Intelligent Design

Just yesterday I was reading some scientist bloviating about how scientific knowledge is superior to other types of knowledge, because “nothing is ever settled” and scientists are “unrelentingly skeptical” of all claims.  Piffle. Today I read that Dr. Ivar Giaever, who won the Nobel Prize in physics, resigned from the American Physical Society (the premier physics organization in the nation), because its scientific integrity has been subverted by the politics of global warming.  Dr. Giaever truly is what the other scientists in the society only claim to be – skeptical – and he took exception when the society carved its global warming politics into stone by announcing that the evidence is “incontrovertible.”  Dr. Giaever writes:  “In the APS it is Read More ›

Even by the evolutionist’s own numbers protein evolution has failed by somewhere between 27 to 49 orders of magnitude. And those estimates—which make evolution unquestionably the worst theory in science—are optimistic. They are based not on the evolution of a protein, but only part of a protein. But even worse, those estimates assume, believe it or not, the prior existence of proteins. That’s right, when evolutionists estimated the number of searches evolution could have made for those elusive protein sequences, they assumed billions of bacteria were available to do the job. But to synthesize a protein, bacteria need hundreds of different types of, yes, proteins. Indeed, to be bacteria, they need an army of proteins. So we cannot sneak in Read More ›

UD’s resident journalist, Mrs Denise O’Leary, notes on how Mr Michael Shermer of Skeptic Magazine and Scientific American (etc.) has written on his new book, The Believing Brain: Why Science Is the Only Way Out of Belief-Dependent Realism:

. . . skepticism is a sine qua non of science, the only escape we have from the belief-dependent realism trap created by our believing brains.

While critical awareness — as opposed to selective hyperskepticism — is indeed important for serious thought in science and other areas of life, Mr Shermer hereby reveals an unfortunate ignorance of basic epistemology, the logic of warrant and the way that faith and reason are inextricably intertwined in the roots of our worldviews.

To put it simply, he has a “turtles all the way down” problem:

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The claim has been made that ID proponents are just “creationists in cheap tuxedos.” Of course, the term “creationist” is used as a pejorative, meant to imply that all ID theorists are young-earth Biblical literalists who have lost their minds and want to destroy science. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander. Therefore, I’ll make the claim that Darwinists are atheists in expensive tuxedos. By Darwinism I specifically refer to the hypothesis that random errors filtered by differential mortality can explain everything in biological reality. This means that accidents presumably transformed a “primitive” microbe (which was already an astronomically complex information-processing system) into Mozart and his piano concerti. This is a transparently preposterous proposition, considering what is Read More ›

The Guardian features an interesting opinion column by the renowned British pharmacologist David Colquhoun. The article bears the intriguing headline, “Publish-or-perish: Peer review and the corruption of science.” The author laments that “Pressure on scientists to publish has led to a situation where any paper, however bad, can now be printed in a journal that claims to be peer-reviewed.” Click here to continue reading>>>

According to evolutionists scientific problems don’t count for much. They believe evolution is a fact that science will confirm. Scientific problems with evolution, therefore, are more indicative of gaps in our knowledge rather than any fault of their convictions. Hence they view scientific critiques as based on gaps or ignorance, rather than any direct evidence against evolution. This is a good example of how the religion that drives evolutionary thought harms science. In this case evolutionists make science vulnerable to just-so stories. If scientific problems don’t matter then anything goes. In fact, there are substantial empirical problems with evolution. Not only have most of evolution’s fundamental predictions failed, the science shows the idea to be highly unlikely. Consider, for example, Read More ›

ID is often disparaged as “creationism in a cheap tuxedo.” One assumes the point being made is that ID is a stalking horse for theistic creationists. Now, as has been explained on this site many times, while many ID proponents are theists, ID itself stands apart from theistic belief. For the umpteenth time, ID does not posit a supernatural designer. Nor does ID posit any suspension of the laws of nature. To drive this point home UD is going to put its money where its mouth is. UD hereby offers a $1,000 prize to anyone who is able to demonstrate that the design of a living thing by an intelligent agent necessarily requires a supernatural act (i.e., the suspension of Read More ›

It is interesting that devout/militant atheists, like I once was, seem to have no doubts about their philosophical commitment and worldview. Just ask the Illuminati of the “new atheist” movement (Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, et al) — or our good UD friend Nick Matzke — and they will tell you that there is absolutely no question that materialistic processes can explain everything. Most of the Christians I know express doubts, and struggle with difficult questions, as I do, always have, and always will. I therefore put myself in the camp of legitimate skeptics, as a former mindless Dawkins clone with a bunch of Hitchens, Harris and Matzke thrown in for good measure. It was in no small measure that ID theory Read More ›

When you repair a broken pipe, shattered window or cracked sidewalk, you first remove the broken pieces and establish a starting point. Likewise when a break occurs in DNA, the automatic repair machines must first remove the broken, dangling molecules and establish a starting point. It is another fantastic capability of the cell’s DNA repair kit.  Read more