Intelligent Design

I recently published an article on the marvelous design and engineering which undergirds the bacterial chemotaxis system. Since then, a notorious atheist who posts regular videos on YouTube under the alias “C0nc0rdance“, as well as “agentorange20” (under the latter, he identifies himself as Zachary Moore), has posted a rebuttal. This is a brief response to that rebuttal. The extent to which two-component regulatory systems, or the chemotaxis system in particular, are irreducibly complex lay beyond the remit of my previous article, the purpose of which was to highlight the clear engineering analogues. With many of these signalling systems, there is an element of redundancy, with feedback and overlapping systems so as to make things stable and robust to error. As a result, there are often multiple Read More ›

Professor Jerry Coyne has recently written a highly critical post entitled, Ken Miller, confused, finds free will in quantum mechanics, in which he attacks Professor Miller’s invocation of quantum physics to rescue free will. In a recent Youtube video, made on March 23 of this year at the New York Academy of Sciences, and featuring theologians John Haught and Nancey Murphy, Professor Miller elaborated his views: At its finest level, matter has an inherent unpredictability, which certainly doesn’t explain free will, but certainly gives the lie to the notion that any inherent mechanical system is ultimately predictable. And I don’t think we are predictable: I think that capacity to make choices is ultimately wired into the circuity of our brain, Read More ›

From here: ‘THERE’S PROBABLY NO DAWKINS’ SLOGAN FOR OXFORD BUSES ‘Reasonable Faith Tour’ with William Lane Craig Responds to Dawkins Boycott A message with a familiar ring to it will be rolling out on the side of buses in Oxford from 10th of October. ‘There’s Probably No Dawkins. Now Stop Worrying and Enjoy Oct 25th at the Sheldonian Theatre’ The advertising campaign follows Richard Dawkins’ refusal to publicly debate the existence of God with philosopher William Lane Craig when he visits the UK in October. He has an open invitation to debate Craig at Oxford’s Sheldonian Theatre on 25th October. The Oxford bus campaign echoes the 2009 London atheist bus advertisements: ‘There’s Probably No God. Now Stop Worrying And Enjoy Read More ›

Here. “Nobel physics prize honours accelerating Universe find” (BBC News, 4 October 2011) While Scientific American wrestles with unsolved mysteries, some are sure they have the key to the answers now At the time, the competing teams expected to find that the more distant supernovae were slowing down, relative to those nearer – a decline of the expansion of the Universe that began with the Big Bang. Instead, both teams found the same thing: distant supernovas were in fact speeding up, suggesting that the Universe is destined for an ever-increasing expansion. What the trio found has sparked a new epoch in cosmology, seeking to understand what is driving the expansion.

  Functionally specific, complex information and associated information [FSCO/I]  — especially, digitally coded FSCI [dFSCI] — are seen as two of the strongest signs of design as cause. For instance, when you see this post, you do not wonder or debate the odds of different letters being strung by chance [e.g. e in English is typically about 1/8 of the text], you intuitively immediately know that this is best explained as the work of an intelligent, purposeful agent acting towards a goal and based on his knowledge of the language, codes and topic in question. And, analytically, we can substantiate that intuition. That brings us to a significant comment exchange in the current hybridisation as explanation for origin of complete Read More ›