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Intelligent Design

Steve Fuller: Designer Trouble

Steve Fuller: Designer Trouble
Darwinism has had it all its own way for too long, Warwick’s controversial sociologist tells Zoe Corbyn
The Guardian, Tuesday January 31, 2006
http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/profile/story/0,,1698284,00.html

In 1981, in a courtroom in Little Rock, Arkansas, Michael Ruse testified that “creation
science”, the faith-based explanation of life’s beginnings, was not science at all. “In my
opinion,” Ruse told the court, “creation science is religion.” It was the first time in
America’s fraught struggle over evolution that a philosopher of science had taken the
stand and his words made a big impression on Steve Fuller, then a 22-year-old PhD student.

“It set a precedent because, up to that point, the only people allowed to testify on the
nature of science were professional scientists,” Fuller recalls.

These days, Fuller is a professor of sociology at Warwick University. Last October, in
Dover, Pennsylvania, he too found himself giving evidence in court. But unlike Ruse, a
champion of Darwinian evolution, Fuller took the stand as an expert witness in support of
intelligent design. Fuller argued that ID – the idea that some systems are so complex they
must have been designed by an intelligent agent – should be added to the science
curriculum. He lost. The Dover judgment concluded ID was the progeny of creationism and
couldn’t be taught as science. “The judge in the Dover case went back to the old standard
of what the experts say,” says Fuller. Read More ›

Integrating The Sciences

I have been invited to be a contributing author at Uncommon Descent, so I thought I would take this opportunity to introduce myself, and to explain the reasons for my interest in, and passion for, intelligent design, both as an intellectual endeavor and what I view as potentially the most profound revolution in the history of science.

Why does ID represent such a revolution? It is becoming increasingly clear that efforts to cram the evidence into purely materialistic causational categories are failing catastrophically on many fronts.
Read More ›

The Plausibility of (ID) Life

Here are some excerpts from The Plausibility of Life, by Marc W. Kirschner and John C. Gerhart. While reading the book, I find that along the way the types of statements which follow are to be found almost everywhere .

One of the objections (disingenuous, in my opinion) that the Darwinists have to ID is that “we don’t know who the designer is; therefore, how can we possibly identify his designs?” Well the following quotes make it quite clear that the designer’s designs are easily identified. All’s you have to be to detect the design is be a graduate of an engineering school. No wonder lots of ID proponents have engineering backgrounds (including myself.).

Here are just some quotes:

“In this turtle, males are produced at lower temperatures 78° F (26° C) and females at higher, 88° F (31° C), the opposite of the alligator. In a flip-flop circuit, not unlike a thermostat that would gratify any engineer, a small difference in the level of a regulator of estrogen synthesis can be amplified into one of two states, a high-estrogen state (female development) or a low-estrogen state (male development). . . .The result is a bistable switch driven one way or the other by the temperature dependence of the production of SF-1 protein.” (p. 94) . . . .

Read More ›

Stephen Meyer in the Daily Telegraph

Intelligent design is not creationism
By Stephen C Meyer
Daily Telegraph: 28/01/2006.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2006/01/28/do2803.xml

In 2004, the distinguished philosopher Antony Flew of the University of Reading made
worldwide news when he repudiated a lifelong commitment to atheism and affirmed the
reality of some kind of a creator. Flew cited evidence of intelligent design in DNA and
the arguments of “American [intelligent] design theorists” as important reasons for this
shift. Read More ›

Evidence for the Evolution of Complexity

Here’s a revealing quote from Neil Greenspan about the evolution of complexity: In fact, there is no evidence of any kind to indicate that the magnitude of a system’s complexity poses any sort of barrier to an origin through evolution, as opposed to an origin through design by an intelligent agent. (source) Let me suggest that the reason Greenspan can find no evidence for the magnitude of complexity posing a barrier to its evolution is that evolutionists have never provided actual evidence for evolution producing biological complexity. Instead, they’ve only provided handwaving imaginative fairytales — what Franklin Harold and James Shapiro call “wishful speculations.” Since these are enough to settle evolution, how could there be evidence against?

Harris Poll on ID

From a colleague: Harris Poll: http://www.harrisinteractive.com/harris_poll/index.asp?PID=581 According to Table 7, belief in Intelligent Design increases with increasing education. (Ditto for evolution.) According to Table 8, belief in ID is more common among Democrats than Republicans. (Ditto for evolution.) According to Table 9, belief in ID is more common in the Northeastern and Western USA and less common in the Southern and Midwestern USA. (Ditto for evolution.) Also, taking into account this report: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4648598.stm Belief in ID is more common in the UK than in the USA (17% vs 10%). (Ditto for evolution.)