Intelligent Design

With all the talk about Jerry Coyne lately, I just had to dig up this oldie but goodie from Phil Johnson.  I think we should feel sorry for Jerry Coyne. His own work has contributed to the destruction of Darwinism, and he seems to be suffering from a condition I call metaphysical panic, resulting from the shaking of a worldview he had always assumed to be unchallengeable. Persons suffering from metaphysical panic tend to lash out in impotent rage while making wildly illogical arguments. I encounter this sad condition regularly. MORE  

This article (http://www.the-scientist.com/article/daily/23793) presents the ongoing controversy over whether an evolutionist presented “adequate justification for the assumption in the proposal that the theory of evolution, and not intelligent design theory, was correct” . . .  in his grant proposal!

[From a colleague in the UK:] The current issue of the British Ecological Society Bulletin has a special feature on Gaia. It appears that James Lovelock was made an Honorary Member of the B.E.S. in 2005, and the Gaia hypothesis is his “most significant contribution to ecology”. Apparently, the Gaia hypothesis posits that the earth’s ecosystem has improbable stability, and this is increasingly being accepted as a fact by ecologists. In particular it points to processes like these: animals secrete nitrogenous waste as urea rather than nitrogen to help other species use the waste product; phytoplankton in the oceans secrete dimethysulphide, a costly gas which is important for cloud formation; the balance of photosynthesis releasing oxygen and taking in carbon Read More ›

In the latest New Republic Online, the irrepressible Jerry Coyne keeps the insults against ID coming: . . . [O]ne has to ask whether Coulter (who, by the way, attacks me in her book) really understands the Darwinism she rejects. The answer is a resounding No. According to the book’s acknowledgments, Coulter was tutored in the “complex ideas” of evolution by David Berlinski, a science writer; Michael Behe, a third-rate biologist at Lehigh University (whose own department’s website disowns his bizarre ideas); and William Dembski, a fairly bright theologian who went off the intellectual rails and now peddles creationism at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. These are the “giants” of the ID movement, which shows how retarded it really is. Learning biology Read More ›

I would argue that, indeed, they are. In a previous UD thread, Tom English made the following comment: I have seen a number of brilliant and highly educated people do abysmally stupid things when they stepped outside their domains of expertise. Computer scientists make abysmal biologists. Journalists make abysmal biologists. Philosophers make abysmal biologists. Theologians make abysmal biologists. Mathematicians make abysmal biologists. Physicists make abysmal biologists. I would argue the following: Darwinian theorists do foolish things when they step outside their domain of expertise. They are generally not competent mathematicians, computer scientists, chemists, philosophers, theologians, or physicists. Yet, they make sweeping claims of incontrovertible fact that impinge upon all these disciplines, and then expect immunity from challenges from those with Read More ›

John Rennie, the chief editor at SCIAM, continues to do his cause more harm than good. All his naysaying against ID has to give the dispassionate observer pause whether there might not be something to it after all. Here is his latest: http://blog.sciam.com/index.php?title=i_d_is_bad_science_on_its_own_terms&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1.

Bill Dembski asked me to post my comments in a recent discussion elsewhere, regarding intelligent design (ID) as we currently understand it.

Phil Johnson, the lawyer who put ID on the map, is currently seeking more input from the arts community (he calls it Wedge II).

I agree that the ID debate will develop along more useful lines when more people from the arts participate.

Artsies (those who are not crazy) understand some aspects of intelligent original design better than most people.

An original design must be evaluated under actual, not hypothetical conditions.

Fundamental fact: All actual features of any given design exclude all other possible features.

Choices must be made. There is no perfect design, only optimum design.

Thus any rubberneck can point to a feature and say that it doesn’t do everything conceivable. But “everything conceivable” is never the goal of a design.

That is why, years ago, while researching the issues around ID, I quickly blew off the “God woun’t’a dun it dat way” approach of the churchgoing scientists who wring their hands over the menace of ID.

Coming as I do from an English language and literature background, I am familiar with the idea of creating a “world” out of whole cloth.

One always works within constraints. Even Shakespeare, the greatest of English-language dramatists, worked within constraints.

For example, Hamlet has defects as a play – but it is easy to stage.

King Lear is a more sublime play than Hamlet – but it is difficult to stage.

Julius Caesar is great for high school drama classes because of the large number of small parts and easily detachable scenes, plus an emotional range that is not too embarrassing or incomprehensible for teenage boys.

Now watch for some egghead to come along and say “A REAL dramatist wouldn’t have made those errors.”

Errors? What errors?

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The sign of erudition these days is the ability to craft culturally sophisticated terms of abuse. I want to urge others on this thread to list their favorite erudite term(s) of abuse for ID. July 30, 2006 SUNDAY BOOK REVIEW Laws of nature A century and a half ago, Charles Darwin sparked a scientific revolution. Now that revolution has become a culture war. But does the concept of intelligent design have validity as an alternative to evolution? Three new books look beyond the rhetoric.   By Robert Lee Hotz The Reluctant Mr. Darwin An Intimate Portrait of Charles Darwin and the Making of His Theory of Evolution David Quammen Atlas Books/W.W. Norton: 304 pp., $22.95 Intelligent Thought Science Versus the Read More ›

Check out this forthcoming book, in which I understand that our very own Sal Cordova is featured. Note especially Sam Harris’s blurb — with people like Harris expressing such foreboding, one has to wonder how close we are to seeing the Darwinian house of cards collapse under the weight of its self-delusion. 

Righteous: Dispatches from the Evangelical Youth Movement (Hardcover)
by Lauren Sandler

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0670037915/sr=8-1/qid=1152910212/ref=pd_bbs_1/002-3624936-6342425?redirect=true&ie=UTF8

Book Description
There’s a new youth movement afoot in this country. It’s a counterculture fusion of politics and pop, and it’s taking over a high school near you. Like the waves that came before it, it’s got passion, music, and anti-authority posturing, but more than anything else, this one has God. So what does it mean when today’s youth counterculture has a mindset more akin to Jerry Falwell’s than Abbie Hoffman’s?

In RIGHTEOUS: Dispatches from the Evangelical Youth Movement, Lauren Sandler, a dynamic young journalist, reports from this junction of Evangelicalism and youth culture, traveling across the country to investigate the alternative Christian explosion. Using the grassroots modus operandi of the 1960s, these religious kids – part of the “Disciple Generation” as Sandler calls it – turn an antiauthoritarian sneer toward liberalism, feminism, pacifism, and every other hallmark of that era’s counterculture. And they’re engaging their peers with startling success, fusing pop culture, politics, and religion as they preach from the pulpit of the skate park, bar, and rock concert. Secular, liberal, and practically the embodiment of everything Evangelicalism deems unholy, Sandler travels with skateboard missionaries, hangs out with the tattooed members of a postpunk Seattle megachurch that has evolved into a self-sufficient community, camps out with a rock’n’roll antiabortion group, and gets to know the rap preachers who are merging hip-hop’s love of money with old-fashioned bible-beating fundamentalism. Much more than a mere observer, she connects with these young people on an intimate level, and the candor with which they reveal themselves to her is truly astonishing.

Illuminating, often troubling, and unapologetically frank, RIGHTEOUS introduces a bold new voice into the ongoing debate over religion in American life. And it is the first in-depth front-line exploration of the country’s new moral majority – dressed up in punk-rock garb – and what its influence could mean for the future of America.

BACKCOVER: Advanced Praise:

“Lauren Sandler obliterates the naïve and complacent hope that keeps most secularists and religious moderates sleeping peacefully each night-the hope that, in 21st century America, the young know better than to adopt the lunatic religious certainties of a prior age. The young do not know better. In their schools, skate-parks, rock concerts, and in the ranks of our nation’s military, our children are gleefully preparing a bright future of ignorance and religious fascism for us all. If you have any doubt that there is a culture war that must be waged and won by secularists in America, read this book.”
—Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation Read More ›

Is God Really Good? Granville Sewell Mathematics Dept. University of Texas El Paso                                                                                            .   In debates over the theory of intelligent design, the “problem of evil” is frequently brought up by opponents of design: if we are the products of intelligent design, why is there so much evil and misery in the world? From a purely logical, or scientific, perspective, this problem is easy to deal with: Nature offers evidence of design–the question of what the designer is like is a separate, more philosophical, issue. But for most of us humans, this is a very unsatisfactory answer. In two other articles on my web page (here and here, both highlighted by Discovery.com in the last few months) I have outlined Read More ›

Check out the following papers at the big June 2006 Metanexus conference: http://www.metanexus.net/conference2006/papers.asp. How well was ID represented?

In science’s pecking order, evolutionary biology lurks somewhere near the bottom, far closer to phrenology than to physics.

Jerry Coyne

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Darwinian evolutionist Ernst Mayr wrote in Scientific American in 2000:

“Let me now try to summarize my major findings. No educated person any longer questions the validity of the so-called theory of evolution, which we now know to be a simple fact. Likewise, most of Darwin’s particular theses have been fully confirmed, such as that of common descent, the gradualism of evolution, and his explanatory theory of natural selection.”

(Mayr E.W., “Darwin’s Influence on Modern Thought,” Scientific American, Vol. 283, No. 1, pp.67-71, July 2000, p.71)

Note how Mayr has smeared the “so-called theory of evolution” (why “so-called”?) together with the facts of the history of life. He makes clear that he does indeed think that the theory can be identical with the history it interprets and that Darwin’s is the only conceivable interpretation.

This bunkum entanglement first attracted my attention as a journalist years ago. When I first caught sight of the hordes of  churchgoing scientists who rushed to defend it, I knew I was onto something.

The best way to unpack bunkum entanglement is to recognize it for what it is: a creed constructed so as to prevent legitimate evidence-based doubt.

After all, if theory and fact are identical, there is no basis for evidence-based doubt.

In any event, by now, 600 scientists do in fact question Darwin’s “particular theses,” on the evidence. I am sure many more would if Richard Sternberg and Guillermo Gonzalez had not demonstrated, by example, what happens to dissenters.

But my instinct is that it isn’t working for the Darwinists any more. Listen to the caterwauling about Visigoths at the gates. Note the ridiculous-beyond-parody hagiography of Darwin, an upper-class Brit toff who lent respectability to the theory that ruthless competition was the key to all life.

And just yesterday, I noted that John Rennie, editor-in-chief of Scientific American, has been blogging up a storm against a young lawyer, Casey Luskin, who works for the Discovery Institute, in re the current Kansas science standards uproar.

I would have thought that a man in Rennie’s position  would find himself too beset by the demands of his publication to get into a row with …. But I guess not …. ? … ?

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I provide here some snapshots of the Biology 467 Evolution and Design class at Cornell.  Allen MacNeill is the professor and Hannah Maxson is a student representing the IDEA club.  Whether what we hear is something we like or dislike, it still constitutes a data point which we should not dismiss.  Even if I may disagree with Allen, he is to be commended for trying to keep the dialogue on the issues open.  He has done his utmost to get students to read ID literature and to study it to depths few people in the USA have ever explored in a college classroom setting so far.  I post now some random snapshots of the class as it enters it final week.

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Here are two books you’ll want to put in your Amazon.com cart and read this fall. I’ve blurbed each of them. For Wells’s book I wrote: “Darwinists will be furious over this book, gnashing their teeth and vilifying its author — because biologist Jonathan Wells masterfully exposes their bizarre delusions and replaces them with what they hate most: logical arguments and evidence for intelligent design.” For Wiker and Witt’s book I wrote: “With the science of intelligent design now well in hand, the question arises about its wider cultural implications: in a world where materialism fails and where intelligent design is evident, how should we think about ourselves in the grand scheme of things? A MEANINGFUL WORLD masterfully answers this Read More ›