Intelligent Design

Progress in an Internet Debate!  Who Woulda Thunk it Possible?

Barry asks Ms. Liddle:  “If you were to receive a radio signal from outer space that specified the prime numbers between 1 and 100 would you conclude (provisionally pending the discovery a better theory, of course) that the best theory to account for the data is “the signal was designed and sent by an intelligent agent?”

Ms. Liddle responds:  “Yes. And I’ve explained why.”

The first part of Ms. Liddle’s response is easy to understand.  “Yes.”  The second part, not so much, because she had never conceded this point before, I don’t know where she would have explained previously why she conceded it.  Nevertheless, we have made progress of a sort. 

Ms. Liddle agrees that the best theory to account for the data is “the signal was designed and sent by an intelligent agent?”

The important thing to keep in mind is that when she made her quite correct design inference, Ms. Liddle knew nothing about the provenance of the pattern embedded in the signal.  In other words, the only possible basis upon which Ms. Liddle could have made her design inference was the pattern itself — and nothing else. Read More ›

From “Escaping Gravity’s Clutches: Information Could Escape from Black Holes After All, Study Suggests” (ScienceDaily, Aug. 11, 2011), we learn:

Conventional thinking asserts that black holes swallow everything that gets too close and that nothing can escape, but a new study suggests that information could escape from black holes after all.

Read More ›

In a recent comment in a thread discussing his/her claim that ID in inferring design of first life must either face an infinite regress or else tries to explain first life by a self-contradiction [first life from prior life and/or from non-living intelligence], design theory objector FG (in ducking out of further discussion) says:

Barry and I have discovered that we are in agreement that his particular ID argument should only be used on things we can directly observe. It should not be used to answer questions about first life, since we can’t directly observe and investigate this first life.

Limiting the use of his argument in this way takes away my specific objection that triggered this thread.

Of course, the above seems to be a probably inadvertent distortion of what BA has been saying in several threads over the past week.

But what is highly significant lies in its immediate and onward implications: namely, that design theory if it is so constrained cannot properly address either origin of life or of body plans, for neither of these are amenable to direct observation. Oddly enough, FG seems unaware that the whole project of origins science is an exploration of the remote, unobserved past — indeed the unobservable past — on traces and patterns we do observe in the present. So, if the above criterion were consistently applied, we would have to surrender all claims to scientific knowledge of the deep past of origins.

In short, the objection is patently, even trivially,  selectively hyperskeptical.

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Eric Anderson writes: “Darwinists regularly admit [the physical systems we see in life] look designed and they have to keep reminding themselves that they aren’t designed.” Elizabeth Liddle writes later in the same thread: “…by intelligence I mean the power and facility to choose between options–this coincides with the Latin etymology of “intelligence,” namely, “to choose between”which is much more precise, but which would in fact include evolutionary processes” And Upright BiPed asks: “Which evolutionary process has the facility to make a choice between alternate options?” And Barry sums up: Ms. Liddle forgot to remind herself that she cannot use teleological language in a literal sense. Sometimes I wonder if the entire Darwinist program is built on nothing but linguistic Read More ›

From “Darkest Known Exoplanet: Alien World Is Blacker Than Coal” (ScienceDaily (Aug. 12, 2011) we learn:

Astronomers have discovered the darkest known exoplanet — a distant, Jupiter-sized gas giant known as TrES-2b. Their measurements show that TrES-2b reflects less than one percent of the sunlight falling on it, making it blacker than coal or any planet or moon in our solar system.

“It’s not clear what is responsible for making this planet so extraordinarily dark,” stated co-author David Spiegel of Princeton University. “However, it’s not completely pitch black. It’s so hot that it emits a faint red glow, much like a burning ember or the coils on an electric stove.”

Cool. No, hot. But seriously, Read More ›

There is some weighing of probabilities of other possible explanations (which there always has to be), but there is an important presumptive side to the design inference. Namely, our repeated and uniform experience that, for example, complex, integrated, functional systems come *only* from a process of planning, coordination and design. We see such systems designed regularly; we never see them come about by chance and necessity. The *only* reason anyone is even arguing about whether the physical systems we see in life are designed (Darwinists regularly admit they look designed and they have to keep reminding themselves that they aren’t designed) is because either (i) folks have a philosophical objection to them being designed, or (ii) they imagine that some Read More ›

An intriguing fossil suggests ancient aquatic reptiles (plesiosaurs) were live bearers:

Scientists say they have found the first evidence that giant sea reptiles – which lived at the same time as dinosaurs – gave birth to live young rather than laying eggs.

They say a 78 million-year-old fossil of a pregnant plesiosaur suggests they gave birth to single, large young.

Writing in Science, they say this also suggests a degree of parental care. Read More ›

Pity the poor readers of The Huffington Post. Not only do they have to put up with biased coverage of controversial scientific issues, such as the Intelligent Design controversy (see here, here, here and here for recent examples), but they also have to endure poorly researched articles on religion that are riddled with errors, despite the fact that these articles are often written by ministers of religion, who really should know better. This post is about one badly misinformed minister, Rev. Dr. David J. Lose, who has just written a terrible article for The Huffington Post.

Intelligent Design, as readers of Uncommon Descent are well aware, is a scientific quest for patterns in Nature which exhibit signs of being the product of some intelligence – a quest which is rapidly yielding new results in fields as diverse as cosmology, biochemistry and neurology. Read More ›