Intelligent Design

Darwin wrote of himself:

I attempted mathematics [at Cambridge University ], and even went during the summer of 1828 with a private tutor (a very dull man) to Barmouth, but I got on very slowly. The work was repugnant to me, chiefly from my not being able to see any meaning in the early steps of algebra. This impatience was foolish, and in after years I have deeply regretted that I did not proceed far enough at least to understand something of the great leading principles of mathematics; for men thus endowed seem to have an extra sense. But I do not believe that I should ever have succeeded beyond a very low grade.

Autobiography (p. 58 of the 1958 Norton edition)

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In a post earlier today Denyse responded to a student’s charge that ID is a “God of the gaps” scientific show stopper.  Apparently, the student assumes if a researcher performs a scientific investigation of a phenomenon and concludes that design by an intelligent agent is the best explanation for the phenomenon, the matter is then settled and all further scientific inquiry is foreclosed.  But that is not the way science works.  All scientific conclusions are tentative and contingent.  Popper put the proposition this way: “Science does not rest on solid bedrock.  The bold structure of its theories rises, as it were, above a swamp.  It is like a building erected on piles.  The piles are driven down from above into the swamp, Read More ›

See the cartoon below by Hiromi Makita in full size here and here in hi resolution. From: Japanese Scientists Growing More Interested in Intelligent Design by Rob Crowther.

Certain individuals associated with the Templeton Foundation see it as their duty to put as much distance as possible between the foundation and intelligent design. The most recent case is Billy Grassie’s explanation of how the Templeton Foundation could have been in their right minds when they awarded me a $100,000 book grant back in 1999: “The Case of the Missing Book: Setting the Record Straight on William Dembski, the Templeton Foundation, and Intelligent Design.” (Go here and here for earlier posts on this topic at UD). Grassie was responding to a piece by Joseph Campana at ResearchID.org (go here), and Campana has now provided a detailed reply (go here). I therefore don’t see the need to offer a detailed Read More ›

A student appended a comment to one of my blog posts, charging that intelligent design is just a God of the Gaps argument (if we assume design we cannot learn very much about the world), and asking for a response. Here it is, and here is an excerpt: “The concern you expressed above, that an inference of design means that “we wouldn’t learn very much about the world”, beautifully captures the default position of defenders of materialism – whether they claim to be churchgoers or not – and that may be where you first encountered it. (I am not saying that you are a materialist; I am saying that you have beautifully captured their default position.) Their view makes sense, Read More ›

I am writing to draw the attention of anyone who may not have seen it to the NYT Magazine this past Sunday (March 4). The cover story, “Darwin’s God,” by one Robin Marantz Henig, takes the NYT’s usual wide-eyed, credulous approach to all things Darwinian—in this case, giving us an atrocious farrago of self-contradictory Evolutionary Psychology Just-So Stories for the origin of relgious belief. The badness of the article must be read to be believed, but just as a sample, my favorite non sequitur is on page 43. There it is recounted how 5-year-olds are already able to make the vital distinction between what people believe to be the case and what really is the case. This legitimate and very Read More ›

Both Skeptic Forum and Krauze at TelicThoughts are reporting that quotations of Jonathan Wells are appearing on Starbucks coffee cups. “Darwinism’s impact on traditional social values has not been as benign as its advocates would like us to believe. Despite the efforts of its modern defenders to distance themselves from its baleful social consequences, Darwinism’s connection with eugenics, abortion and racism is a matter of historical record, and the record is not pretty.” Dr. Jonathan Wells, biologist and author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design This is the second Discovery Institute CSC fellow to appear on a Starbucks Coffee cup. The first was Wesley Smith. We need a cartoonist. How about a cartoon of Darwinists at Read More ›

Nobody seems to be blogging these days, including me, but a friend sent me something interesting: I’ve often said that the ID guys owe a good deal of their success to their opposition, and here is an example of just what I mean, kindly provided by ID embryologist Jonathan Wells’s Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design (Regnery, 2006), about Paul Mirecki: From Chapter 15 (p. 173): Anti-Christian zealots are often in the forefront of attacks on intelligent design. In 2005, the chairman of the University of Kansas Religious Studies Department, atheist Paul Mirecki, proposed to teach a course titled “Intelligent Design Creationism and Other Mythologies.” Mirecki boasted on a web site that “fundies” would see the course as a Read More ›

Recently, a friend wanted some help in explaining to a hostile audience (1) why there is an ID controversy, (2) why it gets bigger, and (3) why it is not going away.

He was facing an audience, I expect, who would rather believe conspiracy theories than evaluate evidence.

His audience is probably a lost cause, but it may be worth a try if lunch is served.

Conspiracy theorists usually believe themselves more virtuous than their mythical conspirators, so their theories provide both pretended knowledge and pretended virtue at once. As a result, the theories are pretty hard to disconfirm by evidence. Read More ›

In a recent column on the “lost tomb of Jesus,” Frank Pastore observes ,

Poor James Cameron. He wanted some of that Da Vinci Code action so badly that he jumped on a 27 year old story line that everyone else in Hollywood had wisely passed on. He ignored so many early warning signs, too. When he was hav-ing trouble early on finding A, B, or even C list “scientific experts” who were willing to throw their careers away if they would only validate his silly theories – and they all continued saying no – he didn’t let that slow him down one bit. He pressed on and signed the minor league guys. And later, when the best he could come up with for his advance publicity hook was to claim statistically similar names and unrelated DNA samples – He still didn’t pull the plug – even though any-one who has ever seen just one episode of CSI is sharp enough to spit out the bait. Read More ›

In response to the post at ResearchID.org on Templeton’s funding of ID (go here), their Newsroom put up the following on its website: In response to errors and misrepresentations stated in the February 28, 2007 ResearchID.com blog post: The John Templeton Foundation has never made a call-for-proposals to the ID Community. The Henry Schaefer grant was from the Origins of Biological Complexity program. Schaefer is a world’s leading chemist, and his research has nothing whatsoever to do with ID. Bill Dembski’s grant was not for the book “Free Lunch”. Dembski was given funds to write another book on Orthodox Theology, which was not on ID, however he has never written the book. From our FAQ… Does the Foundation support I.D.? Read More ›

In the recent discussion on this blog and elsewhere about the Templeton Foundation distancing itself from ID, there’s been no mention that in 1999 the Templeton Foundation had a brief dalliance with ID. That year, in Santa Fe, Paul Davies convened a private conference titled “Complexity, Information, and Design: An Appraisal.” In attendence at the conference were Sir John Templeton himself, Charles Harper, Paul Davies, Charles Bennett, Gregory Chaitin, Niels Gregersen, Stuart Kauffman, Harold Morowitz, Ian Stewart, Laura Landweber, and yours truly. The proceedings of that conference then appeared with Oxford in 2003, edited by Niels Gregersen, under the new title From Complexity to Life: On the Emergence of Life and Meaning. Design, however, figured centrally in the discussions of the original conference. Moreover, the original title of the conference, “Complexity, Information, and Design,” was mine — I recommended it to Charles Harper, who then mentioned it to Paul Davies, who then ran with it.

At the time, I was in regular touch with Charles Harper, a senior administrator with the Templeton Foundation and currently a public voice of the foundation expressing disapproval of ID. He had received a preprint of my book The Design Inference, had it vetted in-house (notably by British statistician David Bartholomew), and found it not entirely without merit. Indeed, at the time we discussed expanding Templeton’s “portfolio” to include some representation of ID. A year or two later, Templeton interest in ID dried up. The official story has always been that ID is bad science, bad theology, and bad politics. But I would suggest that the real reason is Templeton’s craving for respectability among the scientific elites, and ID, for now, is too iconoclastic for Templeton’s comfort.

It might interest readers of this blog to know that Charles Harper and I had explored a much bigger follow-up conference to the 1999 conference in Santa Fe. What follows is a conference proposal that I sent to Harper in 1999. At the time, he was interested in making this conference happen. I would still be interested in doing a conference like this and would welcome Templeton’s involvement. Read More ›

Here’s a pro-ID cartoon that appeared in the Tokyo Sekai Nippo:

Mustafa Akyol presents a report on Turkey’s first ID conference here. Speakers included Paul Nelson, David Berlinski, Mustafa, John Lennox, and Alpaslan Açıkgenç.

For those not familiar with Mustafa, you can listen to lectures by him at the MacLaurin Institute website (scroll down and look for his name). He shared the podium with UD’s Denyse O’Leary during one lecture.

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On another UD thread there was discussion about an amazing piece of biological molecular machinery and the deficiencies of Darwinian processes to account for it. The bottom line is that Darwinists are looking in the wrong place for an explanation (random variation and natural selection), just as alchemists did when trying to figure out how to transform lead into gold (chemistry doesn’t deal with the nucleus of the atom). They both represent entirely inapplicable explanatory categories for the problems under consideration.
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