Intelligent Design

Dawkins says Given that 93% of the National Academy does not believe in any kind of personal god, a statistician would expect that at least some members of Congress, if not a majority, would also be atheists. Yet, as far as I can discover, the number of avowed atheists among the 535 members of Congress is not 93%, not even 10%. It seems to be zero. What is going on here? I think we all know. Yeah, I think we all DO know, Richard. The National Academy membership is a self-elected body where your chances of becoming a member if you’re not an avowed atheist is akin to passing a camel through the eye of a needle. The National Academy Read More ›

A more apt title for Dawkins’ tome, based on his essay describing it, would be The Dawkins Delusion.

More pap from it:

If, as Francis Crick and Leslie Orgel once playfully speculated, life on this planet was deliberately seeded by a payload of bacteria in the nose cone of a rocket, we still need an explanation for the intelligent aliens who dispatched the rocket.

Playfully? Let’s see about that. Read More ›

Dawkins says Lamentably, the scientific education of most British and American students omits all mention of Darwinism, and therefore the only alternative to chance that most people can imagine is design. Hello? Earth to Richard Dawkins. Do you copy? From What Do The State Science Standards Say About Evolution and Intelligent Design? The Education Week Review According to a 2005 Education Week survey of state science standards from 41 states, 39 state standards documents offer some description of biological evolution and how it accounts for the diversity of species that exist today, while 35 of these documents go further and give similar treatment to Darwin’s principle of natural selection. Note that the title of the article has “Intelligent Design” in Read More ›

In the extreme, it never arrives at all. A case in point below. Dawkins says Intelligent, creative, complex, statistically improbable things come late into the universe, as the product of evolution or some other process of gradual escalation from simple beginnings. They come late into the universe and therefore cannot be responsible for designing it. In Dawkins’ case intelligence appears to have never arrived at all. What does he base his claim on that intelligence (among other things) come late into the universe? A sample size of one. In typical Darwinian fashion he takes one thing that he knows in the present (intelligence in the form of humanity appearing some billions of years into the history of the universe) and Read More ›

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Quantum computers are a reality and they indirectly speak to the issue of intelligent design and the Many Worlds Interpretation (MWI) of Quantum Mechanics.

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Richard Dawkins says As an outsider, I observe American culture polarizing fast, and religion is at the center of the action. Side note: Dawkins’ essay disappeared from his website after 3 days. I wonder if the thumbsters will accuse him of deleting embarrassing articles as they accuse us of doing? Something tells me Dawkins’ faux pas will escape mention over there. Can you spell “hypocrite”? Or how about “double standard”? I knew you could. Anyhow… As an outsider, I observe European culture deteriorating fast, and religion is at the center of the action. Rushing in to fill in the cultural power vacuum created by Christians abandoning their beliefs Muslims set fire to France. Europe, the birthplace of the Protestant church, Read More ›

A colleague of mine added Of Pandas and People to the Wikipedia’s list of Banned Books at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banned_books. It clearly qualifies under the American Library Association’s definition of a successfully challenged book: A challenge is an attempt to remove or restrict materials, based upon the objections of a person or group. A banning is the removal of those materials. Challenges do not simply involve a person expressing a point of view; rather, they are an attempt to remove material from the curriculum or library, thereby restricting the access of others. The positive message of Banned Books Week: Free People Read Freely is that due to the commitment of librarians, teachers, parents, students and other concerned citizens, most challenges are unsuccessful Read More ›

the presence of a creative deity in the universe is clearly a scientific hypothesis. Indeed, it is hard to imagine a more momentous hypothesis in all of science….the God Hypothesis is a proper scientific hypothesis

Richard Dawkins

Whoa!
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Here’s a first in Canada, maybe: A conference at the University of Toronto (September 29-20, 2006) on intelligent design and the universe/life that is not just the usual “God and science” snore – at least the organizers will do everything in their power to keep it from being the usual theistic evolution cop-out snooze. Here’s what you will NOT primarily hear: “Faith, you see, is about feelings and involves no evidence at all. Materialism is about facts because it is based on evidence. And, guess what, folks, materialism IS science! So if ever you get it into your little pinhead that you think you see design in the universe or life forms, or that you have consciousness or free will, rest Read More ›

ID is quietly advancing in the mother state of one-fourth of the American Presidents. I do not know if the advance of ID in Virginia means anything to Richard Dawkins, but 4 of his 17 scheduled stops in his God Delusion world-wide book tour will be in the Virginia/DC area! Coincidence?
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A key problem with the argument over Darwinian evolution (evolution by natural selection acting on random mutations) is that so few actual examples of speciation (new species forming) have ever been observed that we really have no way of knowing for sure whether Darwin had the right idea. I suspect that explains precisely why acceptance of Darwinism is so often treated as some kind of loyalty test for support for science in general. That is, the Darwinist is taking a great deal on faith. And those Darwinists who also happen to  be fanatics  by temperament behave just as other fanatics do when they think they have found certainty: They go about like bulls looking for a fight - demanding that you too, brudder, Read More ›

No friend to religion, Andrew Brown nonetheless says that Richard Dawkins’s “incurious and rambling” diatribe against religion “doesn’t come close to explaining how faith has survived the assault of Darwinism, opening with It has been obvious for years that Richard Dawkins had a fat book on religion in him, but who would have thought him capable of writing one this bad? Incurious, dogmatic, rambling and self-contradictory, it has none of the style or verve of his earlier works. It gets better from there – or worse, I guess, if you bought The God Delusion. Which reminds me to come to the point of this blog: When was the last time Dawkins had an original idea in biology? I don’t mean an Read More ›

Over at Evolution News and Views there is a notice about a new organization in the UK, Truth in Science, that seeks “…to promote good science education in the UK. Our initial focus will be on the origin of life and its diversity.” From their website: For many years, much of what has been taught in school science lessons about the origin of the living world has been dogmatic and imbalanced. The theory of Darwinian evolution has been presented as scientifically uncontroversial and the only credible explanation of origins. This is despite the National Curriculum which states: “Pupils should be taught… how scientific controversies can arise from different ways of interpreting empirical evidence (for example, Darwin’s theory of evolution). The Read More ›

I first got interested in alligators when I discovered, from zoologist Norbert Smith, that the “reptilian brain” theory – according to which alligators cannot show emotion because the mammalian brain (which they don’t have) must evolve first – can’t be true. Alligators are quite capable of showing emotion or curiosity about anything that they are capable of understanding. That includes sex and baby alligators. Their intellectual limitations come in part from the fact that they are exothermic (cold-blooded), and therefore cannot keep up activities for as long as endothermic (warm-blooded) animals. Now, I see Smith has written a book, summarizing a lifetime of research into the passive fear response. It has long been held that animals speed up their metabolism Read More ›

Paul Nelson spent yesterday morning in the editorial offices of Dagbladet, the main daily newspaper in Oslo, and fielded reader’s questions via the Internet. Approximately 1,000 emails came in. Here is the exchange: http://www.dagbladet.no/nyheter/2006/09/20/477320.html. Note that the title of the Dagbladet piece, “Hadde Darwin Rett?” means “Was Darwin Right?”