Intelligent Design

I’m pleased to announce the IDEA Center’s new Executive Director has just rolled out her own website:

IntellectualHonesty.info

I met with Dr. Crocker recently at a screening of the movie Expelled. She will be featured prominently in the movie!

The Darwinists have framed the ID debate as being about what should and should not be taught in the public school science classroom. I speculate that the debate over the public school classroom is another example of Bulverism.

As I pointed out here, the real issue is whether life is designed. If so, most every other question pales in comparison. And also lost in the Darwinist Bulverism is whether individuals in universities will have the chance to answer the question of design for themselves, and whether these individuals will have the freedom to tell others what they discover.

The whole time I was a part of the GMU IDEA club, our club officially refrained from taking a position on what should or should not be taught in science classes both in the public schools and universities. Not that the issue was unimportant, but the issue was not to be the focus of IDEA at GMU. In fact, I personally have lobbied that for the time being, instead of the science classroom, ID and creation science could be discussed and studied elsewhere. [See: My correspondence with Eugenie Scott on ID in the universities.]
Read More ›

Recently, I was interviewed by a fellow journalist who wanted me to explain why the Council of Europe thought that intelligent design theory was a threat to human rights. I said quite honestly I hadn’t a clue. If they are post-modernists, their views can be fact-free. The relevant question might be “What do you guys smoke these days?” Finally, this morning, I stumbled on an answer that at least moves the Council of Europe from the realm of toxic smoke to the realm of coherence. They’re still wrong, at least as far as North America is concerned, but at least they are now making sense. Here’s a short trail of correspondence that explains it.

For many years I was an avid hang glider pilot, and one of my specialties in aerospace R&D is Guidance, Navigation and Control software development for precision-guided airdrop systems.

During many of my hang glider flights I had the opportunity to observe, from an unusual perspective, hawks in their native environment — the air. Flying wingtip to wingtip at the same airspeed, one gets a profound appreciation for these amazing creatures and their GN&C.

On a number of my hang glider flights, hawks came up close. They always seemed to be curious about me, flying my lumbering 32-foot-wingspan Dacron and aluminum aircraft. Up this close, I could observe the subtle adjustments they made in their primary feathers to compensate for the turbulence in the air, and they would glance furtively at me.
Read More ›

Prof Richard Dawkins is retiring from his position at Oxford. There is a search underway for the next Charles Simonyi Professorship in the Public Understanding of Science. Who would we at UD like to take up this position and why? http://www.admin.ox.ac.uk/fp/wd9-018.shtml

{Frost122585and Gerry Rzeppa started an interesting off topic train of thought on Leibniz and design of “machines of nature” vs “artificial automata” that is worth its own thread. I copied those posts below and will delete the others. DLH}
——————-
Frost122585
In Leibniz’s Monadology he talks about the difference between man made art and the art of God- which for me creates a very interesting problem for ID- one that could if described and understood correctly – lead to an even better understanding of Design in nature-

“Thus the organic body of each living being is a kind of divine machine or natural automaton, which infinitely surpasses all artificial automata. For a machine made by the skill of man is not a machine in each of its parts. For instance, the tooth of a brass wheel has parts or fragments which for us are not artificial products, and which do not have the special characteristics of the machine, for they give no indication of the use for which the wheel was intended. But the machines of nature, namely, living bodies, are still machines in their smallest parts ad infinitum. It is this that constitutes the difference between nature and art, that is to say, between the divine art and ours.”

Read More ›

From The Boston Globe: Can expectations influence how we judge the evidence?

SCIENTISTS AT CALTECH and Stanford recently published the results of a peculiar wine tasting. They provided people with cabernet sauvignons at various price points, with bottles ranging from $5 to $90. Although the tasters were told that all the wines were different, the scientists were in fact presenting the same wines at different prices.

The subjects consistently reported that the more expensive wines tasted better, even when they were actually identical to cheaper wines.

[…]

What they saw was the power of expectations. People expect expensive wines to taste better, and then their brains literally make it so. Wine lovers shouldn’t feel singled out: Antonio Rangel, the Caltech neuroeconomist who led the study, insists that he could have used a variety of items to get similar results, from bottled water to modern art.

[…]

After the researchers finished their brain imaging, they asked the subjects to taste the five different wines again, only this time the scientists didn’t provide any price information. Although the subjects had just listed the $90 wine as the most pleasant, they now completely reversed their preferences. When the tasting was truly blind, when the subjects were no longer biased by their expectations, the cheapest wine got the highest ratings. It wasn’t fancy, but it tasted the best.

Read More ›

The latest issue of the on-line journal Anti-Matters published by the Sri Aurobindo International Center of Education in Pondicherry, India, includes reviews of Wells and Dembski’s “The Design of Life” and Mike Gene’s “The Design Matrix”, as well as my article “Is God Really Good?”. How is this question relevant to ID? The article makes the connection at the beginning: In debates over the theory of intelligent design, the “problem of evil” is frequently brought up by opponents of design: if we are the products of intelligent design, why is there so much evil and misery in the world? From a purely logical, or scientific, perspective, this problem is easy to deal with: Nature offers evidence of design–the question of Read More ›

Read the review and insightful excerpts about me at TheBRITES.org.

“5th Feb 2008 Dr Francis Collins discussed his views on science, faith, and the ease with which the two can be reconciled through a rejection of extremes, and an embrace of “harmony in the middle”. Collins emphasized that science does not provide us with the right instruments to prove the existence of God because God is outside of nature. Collins cited pointers to God in nature such as the “unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics,” and the precise tuning of physical constants during the Big Bang. Examples of such improbability suggest that there is a creator God. To justify a creator God that actually cares about humans, though, requires more than just science. Collins’ attack on Intelligent Design was one of the Read More ›

In any debate, it is always good strategy to acknowledge your opponent’s strongest points up front, effectively taking those points off the table. The evolutionist’s strongest points are the fact that science has been so successful to date in finding “natural” (unintelligent) causes in other areas of science, and the fact that the development of life, in many ways, simply “looks like” it was due to natural causes. On the other hand, there is virtually no evidence that natural selection can explain anything more than trivial changes, and the idea that it can account for the complexity of life is patently absurd. In all debates over evolution, our opponents emphasize the features of evolution which, admittedly, suggest natural causes (“a Read More ›

North America undergoing religious revolution? No way. Atheism is not growing significantly. Anti-depressant are definitely NOT the death of the soul, as Tom Wolfe thought Templeton Foundation offers L2 million pounds to find a non-spiritual source of belief in God

 The Reason for God by Timothy Keller is No. 18 on the NYT bestsellers list.  Over at First Things Anthony Sacramone has a great interview with Keller that includes this on the evolution debate:

 In The Reason for God, you make a very brief argument for the validity of evolution within a limited sphere. It would seem to me that apologists for the faith must address this issue at some point. But doing so can call into question the historicity of the Fall and the very need for a savior. How do you talk about evolution without confusing people?

Oh, it’s a little confusing, but actually I’m just in the same place where the Catholics are, as far as I can tell. The Catholic Church has always been able to hold on to a belief in a historical Fall—it really happened, it’s not just representative of the fact that the human race has kind of gone bad in various ways.

  Read More ›

Here.

New Scientist February 16, 2008 Dan Jones Pg. 40-43 heavily edited. Full text here. “William Paley, who argued that the natural world is full of designed complexity which must have a creator, would have considered the bacterial flagellum an excellent example. The flagellum, with its intricate arrangement of interconnecting parts, looks no less designed than a watch. Modern biology, of course, has no need for omniscient designers. Evolution – Richard Dawkins’s blind watchmaker – is all that is needed to explain the origin of complexity in nature. The bacterial flagellum has become a focal point in science’s ongoing struggle against unreason. The study of complex molecular systems has been given added impetus by the ID movement. ID claims that such Read More ›

When I first wrote “My Failed Simulation” (now on the discovery.org main page here and at Human Events) it really never even occurred to me that anyone would think I had actually tried such a simulation, or that I was claiming to have tried it. I thought it was pretty obvious that it was just a thought experiment, designed to get people to think about the alternative to ID, namely that physics (the Schrodinger equation plus the elemenary particles of physics plus the four known forces of physics) alone can explain computers, libraries full of science texts and novels, and the Internet. My point was, not only is this the officially accepted view of science today, but anyone who doubts Read More ›