Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community
Category

Intelligent Design

Literature Bluffing, Part Deux — Or, The Deceived Leading The Deceived

I had no idea that my original literature-bluffing post would spark this much discussion, but I’m certainly pleased that it did. The entire history of Darwinian theory has been characterized by literature bluffing and legend accepted as fact. Phillip Johnson has observed that his challenges are not new, and that they have been dismissed with comments like, “These concerns were addressed long ago.” But when Phil checked the literature, he discovered that his concerns were not addressed with anything more convincing than glorified speculation. This Darwinian tradition persists. It was known in Haeckel’s day that his embryo drawings were faked, but these drawings persisted in public-school textbooks for more than a century. How could this have possibly happened in a Read More ›

What Behe Actually Said

For those who are interested in what Professor Behe actually said in Dover (instead of the distortions of his testimony in Judge Jones’ opinion), click on “more.”  [Thank you to tribune7 for sussing this out].

Read More ›

Thinkquote of the day: How do animals and plants become species, as in Darwin’s “Origin of Species”?

University of Bristol (England) bacteriologist Alan H. Linton went looking for direct evidence of speciation and concluded in 2001: “None exists in the literature claiming that one species has been shown to evolve into another. Bacteria, the simplest form of independent life, are ideal for this kind of study, with generation times of twenty to thirty minutes, and populations achieved after eighteen hours. But throughout 150 years of the science of bacteriology, there is no evidence that one species of bacteria has changed into another … Since there is no evidence for species changes between the simplest forms of unicellular life, it is not surprising that there is no evidence for evolution from prokaryotic [i.e., bacterial] to eukaryotic [i.e. plant Read More ›

BarryA Responds to His Critics at Panda’s Thumb

As I write this there have been 80 comments to my posts about the evidence issues implicated by the plaintiffs’ literature bluff at the Dover trial.  Our friends at Panda’s Thumb have also opened a thread to discuss my posts see (here) and also (here).  For those interested in my response to PT, read on.

Read More ›

What has disbelief in Darwinism cost American society?

 Recently, we have been discussing the (probably true) claim that Americans are less likely than others to believe Darwinism. As I noted in earlier discussions, American society gives its citizens greater rights than many other societies do to disagree with the elite and the privileged. And what may be the consequences of that?: “In the final episode of PBS’s television series, the narrator states that for decades after the 1925 Scopes trial “Darwin seemed to be locked out of America’s public schools.” When the Soviets launched Sputnik, the first man-made satellite, in 1957, according to the narrator, Darwin was restored to the curriculum and “long-neglected science programs were revived in America’s classrooms.” Yet during the supposedly benighted decades between 1925 Read More ›

Crocker, Sisson, Cordova, Chenette: TV special on ID in Higher Education

Caroline Crocker

Feature: The Intelligent Design Controversy in Higher Education
This week on The Coral Ridge Hour we look at Intelligent Design, a movement which is gaining adherents at colleges and universities around the world. But what about professors who dare to challenge evolution by presenting alternatives to students? As you are about to see, the consequences can be severe.

Read More ›

If materialism is true . . .

Terry Mirll sent me the following predictions and anti-predictions related to materialism.

If naturalistic materialism is true:

1. We are nothing but the sum of our parts. Our bodies are wholly explicable in terms of nature, and there is no aspect of our bodies that cannot be described in purely naturalistic terms, nor any means of describing ourselves other than naturalistic ones. Human beings are simply organic beings and nothing more, composed of organs which are composed of cells which are composed of molecules which are composed of atoms which are composed of sub-atomic particles (and, if string theory is valid, the particles are composed of various strings of energy), and that’s it. We are thus material beings and not spiritual ones. We have no souls. Consciousness is therefore nothing but a curious offshoot of biochemistry, a higher reasoning function of our brains that has arisen from the natural advantage afforded to us by both the size of the human brain and its level of complexity. It is NOT evidence that Man is a creature imago dei, but rather evidence of the power by which natural selection operating in tandem with random genetic mutation can operate.

THEREFORE, I PREDICT that scientists will one day construct a device capable of transporting a human body across vast regions of space–a device comparable to the “teleporter” as portrayed in the “Star Trek” TV series. It will disassemble a living human body at a molecular or sub-molecular level, transport those small bits of living organic material at high speed across great distance, and reassemble them to their original macroscopic configuration, with no ill effects to the body it has transported.

IF, HOWEVER, after several hundred years of scientific advance no such a device will have been formulated, this fact should be taken as an indication that naturalistic materialism is not true. Read More ›

Let’s Grade Mr. Than’s Journalism Project

Denyse, I would be interested in how you would grade Mr. Than’s article (see a couple of posts down)  if it were a project in a journalism class you were teaching.  I am not a journalist, but from my lay perspective he gets points off for: 1.  Value laden language.  Depending on one’s perspective, “near the bottom” could just as easily be “near the top” for independence of thought, and “low ranking” could be “high ranking” for a wholesome skeptical scientific attitude. 2.  Stating opinions as facts.  His wholesale adoption of ID’s opponent’s characterization of ID as factual statements, instead of statements of their opinion, is a mistake. On the positive side, he at least gave someone with an ID point Read More ›

This just in from evolutionary psychology: Hardwired to believe in God – part zillion and three

Bill’s recent exchange with an American sci jo who has suddenly discovered (how, I wonder?) that Darwinists’ promotion of evangelical atheism is a poor match for their claims of religious neutrality made me decide to cross-post an item from the Post-Darwinist. I keep up with the steady stream of nonsense from evolutionary psychology, because that is the form of Darwinism that most laypeople encounter most regularly. Stories like the one from the Dallas Morning News, linked below, help us understand why so many Americans cannot take Darwinism seriously. It drips with the vast contempt that the Darwinist feels for people who have had experiences he (or she) cannot account for, let alone (apparently) have. (I don’t take too seriously the Read More ›

“Evangelical Atheism”: Are Dawkins and Dennett shooting themselves in the foot?

Here’s a recent exchange between me and a well-known journalist: Dear Mr. Dembski: I got your email from [snip]. I’m a science writer who has written for the usual suspects: New York Times (book review, op-ed, magazine, week in review), The Atlantic, Discover, Omni, Wall Street Journal, many others. You can google me, but the NY Times and WSJ block search engines, and that’s where most of my journalistic stuff is. . . . I am not sympathetic to ID or creationism, but I’m thinking of writing a piece–not yet sure for whom–about how silly the neo-Darwinists have become, Dawkins and Dennett come to mind. It seems to me the evolutionists have fielded the wrong team, and despite the recent Read More ›

U.S. Lags Behind Europe, Japan in Acceptance of Evolution

So reports Ker Than a Staff Writer for Space.com and LiveScience.com.  You can get the whole story here:  http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,207858,00.html. 

Mr. Than reports that a new study compares attitudes toward evolution in 34 countries.  The US ranks “near the bottom” when it comes to public acceptance of evolution.  Other findings:

More...

Read More ›

After Further Review, It Was Not Judge Jones Only

Thank you very much to Bob OH for pointing me to a transcript of the Behe literature bluff at the Dover trial.  I have read the transcript in detail, and I now believe the Dover defendants’ lawyers should have made objections that they did not make.  Here are quotes from the Behe examination followed by the objections that should have been made (in bold):
 

Read More ›

SPECIAL!! Five-star religion-and-science bore banished to horrid 1960s rec room!

In an article in Skeptical Inquirer Paul Kurtz announced that religion and science are compatible: … there is an appropriate domain for religion, and in this sense science and religion are not necessarily incompatible. That domain is evocative, expressive, emotive. Religion presents moral poetry, aesthetic inspiration, and dramatic expressions of existential hope and yearnings. In other words, religion represents what yer know ain’t so. I don’t imagine he’ll sell too many of those to people who take their faith seriously. More to the point, the relevant question is not whether “religion” and “science” are compatible. When categories are as broad as that, anything can be compatible with anything else, or not. The relevant question for Western culture is whether Judaeo-Christianity Read More ›