Intelligent Design

I have a question for our materialist friends. Let’s imagine a group of chimpanzees. Say one of the male chimps approaches one of the female chimps and makes chimp signals that he wants to have sexual relations with her, but for whatever reason she’s not interested and refuses. Is it morally wrong for the male chimp to force the female chimp to have sex with him against her will? If you answer “no it is not morally wrong,” imagine further a group of humans. On the materialist view, a human is just a jumped up hairless ape. Is it morally wrong for a human male to force a human female to have sex with him against her will? If you Read More ›

Our engineering department often gets feasibility-study contracts. The client has an idea, but wants to know if he should pursue further investment and research into a proposed solution to an engineering problem. Our team goes to work. We use all our resources and experience to evaluate the suggested engineering solution. Our team recommends three possible avenues of approach: 1) Based on our analysis, the probability that it could work is so small that no further investment of effort or resources should be made. 2) Based on our analysis, there is a reasonable chance that this engineering solution could work, but we’ll need to build prototypes and test them. In addition, our analysis suggests that further design modifications should be made Read More ›

At its core ID affirms the truth of two statements and then makes a logical deduction: Statement 1. Designers often leave behind objectively discernible indicia of design in the things they design. Statement 2. Some aspects of living things exhibit these objectively discernible indicia of design. Logical conclusion. Therefore, the best explanation for the existence of the aspects of living things that exhibit these objectively discernible indicia of design is that they were in fact designed. In a comment to a prior post lastyearon says the ID project is “meaningless.” That is a powerful charge to make; therefore it is incumbent upon lastyearon to prove his case. That, in turn, is a very tall order, because statement 1 is obviously Read More ›

The abrupt appearance of Cambrian life forms in the Cambrian Period of Earth history continues to provide us with spectacular evidence of sophistication. New research on fossils recovered from petroleum exploration drill cores assigned to the Deadwood Formation of western Canada documents “a cryptic but significant diversity of Cambrian crustaceans”. Previously, palaeontologists have had hints of these animals from the nonmineralised remains of minute organisms (<2mm). The new finds are of disarticulated body parts that are unambiguously crustacean, representing branchiopods, copepods and ostracods. They are part of an assemblage known as SCFs (small carbonaceous fossils). They show many signs of modernity. “The fresh taphonomic perspective of SCFs provides the only direct evidence for sophisticated particle-handling in larger-bodied Cambrian arthropods. This Read More ›

For some time now, LYO has been a fairly frequent critic in UD’s comment threads. Overnight, he has challenged EA:

I challenge you to give me a fact, real or hypothetical, any fact at all about the world which would falsify ID.

There were prompt short answers that immediately followed the just linked:

UB: A demonstration that inanimate matter can physically establish the relationships required for information to be recorded and transferred.

Joe: Demonstrate that blind and undirected chemical processes can produce a living organism from non-living matter- ie demonstrate that a living organism is reducible to matter, energy, necessity and chance.

A little later, responding to the wider point being raised by LYO, EA said: Read More ›

“The very fact that otherwise sober scientists must resort to such a remarkable hypothesis [i.e., the multiverse hypothesis] is a sort of backhanded compliment to the design hypothesis.” William Lane Craig

Concerning the question of “natural evil” or “cruelty in nature” that others have been discussing today, Chesterton writes: But nature does not say that cats are more valuable than mice; nature makes no remark on the subject. She does not even say that the cat is enviable or the mouse pitiable. We think the cat superior because we have (or most of us have) a particular philosophy to the effect that life is better than death. But if the mouse were a German pessimist mouse, he might not think that the cat had beaten him at all. He might think he had beaten the cat by getting to the grave first. Or he might feel that he had actually inflicted Read More ›

Over at Why Evolution is True, Professor Jerry Coyne has written a post entitled, Readers’ photos: a doomed caterpillar about the fate of a beautiful caterpillar being attacked by a parasitic fly that lays eggs on its victim. He quotes from a reader who took photos of the incident during an excursion to Vietnam: As I walked on I felt sorry for the beautiful caterpillar, knowing that it almost certainly was going to die an extremely unpleasant death (slowly being eaten alive by a maggot). Should I have interfered? This moral dilemma occupied me for a while. Nature is wonderful, but full of horrors, most of which go unnoticed. But Professor Coyne does not stop there. He quotes from a Read More ›