Intelligent Design

Controversy expected at intelligent design debate
By: Eddith Sevilla / Contributing Writer
Issue date: 12/8/05 Section: News
Article Tools: Page 1 of 1

http://www.beaconnewspaper.com/ID_controversy

The floor may get heated when an evangelical Christian and an Orthodox Jew debate intelligent design at the Sixth Miami International Conference on Torah and Science, to be held at the Kovens Conference Center at the Biscayne Bay Campus beginning Dec. 13 at 8 p.m. and continuing through Dec. 15.

William A. Dembski, a professor of science and theology at Southern Theological Seminary and considered the most eloquent advocate of intelligent design, along with Orthodox Jewish thinkers including Rabbi Moshe D. Tendler, a noted ethicist and biology professor at Yeshiva University in New York, Herman Branover of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel, Rabbi Sholom D. Lipskar of The Shul in Surfside and Eduardo Zeigler, professor of biology at UCLA will discuss, “How Should We Teach the Origin and Diversity of Species?” Read More ›

Twenty years ago: Darwinian biology teacher challenges students with “overwhelming evidence” for evolution, and students who believe in creation/design are left feeling confused and intimidated. The present day: Darwinian biology teacher is forced to expend a lot of energy finding plausible answers to all the challenges that ID-informed students are levying against evolution.

[From a philosopher colleague:]

I am visiting Harvard, and I was reading the conservative student
paper here, and came across an interesting quote from from Richard
Wrangham, a biologist, on the gaps in science that Intelligent Design
theorists point to: “Given that everything we know about science
gives us confidence that these details either have already or will
shortly be provided, this is both an unhelpful and an improbable claim.”

Nevermind the Intelligent Design context specifically. What I am
interested in is whether there can be a good reason for a naturalist
(and this guy may not be one, though his being a biologist, alas, makes
it more likely than not given the stats) to believe of an unsolved
scientific problem that a solution will eventually be found
(“shortly” or not). The argument seems to be an induction: We have
solved so many prior scientific problems that we have a reasonable
confidence that we will solve this one. Read More ›

Go here for audio-on-demand and here for podcast. For the wave file of the debate, go here: http://www.audiomartini.com/Shermer_Dembski.wma

HOW THE DEBATE OVER DARWIN HASN’T EVOLVED by Gertrude Himmelfarb The New Republic Online Post date: 12.03.05, Issue date: 12.12.05 . . . Many Victorian clerics found it possible to reconcile not only evolution but natural selection as well with religion, while many secularists had reservations not about evolution but about natural selection. John Stuart Mill, for example, was impressed by the “knowledge and ingenuity” that Darwin brought to bear upon his thesis, but finally decided (as late as 1870) that it “is still and will probably long remain problematical.” Moreover, he added, even if it were proved, it would not be inconsistent with creation. He himself, he said, on the state of the evidence, believed in “creation by intelligence.” Read More ›

. . . What did they say, exactly? I guess it was something like, “This mild assault is payback for your famously controversial opinions against us fundamentalist Christians, Mirecki. Don’t let us catch you south of Lawrence again.” Or maybe not. But I am forced to guess, because Mirecki won’t tell what the men said to him. . . . MORE

Concerning Nicholas Kristof’s NYTimes Op-Ed that appeared yesterday:

[From a colleague:] It is ironic that Mr. Kristoff chose to convey his disdain for the humanities by employing language rather than statistics or flow charts.

He writes that the officers of the Third Reich were steeped in Kant and Goethe,” but they were also whizzes in mathematics, the medical science, natural gas, and the technology of efficient transportation, for without
those four the Holocaust would have had far fewer victims. It is not the latter four that impart to Mr. Kistof his belief that the Third Reich was wrong. In fact, his notion that the humanities are less important than the
sciences is not a scientific judgment, but a philosophical claim about the order of things. Mr. Kristof must rely on that which he despises. If he had studied the humanities well, he would have not made such a freshman
philosophy student mistake. But then again, he writes for the New York Times.

Mr. Kristof writes that “the U.S. has bungled research on stem cells, perhaps partly because Mr. Bush didn’t realize how restrictive his curb on research funds would be.” That’s exactly how the Goethe-Kant reading Nazis would have put it if confronted with criticisms of their use of human subjects to find cures for the powerful. Anti-science in the German 1940s meant you were against fewer lampshades made out of people with names like Goldberg and Einstein. This is what happens when we take the “human” out of humanities and let the cultural barbarians dictate to us what is right and wrong. Read More ›

Intelligent design — A scientific, academic and philosophical controversy
Paul Weyrich
December 6, 2005

http://www.renewamerica.us/columns/weyrich/051206

Many Americans are focused on what should be taught in the schools regarding our universe and the Earth — how life as we know it has come to be. This has become a hot-button issue, igniting controversy in Kansas over what should be taught in the public schools and in Pennsylvania, where a high profile trial is taking place over a local school board decision. NEWSWEEK featured Charles Darwin on its cover and the current SMITHSONIAN prints a story on Charles Darwin. The controversy is unlikely to fade soon, in large measure because a new school of thought is gaining increasing acceptance within scientific and academic circles. Read More ›

Below is an article by the NPR Omsbudsman Jeff Dvorkin. In it he addresses the challenges NPR faces in covering ID. Is he writing as a reporter or as an advocate for materialism? How well informed is he about ID? Does the Ombudsman needs and Ombudsman?

Consider these quotes: Read More ›

http://www.lubavitch.com/Article.asp?Section=10&Article=728 . . . Professor Dembski, considered by many to be the most articulate advocate of Intelligent Design, will address the place of intelligent design in the natural sciences, followed by an interactive question and answer period with the audience. . . .

Nick Matzke, despite faulting ID proponents for quote-mining, is himself not averse to taking things out of context. At http://www.pandasthumb.org/archives/2005/11/coopting_coopti.html he purports to show how Scott Minnich, during his testimony in Kitzmiller v. Dover, gave away the store in regard to cooption and irreducible complexity. Not so. During the Dover trial, Minnich, as an expert witness, quoted from the Nature paper by Lenski (Pennock was a co-author) as well as Shapiro’s comment concerning the lack of a single phylogenetic history of a sub-cellular organelle or biochemical pathway. Read More ›

Derek Davis, the head of church-state studies at Baylor, is cited in today’s NYTimes story as a critic of ID (I blogged this NYTimes story here). Since Baylor was my previous employer, I have some interest in Davis’s comments about ID, especially since in the past he has published articles supporting the teaching of creationism in public schools. If the NYTimes reporter had done a minimal google of him, she would have found the piece. Here is what Davis says in the Journal of Church and State in 1999: Read More ›

Intelligent Design Might Be Meeting Its Maker
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN
December 4, 2005

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/04/weekinreview/04good.html?pagewanted=print

This article is remarkable, especially the following passage in which Charles Harper describes the Templeton Foundation’s involvement with ID: Read More ›

If you have delayed ordering your ID T-shirts and coffee mugs for Christmas (or you already ordered and want to order more) you are in luck.

Café Press just announced a two-day sale on December 7-8 which will save you 25% on your order. On those two days (this Wed & Thur) any Café Press orders will receive the following discounts: Read More ›

According to George V. Coyne: “In the third paragraph of his op ed article in the NY Times, 7 July 2005, Card. Schoenborn mistakenly defines neo-Darwinian evolution as ‘an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection’ and then condemns it. If you arbitrarily define something in a condemning way and then condemn it, you make dialogue pretty difficult.” [From circulated email.] In neo-Darwinism, the raw material for innovation derives from changes in genetic material. According to the theory, those changes are NOT correlated with future benefit. Hence they are random, unguided, unplanned. Likewise, natural selection has no plan — it does not anticipate future functions that are not currently available. It can only take advantage of present function. Read More ›