Intelligent Design

Courtesy of the McLaurin Institute, I gave a talk last Thursday night at the Murphy Building of the University of Minnesota’s journalism school, on how North American media cover the intelligent design controversy and why the media are really the ID guys’ most useful unintentional ally – second only to Richard Dawkins, in my view. (Yes, yes, I know, this is a controversial viewpoint, but the Internet is a free country.)

Anyway, I wrote up my notes, and posted them, in case others were interested.

On “bottom up” materialism:

“Atheists who insist that the evidence for bottom up is “overwhelming” are overwhelmed by the force of their own convictions. They mistake rock-like conviction for rock-solid evidence.”

from Part 1: First, how and why did intelligent design get started and why did it grow so quickly?

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ID proponents are often accused of using “God-of-the-gaps” arguments. Of course, there are positive arguments for inferences to design in the natural world, but Del Ratzsch makes an interesting point about gap arguments in this interview.

He comments:

…the SETI program is a gap-searching project — trying to find signals which nature alone couldn’t or wouldn’t produce, then constructing alien-civilizations-of-the-gap arguments. Further, it is nowhere written in stone that nature has no causal or explanatory gaps of the relevant sort… gaps and gap arguments as such are unproblematic in principle.

[…]

…gaps have to do with e.g. mechanical causal histories, whereas design has to do with intentional histories. Those are in many cases intimately related issues. Gaps can be important clues to design, since depending on the context an actual mechanical, causal gap could suggest agency as a causal factor, and it is a relative short step from there to design. But the issues are distinct, and the ritual allegation that design views are all God-of-the-gap theories is inaccurate philosophically, as well as historically and contemporarily.

…It is also worth noting that if nature is designed and if it does contain causal or explanatory gaps, then any prohibition on gap theories will nearly guarantee that science — discarding one failed non-gap theory only by replacing it with another (not yet failed) [non]-gap theory — will not self-correct in the usual advertised way, and that science will never correctly understand the relevant phenomena.

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Marilynne Robinson, author of Gilead, which won both the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for fiction and 2005 National Book Critics Circle award, says what needs to be said, and no more, about Oxford Professor of the Public Understanding of Science Richard Dawkins’ inane crusade against religion And she says it brilliantly in “Hysterical scientism: The ecstasy of Richard Dawkins”. Reviewing his recent The God Delusion for November’s Harper’s, she notes that “There is a pervasive exclusion of historical memory in Dawkins’s view of science,”observing that, while it is true that Jews were persecuted in Christian Europe, … it is also true that science in the twentieth century revived and absolutized persecution by giving it a fresh rationale – Jewishness was not Read More ›

The first paragraph of the following quote appeared in a comment to Gil Dodgen’s post on the Quinn v. Dawkins debate on Irish radio. The succeeding paragraph is quite illuminating and included here. Question: What evidence (since Dawkins is so big on evidence) would help us to decide whether attributing responsibility to others for their actions is simply an adaptive device fobbed off on us by evolution or a reflection of an underlying moral structure to the universe (sometimes called “natural law” or “higher law”)? But doesn’t a truly scientific, mechanistic view of the nervous system make nonsense of the very idea of responsibility, whether diminished or not? Any crime, however heinous, is in principle to be blamed on antecedent Read More ›

At least I hope it’s just confusion. If not, then it looks an awful lot like persecution of a man for his personal views. To see what I’m talking about, go here. It’s stuff like this that makes me glad to see that a rival to Wikipedia is “days away from launching” and is supposed to be “more orderly” in the management of its entries. We’ll see.

Update: It looks like the incriminating part of the “Criticism” section has been promptly removed–after having been up for at least four days! Luckily for you, dear readers, I anticipated this move and saved it:
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Sorry for the serial posts, but so much is happening. David Quinn, a well-known Catholic commentator and journalist in Ireland recently debated Richard Dawkins on Irish radio. Dawkins comments in the debate: “I’m not interested in free will… Just as before Darwin, biology was a mystery — Darwin solved that…” David Quinn is one sharp cookie. (I love that Irish accent!) Check it out: http://origins.swau.edu/misc/Dawkins2.mp3

For those who are convinced that Darwinism has no meaningful philosophical or theological implications I offer the following quotes from biology textbooks. Special thanks go to ID colleague Casey Luskin.
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In a previous UD post I commented on an article by mathematician Granville Sewell, “A Mathematician’s View of Evolution.” Since then Granville and I have corresponded and he forwarded a follow-up piece entitled, “Can Anything Happen in an Open System?”

The essence of the thesis is as follows:

If an increase in order is extremely improbable when a system is closed, it is still extremely improbable when the system is open, unless something is entering which makes it NOT extremely improbable.

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I mentioned earlier my delight that the GMU Provost was willing to put his good name behind Francis Collins book tour: GMU Provost hosts The Language of God.

Well, the talk happened and it was amazing! Francis Collins gave his Christian testimony tonight pretty much along the lines of his book. He recounted his conversion from atheism to the Christian faith. He referred to the Design argument and the creation of the cosmos. The word “Design” kept slipping out of his mouth.
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Non-Darwinian evolutionary biologists may start to speak up in greater numbers as more ID conferences are held. An ID conference sometimes spotlights those who do not want to be called Darwinists or Darwinians, irrespective of their views on ID.

Readers may recall that at our University of Toronto ID conference a couple of weekends ago, I ran into an interesting biochem textbook author named Larry Moran, an evolutionary biologist who does not seem to be a Darwinist or a Darwinian. He proposes an alternative. Read More ›

The Sci Phi Show interview with Michael Behe is now available! Check it out!

Here is the link Michael Behe on Sci Phi Show.

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December 5, Penguin is coming out with The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Intelligent Design .Author Christopher Carlisle is the Episcopal Chaplain at the University of Massachusetts and W. Thomas Jr.l, is a freelance writer. Intelligent Design is one of the hottest issues facing parents and educators to day, but it can be hard to separate the facts from the heated rhetoric. This expert and objective guide gets to the bottom of the questions: What is Intelligent Design? Should it replace or complement traditional science? What’s all the fuss about? • Explains the terms, the controversy, and the involvement of the American courts • Indispensable guide for concerned educators and parents • Written by an expert in the field I wonder Read More ›

The “modern synthesis” is dead

Allen MacNeill

This echoes exactly the words of Eric Davidson and Stephen J. Gould. Below is the full quote in context:
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Why there is an intelligent design controversy, reason xxx xxx xxx …. Logically derived from confirmable evidence, evolution is understood to be the result of an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection. [ … ] Differences exist between scientific and spiritual world views, but there is no need to blur the distinction between the two. Nor is there need for conflict between the theory of evolution and religious faith. Science and faith are not mutually exclusive. Neither should feel threatened by the other. – 39 Nobel laureates writing writing to the Kansas State Board of Education , via the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity: Nobel Laureates Initiative (September 9, 2005) Toss this one in the “why the intelligent Read More ›

The readers at Uncommon Descent are often a good source of feedback for the topics which interest them. To that end, I’d like to address a question asked by one of our readers, David vun Kannon, about the rift between ID and Creationist communities.
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