Intelligent Design

The British Centre for “Science” Education (Great Britain’s attempt to emulate the NCSE in the U.S.) appears to have faded into the oblivion, meaninglessness, and ultimate absurdity that its philosophy has attempted to promote. From BCSE Revealed: They are whittled down to the real hard core. Those who are left are those who simply refuse to believe it has failed: whether because they’ve invested too much time or reputation for their pride to admit it, or whatever.

Recently, I received an e-mail from someone well known in the American Scientific Affiliation, an American organization of Christians in science, asking me to mute my criticism of its worse-than-useless policies in dealing with the current anti-religious materialist agenda. The note followed on the heels of “Public questions for Denyse O’Leary” (and eventually an “open letter to Bill Dembski and Denyse O’Leary”)

Incidentally, while I am here, anyone know what’s with the “Public” questions and “open” letter stuff?

Usage note for composers of public questions and open letters: Dearest muffintins, if you put something on theWorld Wide Web, it IS public and open. That’s what putting it on the Web means. So you don’t need to tell me or anybody else that it is public or open.

Well, anyhow, below follow some “public” answers. It is a longish post in which I say things like,

Message to American Association for the Advancement of Science: In a country where individuals have civil rights and the majority of people who work to pay your bills are professing Christians, it would be very unwise to be “inherently hostile” to the Christian faith. So we will assume, for now at least, that whatever happened was only a misunderstanding or a mistake.

About the American Scientific Affiliation: Is it possible that the ASA types are just bright guys living in fear? The whole sense I get from years of monitoring the ASA list is of a bunch of people who act as if they really think that materialism has won and they must live in the ruins, and hope materialists will behave respectfully toward them.

The trouble is, as I realized while researching The Spiritual Brain, materialism has lost. Lost big time. Materialists sense it and they are frantic. …

But first, a brief summary: Read More ›

Here are some extracts from a recent paper by James Hartle and Mark Srednicki at arXiv.org. So, if we’re not typical, are we special? And is our specialness more than just having big brains and being successful at passing on our genes? ABSTRACT: Bayesian probability theory is used to analyze the oft-made assumption that humans are typical observers in the universe. Some theoretical calculations make the selection fallacy that we are randomly chosen from a class of objects by some physical process, despite the absence of any evidence for such a process, or any observational evidence favoring our typicality. It is possible to favor theories in which we are typical by appropriately choosing their prior probabilities, but such assumptions should Read More ›

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Darwinists often cite the inverted retina (backward wiring) of the vertebrate eye as a prime example of bad design and therefore as evidence that no right-thinking designer would have done things that way. On the ID side, it’s been clear that the Darwinists’ received wisdom here is not nearly so clear cut and that there can be good functional reasons for an inverted retina (see Michael Denton on this subject here). A recent article in PNAS now indicates that living optical fibers create a clear passage for light to the light-sensitive cells at the back of the eye. Concerning his research in this area, Andreas Reichenbach remarks, “Nature is so clever. This means there is enough room in the eye Read More ›

Sign the “I Love Lucy” petition at TheBRITES.org.

I have no “philosophical axe to grind” in this discussion. Philosophically, the notion of a beginning of the present order of Nature is repugnant to me. I am simply stating the dilemma to which our present fundamental conception of physical law leads us. I see no way round it; but whether future developments of science will find an escape I cannot predict. The dilemma is this: Surveying our surroundings, we find them to be far from a “fortuitous concourse of atoms”. The picture of the world, as drawn in existing physical theories shows arrangements of the individual elements for which the odds are multillions to 1 against an origin by chance. Some people would like to call this non-random feature of the world purpose or design; but I will call it non-committally anti-chance. We are unwilling in physics that anti-chance plays any part in the reactions between the systems of billions of atoms and quanta that we study; and indeed all our experimental evidence goes to show that these are governed by the laws of chance. Accordingly, we sweep anti-chance out of the laws of physics–out of the differential equations. Naturally, therefore, it reappears in the boundary conditions, for it must be got into the scheme somewhere. By sweeping it far enough away from the sphere of our current physical problems, we fancy we have got rid of it. It is only when some of us are so misguided as to try to get back billions of years into the past that we find the sweepings all piled up like a high wall and forming a boundary–a beginning of time–which we cannot climb over.

A way out of the dilemma has been proposed which seems to have found favour with a number of scientific workers. I oppose it because I think it is untenable, not because of any desire to retain the present dilemma, I should like to find a genuine loophole. But that does not alter my conviction that the loophole that is at present being advocated is a blind alley.

Eddington AS. 1931. The end of the world: from the standpoint of mathematical physics. Nature 127:447-453.
Read More ›

Another icon of evolution, the world famous fossil “Lucy” was found to not be in the modern human lineage at all. The interesting part of this is that this is extremely newsworthy but because it casts a very unflattering light on so many scientists who, uncritically it seems, placed Lucy in the modern human line of descent, you won’t find it widely reported except in the Darwin-denier blogs and websites. This strategy is common when embarrassing mistakes are found in widely accepted evolutionary dogma. Keep it mum and let the embarrassing news become common knowledge over a long span of time. Haeckel’s embryos are a fine example of it. Apr. 16, 2007 0:21 | Updated Apr. 16, 2007 15:39 Israeli Read More ›

Photosynthesis research on yellowtops: Macroevolution in progress. Kutschera U, Niklas KJ. Institut fur Biologie, Universitat Kassel, Heinrich-Plett-Str. 40, 34109 Kassel, Germany. My emphasis. The vast majority of angiosperms, including most of the agronomically important crop plants (wheat, etc.), assimilate CO(2) through the inefficient C(3) pathway of photosynthesis. Under ambient conditions these organisms loose about 1/3 of fixed carbon via photorespiration, an energetically wasteful process. Plants with C(4) photosynthesis (such as maize) eliminate photorespiration via a biochemical CO(2)-pump and thus have a larger rate of carbon gain. The genus Flaveria (yellowtops, Asteraceae) contains not only C(3) and C(4) species, but also many C(3)-C(4) intermediates, which have been interpreted as evolving from C(3) to fully expressed C(4) metabolism. However, the evolutionary significance Read More ›

This annual competition teaches Darwin Scouts applied natural selection and survival of the fittest. This year’s winner, a 28 year old ex-motorcycle gang member from Oakland, California, shows no remorse after cheating. Darwin Scouts must be between the ages of 8 and 14. “Let him keep the prize,” says Finch. “There are no rules in evolution.” TheBRITES.org

Columbia Medical Professor John Marshall made the case for scientific acceptance of Intelligent Design last night before 100 or so guests, and found himself taking fire from his peers for his view. Marshall, a signer of the ‘Dissent From Darwinism’ document and vocal supporter of ID as science is once again under attack for his views, perhaps the most prominent opposer being MU Biology Professor Frank Schmidt, who says he counted “21 distortions, 15 half-truths, and 10 untruths” in Marshall’s presentation. He further asserted that what Marshall was really doing was “cloaking a narrow definition of Christianity, which (he) found personally offensive”, and that it “really hacks (him) off”. “It’s as much science as Darwinian evolution is science,” Marshall said. Read More ›

Michael Shermer and I will be debating evolution and intelligent design at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo on Thursday, April 26, 2007. Venue: Chumash Auditorium, located at the second floor of the University Union. The debate starts at 8:00 pm; doors open at 7:30 pm. The event is free to Cal Poly students, $10 at the door to general public — so have those Cal Poly IDs ready.

In “American Scientific Affiliation – whatever happened to its mission?”, Bill Dembski alludes to an earlier post of mine:

I write this post to put into perspective Denyse O’Leary’s recent remarks about the “gutting of a spiritual tradition from within” (see here — the relevance of her remarks to the ASA cannot be missed) and to highlight that with the efforts by Dawkins, Dennett, and Harris to ramp up their propaganda for atheism since this letter by Jack Haas was written suggests that the ASA was mistaken in shifting its emphasis away from “the sweeping tide of scientific materialism.”

He addresses something I find truly shocking:

About three years ago I received the following mass mailing from the ASA’s Jack Haas (I’ve known Jack since 1990 and our exchanges have always been cordial). In this letter he describes how the ASA had, in times past, been concerned to address “the sweeping tide of scientific materialism,” but had recently decided to change its emphasis to combat young-earth creationism.

adding,

If the problem with young-earth creationism is that it is off by a few orders of magnitude about the age of the earth and universe, the problem with scientific materialism is that is off by infinite orders of magnitude about what is ultimately the nature of nature.

appending the relevant letter.

Well, that sheds considerable light on why the 2000-member organization of Christians in science has been AWOL from the main battle for so long. In an age when the non-materialist taxpayer has been compelled to fund materialist propaganda in science textbooks, when science textbooks routinely promote long-exploded errors in order to advance Darwinism, and key Darwinists promote a widely publicized anti-God campaign, this premier organization of Christians in science has chosen to largely (or entirely) ignore these problems and instead … conduct a war against the doctrinal position of some fundamentalist denominations. (The belief that the Earth is less than 10,000 years old.)

It beggars belief, but it is apparently true. Read More ›

Here are some animations of the machinery of living cells, which I have encountered from various sources and put in alphabetical order for convenience. You might want to bookmark the file, as I plan to add to it, Read More ›

Even the most vociferous and vehement ID opponents (e.g., Richard Dawkins) admit that design in nature appears to be self-evident. Why then, the heroic efforts to explain design away, with such silliness as random variation and natural selection providing the engine that produced highly sophisticated biological software and information-processing systems? I remain completely bewildered by the fact that intelligent, educated people cannot recognize this obvious act of denial and desperation. On the other hand, perhaps they don’t want to recognize it, because evidence and logic might conflict with what they want to believe — that there is no design or ultimate purpose to anything. An obvious question remains: What might motivate this denial of the obvious? I believe that the Read More ›