Intelligent Design

Here’s the contest: “Uncommon Descent contest: List the five books that helped ID most – written by non-ID researchers.” It riffs off an earlier contest: “List the ten most significant ID books of the last 25 years,” judged here. Briefly: Lots of books whose authors are looking for any solution other than ID have actually helped ID, and entrants were asked to pick the five most significant, with explanation. (Apologies, as usual, for judging delay. In part not all my fault – we just underwent a site redesign. And the management team still likes each other. Therefore, the age of miracles is not over. The age of wonders is not done. Proven.) First prize, a copy of The Nature of Nature Read More ›

One of the most amazing examples of cellular nanotechnology is a molecular motor protein known as kinesin. Kinesin is responsible for transporting molecular cargo — including chromosomes (e.g. during cell division), neurotransmitters and other important material — along microtubule tracks from one region of the cell to another. Read More>>

I’d like to introduce my readers to two women of formidable intelligence who share a common first name. On the left is the British philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe (1919-2001), as she appeared in her younger days. Anscombe, a famously forthright philosopher who translated Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations from German into English, is best known for her highly original monograph, Intention (1957) and for her 1958 essay Modern Moral Philosophy. On the right is our very own Elizabeth Liddle, who lectures in Translational Mental Health in the Faculty of Medicine & Health Sciences at the University of Nottingham. Dr. Liddle is particularly interested in ADHD and schizophrenia, as well as neuroimaging. She has described herself as “a catholic turned atheist, an ex-professional musician turned cognitive neuroscientist and computational modeller of evolutionary learning algorithms.” She attributes her atheism to “a radical shift in stance over the nature of free will.” She has stated that reading Professor Daniel Dennett’s Freedom Evolves in 2007 literally changed her life: “I changed from dualist to monist half-way through the book.”

The topic I’d like to discuss in this post is whether free will and physical determinism are compatible.

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Lizzie, You continue to astonish. In the first sentence of your reply to my prior post you wrote: “I know that it is possible for intelligent life-forms to send radio signals, because we do; my priors for the a radio signal to have an intelligent origin are therefore substantially above zero.” As I demonstrated earlier, the issue is not whether nature or intelligent agents can cause radio signals. We know that both can. The issue is whether we have any warrant to distinguish this particular signal from a natural signal. Then you write: “I know of no non-intelligent process that might generate prime numbers (presumably expressed as binary code), and so my priors on that are low.” Upon a moment’s Read More ›

In this post I demonstrated beyond the slightest doubt that Lizzie made a design inference based on nothing more than the existence of CSI embedded in a radio signal.  Lizzie responds:  Barry, I did NOT make the inference “based upon nothing but the existence of CSI”! My inference had nothing to do with CSI. It was a Bayesian inference based on two priors: My priors concerning the probability that other parts of the universe host intelligent life forms capable of sending radio signals (high) My priors concerning the probability that a non-intelligent process might generate such a signal (low). To which bevets aptly responded:  “Can you give any evidence based description of the ‘intelligent life forms’ other than the evidence Read More ›

Or, why is Michael Shermer so selectively skeptical? As a software engineer I think in powers of two (and in French on occasion, just like David Berlinski, a secular Jew, with whom I had a wonderful conversation in French at BIOLA when his book, The Devil’s Delusion, was first released). But I digress. Click here for a discussion about the “Who designed the designer?” debate. There is a very simple answer to this question. If time came into existence at the birth of the universe, its cause transcends time. It therefore has no past (a quality of time), and therefore no history. That which has no history has no point of origin, and therefore no designer. But the real question Read More ›