistic evolutionists but from young-earth creationists (e.g., Johnny Helms’ blog here). As I comment at that blog, “What I’m trying to do is preserve Christian orthodoxy within an old-earth perspective…. BOTTOM LINE: The only way my book Read More ›

. Lewis Wolpert and I had an audio debate a few weeks ago, which is now available online as a podcast: go here (there’s about three minutes of stage-setting by the interviewer Justin Brierly before the actual discussion with Wolpert begins). The debate is part of a program series called UNBELIEVABLE. Other debates available there include one between Denis Alexander and PZ Myers and also one between Richard Dawkins and John Lennox.

< This book takes a look at the rivalry in science today surrounding attempts to discover the elusive process of evolution. In one camp are the faithful followers of the long-standing theory of natural selection promulgated by Charles Darwin more than 150 years ago. This “survival of the fittest” theory, according to author Suzan Mazur, is no longer the scientific cornerstone of biology and has been challenged for decades. In the other camp are those challengers who want to steer evolutionary science in a more honest, scientifically accurate direction. However, the Darwinian theory has become a political powerhouse brand that is hard to unseat because of the money and power associated with it. The Altenberg 16 is about a group Read More ›

Go here for Wikipedia’s treatment of Climategate and here for Conservapedia’s treatment of it. True to form, Wikipedia argues that the hacking of the CRU server changes nothing. Conservapedia, by contrast, treats Climategate as further confirmation that AGW is a ruse. Interesting is the following quote from their Climategate article: It was reported that, despite Climategate related pages being the most-read articles of the UK’s Telegraph entire online operation, mysteriously when attempting to search using Google -– it didn’t feature links related to Climategate.[67] James Delingpole from the Telegraph noted, “Instead, the top-featured item is a blogger pushing Al Gore’s AGW agenda. Perhaps there’s nothing sinister in this. Perhaps some Google-savvy reader can enlighten me.”[68] Google.com has been accused before Read More ›

Here’s a fun video produced by the American Museum of Natural History:

. By any accounts, Thomas Nagel has proven himself a more nimble philosopher than the hamfisted Brian Leiter. That’s perhaps why Leiter simply can’t get over that Nagel liked Stephen Meyer’s SIGNATURE IN THE CELL (reported at UD here). For Leiter, when scholars of Nagel’s stature endorse books coming out of the rogue Discovery Institute, that endorsement itself constitutes an attack on liberal democracy, cultured discourse, science, etc. Leiter simply can’t let this go. Here are the posts to date on his blog: leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2009/12/nagels-nonreply.html leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2009/12/more-comments-from-philosophers-on-thomas-nagels-shameful-stunt.html leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2009/12/thomas-nagel-jumps-the-shark.html leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2008/09/nagel-wins-ba-3.html

Back in 2003 NATURE (vol 423, pp 139-144) published an article by Richard Lenski, Charles Ofria, Robert Pennock, and Christoph Adami titled “The Evolutionary Origin of Complex Features.” The abstract reads: A long-standing challenge to evolutionary theory has been whether it can explain the origin of complex organismal features. We examined this issue using digital organisms—computer programs that self-replicate, mutate, compete and evolve. Populations of digital organisms often evolved the ability to perform complex logic functions requiring the coordinated execution of many genomic instructions. Complex functions evolved by building on simpler functions that had evolved earlier, provided that these were also selectively favoured. However, no particular intermediate stage was essential for evolving complex functions. The first genotypes able to perform Read More ›

William Lane Craig is not only one of the world’s leading Christian apologists but he has actually made outstanding original contributions to philosophy. Yes, Craig publishes popular-level books. Unlike Dawkins, however, who in 20-years plus has been purely a popularizer (of Darwinian evolution, materialist science, and atheism), Craig continues to publish at the highest levels of the academy addressing scholars of the highest caliber (and gaining their respect). Dawkins, by contrast, increasingly appeals to the lowest common denominator. It’s in this light that Dawkins glib dismissal of Craig should be viewed:

Bret Stevens’ article today in the WSJ, “The Totalities of Copenhagen,” again shows the strong parallels between the global warming debate and the evolution debate, especially with the proclivity of AGW and evolution advocates to quash all dissent. Consider, from his piece, the following characteristics of the AGW advocates: • Revolutionary fervor: There’s a distinct tendency among climate alarmists toward uncompromising radicalism, a hatred of “bourgeois” values, a disgust with democratic practices. So President Obama wants to cut U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 83% from current levels by 2050, levels not seen since the 1870s—in effect, the Industrial Revolution in reverse. Rajendra Pachauri, head of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, insists that “our lifestyles are unsustainable.” Al Gore Read More ›