Intelligent Design

“. . . even an infinity of universes would amount, ontologically speaking, to an infinity of unnecessary contingencies, an infinite reiteration of the mystery of existence.” David Bentley Hart (emphasis in the original)

Industry is constantly searching for technologies to maximize profits and minimize costs. Software industry is no exception (the world software market exceeded $300 billion). Actually some computers can process quadrillions floating-point operations per second (10^15 flops). It would be technically possible to implement on such computers the paradigm of unguided evolution (random variation + selection) for obtaining new programs by randomly modifying old programs. So, why software houses pay legions of human programmers to develop ex-novo applications when an automatic process could do the job? They could save truckloads of money by automatizing, at least in large part if not in toto, the software development work flow. To have an idea, let’s perform two simplified calculations about the speed of Read More ›

Not only is evolution a fact beyond all reasonable doubt, it also is essential to ones understanding of biology. Indeed, without evolution, science itself would be impossible. These are the pronouncements of evolutionists who even go so far as to define life as the ability to evolve. Given these truths one would think that evolutionary theory would be rather important for research in the life sciences. Is not the evolutionary framework a necessary starting point? Surprisingly scientific progress consistently is made without evolution leading the way or even pointing in the right direction. Often evolutionists are surprised by the science and new evolutionary explanations are tacked on after the fact rather than providing the initial insight. Other times evolution simply Read More ›

In his latest post, Hart Whacks the ID Movement, Barry Arrington summarizes Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart’s theological objections to Intelligent Design, and invites readers to respond. The aim of this post of mine is to correct a misunderstanding of Intelligent Design on Dr. Hart’s part, and to show that far from contradicting classical theology, ID complements it in a very useful way. Let’s begin with a definition. In its broadest sense, the theory of intelligent design (ID) holds that certain empirically observable features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, and that this intelligent cause can be shown to be the best explanation by applying the scientific method in order to rule Read More ›

People who think sharks are “primitive” fish may be commended as being reasonably up-to-date with the evolutionary literature, but they need to take note of a new fossil fish that has thrown all the ideas into the melting-pot. Only a year ago, as an apparently coherent story was beginning to emerge, a specialist in vertebrate biology explained that the common ancestor of all jawed vertebrates on Earth resembled a shark. “The common ancestors of all jawed vertebrates today organized their heads in a way that resembled sharks. Given what we now know about the interrelatedness of early fishes, these results tell us that while sharks retained these features, bony fishes moved away from such conditions.” (Source here) For more, go Read More ›

Remember how nearly-identical chimpanzee-human genes were celebrated as yet another proof of evolution? There was only one problem: it didn’t make sense because the genes were too similar. The minor differences were probably not enough to produce species as different as the chimp and human and, as I explained in my bookDarwin’s Proof, there must be more significant differences to be found between the two primates. And indeed such differences were discovered. One was that even those highly similar genes were often transcribed at very different levels in the two species. This, evolutionists reasoned, must have been a driver in the primate evolution that led to such different species. What evolutionists did not realize was that, once again, they had Read More ›

fi·de·ism  [fee-dey-iz-uhm, fahy-dee-] noun, “exclusive reliance in religious matters upon faith, with consequent rejection of appeals to science or philosophy.” Fideism is usually associated with religious fundamentalism.  But the materialists have their own fundamentalists, and in a comment to my previous post, a materialist who goes by the handle JLAfan2001 put up a comment that contains one of the purest assertions of materialist fideism I have ever seen.  I mean this guy despises God so much that he refuses to capitalize the word even if it begins a sentence. His faith is very strong, but let’s see if we can shake it just a little (I am not hopeful, but I’m willing to try). Here’s the comment: There is no Read More ›

Newton’s blunder regarding planetary motion is usually given as the classic “God of the gaps’ error.  Newton knew that in addition to the sun’s gravitational attraction, the planets’ affected each other.  Yet the planets orbits seemed too stable to account for this, and he suggested that God sometimes intervened to smooth the orbits out.  It was later discovered that the regularity of planetary motion can be accounted for based on a more rigorous application of Newton’s own equations.  Thus, the problem with a “God of the gaps” argument is that as scientific understanding advances, the phenomena previously ascribed to God continually narrow. We find that it was an error to “cover up,” so to speak, our ignorance by resorting to direct Read More ›