Intelligent Design

In my previous post where it was confirmed that Paul “PZ” Myers fooled the hosts of a private screening of “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed” by RSVPing to an invitation he never received I reserved judgement on Richard Dawkins, giving Dawkins the benefit of doubt that he may have been duped by Myers into thinking he was an invited guest at the private screening. Well, there is no longer any doubt. Richard Dawkins registered for the screening as “Clinton” Dawkins. How many of you knew Dawkins’ first name was Clinton? Registering for the event using a first name which he never uses for anything else is about as red-handed as you can get. Dawkins was fully aware he was sneaking into Read More ›

EXPELLED Controversy Top Issue in Blogosphere SANTA FE, N.M.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Something amazing happened yesterday. The controversy around Premise Media’s upcoming movie Ben Stein’s EXPELLED: No Intelligence Allowed became the hottest topic in the blogosphere. According to BlogPulse, a service of Nielsen Buzzmetrics, the issue held the number one slot throughout the day on Monday, March 24th (http://www.blogpulse.com). There were also over 800 results on Technorati (www.technorati.com). “It is amazing to see the reaction of PZ Myers, Richard Dawkins and their cohorts when one of them is simply expelled from a movie. Yet these men applaud when professors throughout the nation are fired from their jobs and permanently excluded from their profession for mentioning Intelligent Design,” said producer Mark Mathis. Mathis was Read More ›

R.S.V.P. is an abbreviation for the French “répondez s’il vous plaît” which means “please respond” and traditionally is appended on invitations so that the host knows who and how many guests to expect. Richard Dawkins and PZ Myers are running around saying they weren’t “gate crashers” at a pre-screening of “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed”. But that’s exactly what they were. PZ Myers claims he went through the same process to get a reservation for himself and a number of guests as all the other guests by going here Expelled – RSVP System ADDENDA: 3/25 There is no way to get to the URL above from the main page www.getexpelled.com. The above is not a publicized address. The links from the Read More ›

by K.D. Kalinsky “Either biological life required intelligent design or it did not. As with most problems in science, it is difficult to prove one option or another with absolute certainty. Instead, options can be evaluated against each other in an attempt to estimate which option is more likely. Even then, the fact that one option may be more likely than another does not ‘prove’ that it is actually the case. Instead, I will propose a way in which both options can be evaluated against each other. The results indicate that it seems highly likely that intelligent design was required for biological life.” PDF paper available here

An on line appeal for RD and PZ to make sacrifices in the interest of winning the “war on science”. Will they take the advice? “Richard and PZ, when it comes to Expelled, it’s time to let other people be the messengers for science. This is not about censoring your ideas and positions, but rather being smart, strategic, tactical, and ultimately effective in promoting science rather than your own personal ideology, books, or blog.” Go here.

Why was an American Darwin fan kicked out of the screening of Expelled? Templeton winner trashes design? The Big Bang as a creationist theory At last, a useful encyclopedia entry on intelligent design theory

Listen to it here.

A friend tells me there is quite the kadiddle going on over at Darwinist Web sites on account of PZ Myers getting the bum’s rush out of the recent Expelled screening. And he wasn”t let in  even though Richard Dawkins, also sneaking around, was let in and introduced. What, I wonder, did Dawkins say? Hi, I’m Richard Dawkins and, even though I live in Oxford, England, I just happened to be skulking around here this evening, so I …. (?) Gotta admire his initiative though. Rats, I can’t get a DVD out of the Expelled myself, and their show won’t open in Canada till way later than the States’ kickoff. I didn’t think of trying to sneak into a US showing because Read More ›

Darwinians objecting to Michael Behe’s Irreducible Complexity appeal to indirect “scaffolding” or Roman Arch routes that support the assembly and are later discarded. Now research shows cancer is caused by mutations in the CARD11 gene that forms a cytoplasmic scaffolding docking site for a signaling molecule.

If mutations in genes forming known scaffolding lead to cancer, why should we believe that numerous mutations needed to form genes to make hypothetical scaffolding will create properly functioning irreducible complex systems?

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The following is an edited extract from a Nature paper. It is an example of real ID research. Notice that the designers only used evolutionary techniques to very slightly tweak the enzymes scaffold structure that had been designed with “borrowed components” from existing enzymes tacked together.  The novel active site was completely intelligently designed. doi:10.1038/nature06879

Kemp elimination catalysts by computational enzyme design

“We designed eight enzymes with computationally designed active sites. In vitro evolution enhanced the computational designs, demonstrating the power of combining computational protein design with directed evolution for creating new enzymes.

Natural enzymes bind their substrates in a well-defined active site with precisely aligned catalytic residues to form highly active and selective catalysts for a wide range of chemical reactions. The design of stable enzymes with new catalytic activities is of great practical interest, with potential applications in biotechnology, biomedicine and industrial processes.

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Language matters. And my recent search on the terms “post-Darwinist” and “post-Darwinian” suggests that getting over Darwin may be catching on. Check the figures. I would not have named my personal ID news blog the Post-Darwinist in April 2005 if the use of the term then had been anything like what it is now. Someone else searched on “intelligent design”, minus the supposed chief culprits (you can do that with a Google Advanced search), also with some very interesting results. And all this in the year of ridiculous Darwin hagiography – with more to come in 2009! Excerpt: When I first started researching this controversy in 2001, I kept turning up promotional copy for products or ideas that show “intelligent Read More ›

Check out this CBN segment that features Ben Stein, David Berlinski and yours truly: GO HERE.

The BRITES today launched their crusade to lobby the Motion Picture Association to rate the documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed NC-17. Dr. Richard Knuther railed against Expelled‘s practice of reductio ad Hitlerum, questioned the morality of the producers of the documentary, and called the movie thought porn. More at TheBRITES.org.

While cleric Michael Heller disparages Intelligent Design, Chuck Colson observes: “John Scotus Eriugena is considered perhaps the first proponent of “intelligent design.” See: Learning from the Irish, Chuck Colson

“Observe the forms and beauties of sensible things,” he wrote, “and comprehend the Word of God in them. If you do so, the truth will reveal to you in all such things only He who made them.” . . .

See Colson’s full “Breakpoint” 3/17/2008
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Michael (Michal) Heller is a Polish cosmologist and Catholic priest and recipient of this year’s Templeton Prize.  Here he is over at FT bashing ID.  Adherents of the so-called intelligent design ideology commit a grave theological error. They claim that scientific theories that ascribe a great role to chance and random events in the evolutionary processes should be replaced, or supplemented, by theories acknowledging the thread of intelligent design in the universe. Such views are theologically erroneous. They implicitly revive the old Manichean error postulating the existence of two forces acting against each other: God and an inert matter; in this case, chance and intelligent design. There is no opposition here. Within the all-comprising Mind of God, what we call Read More ›