Intelligent Design

“I completely agree that scientific progress has undermined our old animist beliefs and led to the disenchantment of the world.” Jules Evans I was thinking about that highlighted part, and my response is, “Well, yes and no.” Yes, if Evans is saying nothing more than that we no longer believe, for example, that fairies tangle the hair of sleepers into elf-locks. But if Evans is suggesting that science has given us a better understanding of final causes, he is wrong. My favorite Chesterton quote: All the terms used in the science books, ‘law,’ ‘necessity,’ ‘order,’ ‘tendency,’ and so on, are really unintellectual, because they assume an inner synthesis, which we do not possess. The only words that ever satisfied me Read More ›

Ray Comfort’s video, Evolution vs. God, has attracted criticism since its release earlier this month. No surprises there. But when two prominent evolutionary biologists lend their endorsement to an expose of the video, which contains even worse scientific errors than the video it claims to debunk, then you have to laugh. Jaclyn Glenn, a 25-year-old medical student with her own blog site, is the author of the expose. I don’t wish to criticize her, because there are very few people her age who don’t have major gaps of one sort or another in their knowledge of the world. Fair enough. But I expect a lot more of two widely respected biology professors in their fifties and sixties. On August 15, Read More ›

For the sake of argument, let’s surmise that, after a long controversy, finally ID succeeds in scientifically convincing all people that life and the universe are designed. Good, but what happens now? If the universe is a design there must be a designer. What is the designer? It is likely that evolutionists convinced to ID were atheists or at least agnostic. Therefore for these persons, quite paradoxical, accepting ID could imply a very critical point in their intellectual path. Let’s start with the worse possibility. The worse case for them would be to equate the designer with something that has nothing to do with God, or – worse – even with something that is a caricature of God. This is Read More ›

It must be the silly season over at Why Evolution Is True. Professor Jerry Coyne has just written a post entitled, Measles back again, thanks to religion, in which he leads off with this bald assertion: This is one of the more palpable dangers of faith: disease spread by a refusal to accept modern medicine, itself based on the assumption that God will heal you. Except he doesn’t. To buttress his argument, Coyne points to a single measles outbreak in the United States, “spread by one infectious case and a bunch of kids whose church frowns on vaccination.” The church in question, which does not oppose vaccination of children but lets parents decide for themselves, has an attendance of 1,500 Read More ›

Above: Ludwig van Beethoven in 1804. Below: The opening of Beethoven’s Fifth. Among St. Thomas Aquinas’ celebrated five proofs of the existence of God, the Fifth Way holds a special place: it is the only one which explicitly attempts to show that the cosmos is dependent on some Intelligent Being, Who directs all natural objects towards their built-in ends. In this post, I’m going to critically analyze Aquinas’ Fifth Way – or more specifically, Professor Edward Feser’s reconstructed version of this argument by Aquinas. On Feser’s account, the argument proceeds from a set of very simple facts about the natural world, and then demonstrates that the only way to explain these facts is by positing an intelligent being (or beings) Read More ›

New researchout of the University of Pennsylvania reveals yet another fascinating aspect of gene expression regulation. In the higher species genes are not one continuous DNA segment. Instead there are intervening segments within genes known as introns (intervening regions). Many introns are quite long and some are short. After a gene is copied by the transcription machinery (known as RNA polymerase), resulting in an mRNA transcript, these major and minor introns are spliced out of the mRNA by the major and minor spliceosomes, respectively. The new research shows that the minor spliceosomes can be turned off, thus turning off the expression of that gene.  Read more