Intelligent Design

Back in 2005, David Berlinski responded to James Randi’s attempt to bribe the Smithsonian to suppress showing THE PRIVILEGED PLANET. Enjoy Berlinski’s response by clicking here.

Here is one consequence of evolution being used to justify strict continuity between humans and other forms of life. Discovery Institute’s persistent stress on humans being made in the image of God and that not being a privilege extended to the rest of the animal world makes more and more sense. This action in Spain may for now seem benign, but I sense lunacy around the corner (nice to know that Peter Singer is in on this): Spanish parliament to extend rights to apes Wed Jun 25, 2008 4:27pm EDT By Martin Roberts MADRID (Reuters) – Spain’s parliament voiced its support on Wednesday for the rights of great apes to life and freedom in what will apparently be the first Read More ›

I started reading Lenski’s full paper myself to see what raw data was provided and I got no farther than the first paragraph beyond the abstract when I encountered a bias error that a chance worshipper would never notice. My emphasis: At its core, evolution involves a profound tension between random and deterministic processes. Natural selection works systematically to adapt populations to their prevailing environments. However, selection requires heritable variation generated by random mutation, and even beneficial mutations may be lost by random drift. Moreover, random and deterministic processes become intertwined over time such that future alternatives may be contingent on the prior history of an evolving population. The bold portion is patently wrong. Selection operates on any heritable variation Read More ›

Uncommon Descent member AussieID brought up the point in my previous article that belief in God tends to fall off with increasing IQ. I countered with the point that the very highest IQs tend to come back around, not full circle to a belief in a personal God (such as the God of Abraham), but to a belief in a designed universe which is more or less categorized as “deism”. I offered examples of famous high IQ deists such as Albert Einstein, Leonardo Da Vinci, Benjamin Franklin, Voltaire, and even Antony Flew.

Curious, and uncertain how strong the correlation is between high genius and deism, I googled around a bit and stumbled upon Christopher Michael Langan who has been billed by the media, including 20/20, as the smartest man in America with a measured IQ of 195. His life is both surprising and fascinating in many ways.

However, the biggest surprise of all was that Mr. Langan is an IDist!

Langan is a fellow of the International Society for Complexity, Information and Design (ISCID), a professional society which promotes intelligent design, and has published a paper on his CTMU in the society’s online journal Progress in Complexity, Information, and Design in 2002. Later that year, he presented a lecture on his CTMU at ISCID’s Research and Progress in Intelligent Design (RAPID) conference. In 2004, Langan contributed a chapter to Uncommon Dissent, a collection of essays that question evolution and promote intelligent design, edited by ISCID cofounder and leading intelligent design proponent William Dembski.

Asked about creationism, Langan has said:

“I believe in the theory of evolution, but I believe as well in the allegorical truth of creation theory. In other words, I believe that evolution, including the principle of natural selection, is one of the tools used by God to create mankind. Mankind is then a participant in the creation of the universe itself, so that we have a closed loop. I believe that there is a level on which science and religious metaphor are mutually compatible.”

Langan has said he does not belong to any religious denomination, explaining that he “can’t afford to let [his] logical approach to theology be prejudiced by religious dogma.” He calls himself “a respecter of all faiths, among peoples everywhere.”

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PZ Myers at the Panda’s Thumb draws our attention to an exchange between Andrew Schlafly and Richard Lenski (the impetus for the exchange is Lenski’s work running tens of thousands of generations of E. coli to produce some interesting, or not so interesting, evolution as the case may be). Myers thinks Lenski gets the better of the exchange. I would draw your attention to Lenski’s seething contempt and ask whether it betrays strength or weakness.

In the latest Gallup poll in a 26-year series asking the same questions, only 14% of Americans are chance worshippers when it comes to evolution. The other 86% believe an intelligent agent was involved. Of course the poll names the intelligent agent “God” but you know what my old pal William Shakespeare had to say about that – “a rose by any other name would smell as sweet”. Imagine what the numbers would be like if criticism of evolution by chance & necessity were allowed into the childhood secular indoctrination program (a.k.a. public schools). No wonder the chance worshippers freak out over the thought of having their lame hypothesis discussed in an open manner. If, in the absence of criticism, Read More ›

I watch very little television, but I enjoy The History Channel (THC). I’ve learned a lot from it. When it comes to hard science and engineering they do a very good job. I’ve particularly enjoyed their programs about the history of aviation, since I’m a software engineer in the aerospace R&D industry with hundreds of hours of airtime in hang gliders and have a special interest in aerodynamics and aviation history.

When it comes to aviation, THC gets it right, virtually all of the time.

It was thus with trepidation that I watched “How Life Began” last evening. The title of the show was a dead giveaway about what I would see, hear, and experience. The title of the show should have been “How Did Life Begin?” and the answer should have been, “No one has the faintest idea.”

But no, we are presented with endless speculation that doesn’t withstand even the most trivial scrutiny, and are given the impression that “science” has the solution well in hand, with only minor details to be filled in.

We are also greeted with the usual obligatory assurances that “religion” and “evolution” are perfectly compatible, if one has a proper intellectually and materialistically enlightened interpretation of religion*. White-collared Fr. Coyne is prominently displayed as an apologist for this thesis, and assures viewers that “intelligent design” is superbly unnecessary as an explanation for the origin of life. Eugenie Scott would be proud of him.

The big problem with “How Life Began” is that no hard questions are ever asked, much less addressed. We take a journey into the Life, Inc. factory, where all the mysteries of the origin of life are explained.

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This is funny stuff. Jason Rosenhouse, an incurable chance worshipper, fawns over Ken Miller’s gratuitous ID bashing, then goes all negative when Miller starts mouthing telic code-phrases like “the universe was waiting for us” and that “a human-like intelligence was the inevitable result of evolution”. Go to Rosenhouse’s blog at the link above for the rest of the laugh riot.

Core ID and ID-compatible hypotheses have various predictions. For example, there’s the confirmed predictions related to junk DNA and genetic nature of the platypus, the predictions about designer drugs, long-term preservation mechanisms for conserving information that is not currently implemented, and retroviruses being capable of being used to implement designed changes. At this time the scientific research we have so far does not provide conclusive positive evidence for some of these predictions, although there are tantalizing glimpses that such predictions may become known to be true. There’s also some types of observed changes that happen so rapidly and repeatedly that they would seem to defy being within the domain of strictly Darwinian processes. But such research is just beginning. (And Ken Miller claims that ID cannot make predictions and research cannot occur…)

But then there’s the predictions specific to ID-compatible hypotheses such as front-loading.
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An anthology that I started ten years ago is, with the help of two good friends and colleagues, finally out. It is titled The Patristic Understanding of Creation: An Anthology of Writings from the Church Fathers on Creation and Design and can be ordered here. For the table of contents, go here. This is the first book from my own imprint, Erasmus Press (www.erasmuspress.net). The plan is to publish books, journals, and curriculum materials through it — despise not the day of small beginnings! Here is the cover illustration. Further down is the preface.

PREFACE

This anthology might have been published in 1998. Instead, it now appears in 2008, ten years later. For many books, ten years is an eternity and spells the difference between a book that is current or passé. Fortunately, the writings of the Church Fathers are of perennial interest. Going back to Roman and Byzantine times, these writings are basic to Christian theology and have set the standard for how Christians understand creation.

The need for this anthology has persisted – and indeed grown more urgent – in the years since it was first conceived. In the summer of 1998, the journal Origins & Design published a dialogue featuring Jonathan Wells, John Mark Reynolds, and Howard Van Till (available online at www.arn.org/odesign/od191/od191.htm). Van Till, in the mid-1990s, had published a number of articles arguing for creation’s “functional integrity,” by which he meant that God, in creation, had given the world all the capacities it needs to organize and transform itself.

Van Till’s bogey, throughout these discussions, was what he called “extra-natural assembly” – that God subsequent to creation needed to intervene for nature to accomplish things that, left to herself, nature could never do. For Van Till, a world requiring extranatural assembly is unworthy of the deity. More worthy, according to him, is for God to create a world that is “fully gifted” with all the capacities it might ever need to accomplish God’s purposes. Van Till portrays a God who creates a world that, once created, requires further intervention as a miser: such a Creator ungenerously withholds from the world capacities that it might usefully have possessed to carry out its business (which Van Till calls its “formational economy”). Read More ›

Unraveling these crop circles constitutes a design inference that doesn’t just tell us that something was designed but also tells us something about the knowledge of the designer: SOURCE: go here.

I’ve known Karl Giberson over a decade. In the early days, he was a respectful critic of ID. That now seems to have changed with the publication of his most recent book, Saving Darwin: How to Be a Christian and Believe in Evolution (go here for the Amazon listing). The subtitle is curious. Ordinarily one believes in a religion and attains competence in a field of scientific inquiry (does it matter if I believe that quarks really exist? isn’t it enough that I can apply the standard model?). Giberson’s subtitle inverts our ordinary epistemic attitudes (was it intentional?). The title is more interesting still — Saving Darwin. Why should anyone want to save Darwin? Aren’t his ideas strong enough so Read More ›

Darwin’s theory of evolution through natural selection, which was already as well established as the theory of gravity, has taken a big leap forward. According to the New Scientist (see Dave Scot’s post earlier today), E.Coli bacteria have evolved the ability to digest citrate, after only 44,000 generations. “It’s the first time evolution has been caught in the act of making such a rare and complex new trait,” says New Scientist reporter Bob Holmes. Biologists have known for a long time that the same mechanism that induces drug resistance in bacteria is responsible for the evolution of human brains and human consciousness, but this new experiment is spectacular confirmation of this theory. Now that evolution through natural selection is more Read More ›

Since I don’t believe in angels, devils, and things of that nature understand that the devil in the title is a metaphor for positive atheists. I wanted to point out that as soon as the atheists have vanquished the more blatant god bothering creationists from post-modern western civilization they’re going to go after the so-called theistic evolutionists. If any one of the theistic evolutionists thinks that the likes of Richard Dawkins, PZ Myers, or their ilk are going to be happy working side by side with serious theists of any stripe then they have another think coming. I wrote in a comment that theistic evolutionists are spineless appeasers. So too are the positive atheists who embrace them. It won’t last. Read More ›