Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community
Category

Books of interest

Historian Peter Harrison’s five best science and religion books

Harrison: If you look at the frequency of the word “religion”, no one talks about it much until the 17th century—this is true for English, originally Latin, and also the European vernacular languages, too. So, “religion” as a category is not really important to anyone until the modern period. With science, the practices that we regard as science went under a range of different labels. Read More ›

Privileged Address: An excerpt from Neil Thomas’s Taking Leave of Darwin

Neil Thomas: Through the lens of a celestial telescope, it is true, one can see little but the unfeeling immensity of that unremittingly hostile universe invoked by [Bertrand] Russell, but if we look around us here on Earth we can see a planet which seems entirely discontinuous with the rest of the observable cosmos and abounding in a host of benign phenomena so numerous that they tend to go largely unnoticed. Read More ›

One day, a longtime agnostic suddenly realized that Darwinism couldn’t be true

Witt: "Critics of intelligent design will have a hard time maligning Thomas as a “creationist in a cheap tuxedo.” He isn’t religious and is a longtime member of the British Rationalist Association, a group known for religious skepticism." Read More ›

Ten (or so) Anti-Intelligent Design Books You Should Read

I have posted the second video in my two part book recommendation series on the YouTube channel. In the previous video I highlighted many books that argue for intelligent design. My view is that proponents of design should face the strongest criticisms possible, and not be afraid of doing so. In line with this philosophy, in this video I talk about just a handful of the many books that attempt to refute ID. Again, I would be interested to know what others think are the best books that attempt to show ID is wrong. Ten (or so) Anti-Intelligent Design Books You Should Read

Ten (or so) Pro-Intelligent Design Books You Should Read

On the Design Disquisitions YouTube channel, I’ve posted a new video where I recommend several books of interest, specifically pro-ID literature. Most of the suggestions may be familiar to you, but hopefully there are a few that you’ve not read before. I also give a brief summary of the content of each book. I don’t claim that the books mentioned are necessarily the best, but I think anyone who wants to join the discussion needs to be familiar with some of these. Let me know what you would add to the list! Ten (or so) Pro-Intelligent Design Books You Should Read

Professional skeptic Michael Shermer takes on Stephen C. Meyer and his Return of God Hypothesis

In an age when the Raging Woke parasitize the world of ideas, banning everyone from Frank Turek through Richard Dawkins from public life (when not out setting fires and assaulting the non-Woke), it is worth nothing that Shermer’s 2020 book Giving the Devil His Due, is a defense of intellectual freedom. Read More ›

Larry Moran’s new book sounds like a scorcher

He thinks there must be something “seriously wrong” with science if people keep looking for new functions for junk DNA. What’s “wrong,” so far as the rest of us can see, is that researchers keep finding new functions that formerly-junk DNA performs, so they keep looking. For the same reasons as fisherfolk return to the well-stocked lake. Read More ›

From Bill Dembski: Automated driving and other failures of AI

Dembski: in the cossetted and sanitized environments that we have constructed for ourselves in the U.S., have no clue of what capabilities AI actually needs to achieve to truly match what humans can do. The shortfall facing AI is extreme. Read More ›

String theory skeptic Peter Woit reflects on Stephen Hawking

Peter Woit on Hawking's 2010 The Grand Design, co-written with Leonard Mlodinow: " I wrote about this book in some detail here. Put bluntly, it was an atrocious rehash of the worst nonsense about M-theory and the string theory landscape, with an argument for atheism thrown in to get more public attention. This is the sort of thing that has done a huge amount of damage to both the public understanding of fundamental physics, and even to the field itself." Read More ›

Bill Dembski on how a new book expertly dissects doomsday scenarios

Dembski: "At the end of the discussion, however, Kurzweil's overweening confidence in the glowing prospects for strong AI's future were undiminished. And indeed, they remain undiminished to this day (I last saw Kurzweil at a Seattle tech conference in 2019 — age seemed to have mellowed his person but not his views)." But Larson says it's all nonsense. Read More ›

How Darwinism wound its way into various schemes for improving American society

Scambray: Hofstadter softened Darwin, making his a “conservative” force, supporting the laissez-faire status quo. Others classified Darwin as a change agent, a precursor to social planning. These intermural quarrels aside, Watson demonstrates that progressivism “aimed a dagger at the heart of the Constitution.” … Read More ›

Why Michael Denton is an important but under-recognized figure in the ID community

Here’s an interesting assessment of non-Darwinian microbiologist Michael Denton’s work: in The Miracle of the Cell he concentrates on one example of fine-tuning after another… Biologists may have once held simplistic notions about the origin of life, back in the heady days following the iconic Miller-Urey experiment. They may have thought they were on the right track toward explaining life when the double helix was discovered in the 1950s. It might have seemed that the cell was simple enough to explain by a few accidents here and a handful of lucky chemical reactions there. Research since then has put that false hope to rest. Denton’s most famous work was his 1985 book Evolution: A Theory in Crisis. It was both Read More ›