Intelligent Design

Steve Fuller on the Dover Judgement

This applies to everyone writing articles as well as writing comments. Professor Dembski excepted of course. The topic and purpose of this weblog is to instruct and promote the intelligent design work of Bill Dembski in particular and the ID movement in general. We are trying to convince that world that ID is based on math, science, and logic. While the implications tend to attract religious devotees in large number ID is not about religion. I consider atheism to be a contrarian religion and ID offends them as one might expect of anything that pleases the faithful. If you want a soapbox for your favorite religion (including atheism) go somewhere else. I realize that it’s hard to divorce our innermost Read More ›

Adam Wolfson writes a fairly balanced piece on the evolution debate in The Weekly Standard. I take issue with his ending paragraphs saying ID is doomed in public teaching because proponents claim the designer must be God. This conclusion reflects a misunderstanding of ID which is about design detection not designer typecasting and a stereotyping of ID proponents into a mold they all do not fit into. Survival of the Evolution Debate Why Darwin is still a lightning rod. by Adam Wolfson 01/16/2006, Volume 011, Issue 17 WHAT IS IT ABOUT EVEN the slightest dissent from Darwin’s theory of natural selection that drives liberal elites (and even some conservative elites) bonkers? In the 1920s, in the days of the Scopes Read More ›

Source: http://www.statesman.com/news/content/news/stories/local/01/6perry.html

Perry: Add intelligent design to teaching
Theory has a place in Texas schools, he says; most rivals disagree
By W. Gardner Selby
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Friday, January 06, 2006

Gov. Rick Perry, a Republican who has made outreach to Christian conservatives a theme of his gubernatorial portfolio, thinks Texas public school students should be taught intelligent design along with evolutionary theory, his office said Thursday. Read More ›

I’ve decided to write a series of articles touching upon ID-relevant portions of the seminal book describing the nanotechnology revolution “Engines of Creation” by K. Eric Drexler. The book was originally published in hardcover in 1986 and purchased/read by me that year. This year marks its 20th anniversary and is a good point to take a look at where its predictions on the path and nature of the nanotechnology revolution stand two decades later. It is now in the public domain in hypertext format here: Engines of Creation For this introductory article I want to skip up to the second to last chapter. EOC Chapter 14: The Network of Knowledge Chapter 14 discusses the (at the time: 1986) revolutionary new Read More ›

Robert Frost is sometimes cited as being critical of design and theism generally. For instance, one finds the following quote at http://www.pharyngula.org/infidelquotes.php: Read More ›

Glenn McGee of “The Scientist” writes this: A leading synthetic biologists said to me recently that she is working so hard on building and animating an artificial bacterium primarily so that she can prove to advocates of intelligent design that it doesn’t take a God to create life. I wish her luck, and Godspeed. I think we’re supposed to be alarmed. I’m shaking in my boots. 🙂 Go here for the full article.

Bradley Monton, a Princeton-trained philosopher on the faculty at the University of Kentucky, has an important piece on Dover here. Though Monton is not an ID proponent (he is a philosopher of physics who in his professional work is quite critical of fine-tuning as evidence for God), he exhibits little patience for the reasoning in Judge Jones’s decision. Note especially the following paragraph from his article: There is a problem with this idea that science should change its methodology in light of empirical confirmation of the existence of a supernatural being [[a point that Pennock had conceded in testimony]]. How does this empirical confirmation take place, if not scientifically? By Pennock’s lights, there must be some other epistemic practice that Read More ›

Hello, everyone. For my first contribution, I just want to let you guys know what you can expect from me and what I expect from you. What you can expect from me: My posts will probably be similar to those of Dr. Dembski, but due to my busy schedule, I seriously doubt I will be able to post as often as he did. I’m a college junior studying English and Philosophy, so you probably won’t see me addressing very many, if any, hard scientific matters. What I expect from you: I want you all to be civil and respectful to everyone else on this blog. You don’t have to agree with everything I have to say, and I encourage lively Read More ›

By popular demand this blog is back in operation, though with only limited participation in the future from me. Past contributors to this blog have decided they are willing to shoulder the responsibility of maintaining this blog, namely, DaveScot, Bombadill, Crandaddy, and Gumpngreen. Unlike in the past, when they were limited to commenting on my postings, they now have full posting privileges. They will be in charge of the day-to-day business of this blog, everything from keeping it interesting to approving comments to booting recalcitrant commenters. Of these four, DaveScot has been the designated blogczar — the buck stops with him.

I’ve decided to put Uncommon Descent into mothballs indefinitely. Although I’ve enjoyed blogging, I find it distracts from more pressing work that I need to get done. On those few occasions when I will need to blog, I’ll probably do it at www.idthefuture.com. If you want to keep track of my work, consult www.designinference.com, which has always been my main website. Also, watch for www.overwhelmingevidence.com, which I expect will provide a suitable antidote to the Dover trial (stay tuned). Two loose ends: The winning entry of the technological evolution prize competition is comment #2 at https://uncommondescent.com/index.php/archives/341 (I awarded it $150). I still want those OSC letters in the Sternberg case and am willing to pay $1000 for them (thus doubling Read More ›

My book The Design Inference is now out in paperback (I just received 6 copies via FedEx from Cambridge University Press). It might interest readers of this blog to see the difference in the back covers between the paperback edition and the original hardcover edition (after the first two printings, Cambridge omitted the jacket cover of the hardback edition, so it is no longer widely available): Read More ›

Fuz Rana and Hugh Ross, who head up Reasons to Believe (RTB), have issued a press release in which they extol Judge Jone’s decision in the Dover case in coming down against ID: go here for the press release. I’ve already commented on RTB’s distancing itself from ID before on this blog (go here).

Rana and Ross seem happy enough to see ID guillotined by Judge Jones’s ruling, but seem not to appreciate that their own necks are equally in danger. Read More ›