Intelligent Design

Noticing what Steno did here, that animal rights activist philosopher Peter Singer is moving toward the idea that morality has an objective basis, anti-ID Catholic philosopher Ed Feser responds. Noting that Singer is looking for an “intuitive” basis for morality, he writes,

Moral intuitions track objective moral truth in only a very rough, general, and mutable way. Practically they are useful – that is why nature put them into us – and they might provide a useful heuristic when philosophically investigating this or that specific moral question. But intuition does not ground moral truth, it is not an infallible guide to moral truth, and it should never form the basis of a philosophical argument for a controversial moral position.

But that won’t work. Read More ›

In Probability’s Nature and the Nature of Probability, Don Johnson discusses the trilobite eye:

Physicist Riccardo Levi-Setti observes, “In fact, this optical doublet is a device so typically associated with human invention that its discovery in trilobites comes as something of a shock. The realization that trilobites developed and used such devices half a billion years ago makes the shock even greater. ” Read More ›

Expelled’s Caroline Crocker, now executive director of AITSE, and author of Free to Think, describes how she first began to get hints that she was decidedly not free to think, in biology. She asked,

Control mechanisms in cells are like intricate circuit boards; how could something like this evolve through random mutation? Read More ›

In “Antimatter atoms trapped for 16 minutes” Emily Chung reports (CBC News, June 6, 2011),

The scientists’ recent achievement has extended the experimental lifetime of antihydrogen atoms 5,000-fold since the ALPHA experiment — an international collaboration Fujiwara is part of — first figured out how to trap them at all.

This is, scientists say, enough time to make serious study feasible. When antimatter was first trapped, it could be held for less than one-fifth of a second. One proposal: Read More ›

In “Going ape: Ultraviolence and our primate cousins,” New Scientist’s News Editor, Rowan Hooper, reviewing a book on ape violence, riffs,

Josephine Head, also of the Max Planck Institute, describes how she tracked a trail of blood from where chimps had been vocalising loudly the night before, and made a horrible discovery: the spread-eagled body of an adult male chimp, his face battered and bruised, throat torn open and intestines dragged out. Read More ›

… when he said, “We need to use the effective theory of Darwinian natural selection of those Societies most likely to survive. We assign them a higher value.” Even the interviewer, it turns out, didn’t know what he meant, and has been trying to find out.

Read More ›

From a recent study: “More Americans Praying About Health, Study Says; No Correlation Found Between Prayer for Health and Lack of Health Insurance ScienceDaily, May 23, 2011)”:

While prayer about health issues increased across all groups, from 43 percent in 2002 to 49 percent in 2007, the data indicated that people with the highest incomes were 15 percent less likely to pray than those with the lowest incomes, and people who exercised regularly were 25 percent less likely to pray those who didn’t exercise. Women, African-Americans and the well-educated were most likely to pray about their health. Read More ›

Fox news reports that an armchair astronomer, David Martine, claims that he’s discovered evidence of intelligent life on Mars. In this YouTube video Martine speculates that it could be a bio lab, or a dwelling or garage (he hope’s its not a weapon. NASA is investigating. So, is this evidence of intelligent design? Is it a natural phenomenon of some sort? Or is it a hoax (albeit an intelligently designed one)? And how might one go about making the determination? Thoughts anyone?

Over the weekend, we’ve been discussing the Kentucky government offering tax incentives to the Ark Encounter theme park, as a job creation boost. Some oppose it on the grounds that it “establishes religion.” Others say that doesn’t matter if it creates jobs. A third group has pointed out that a tax incentive is not a gift, unless you think the government owns everyone’s labor. Here, the Kentucky government offers tax advantages relevant only if the Ark floats, so to speak. In which case, the job creation scheme will work.

Joshua Youngkin, a lawyer for Discovery Institute, offers us a legal comment: Read More ›

Some were surprised when I linked Christianity Today’s new semi-simian Adam and Eve with involuntary euthanasia. But the link is much more direct than some suppose.

There is, first, the whole, huge question of adjusting our thinking from the idea that we are descended from Adam and Eve to the idea that we are ascended from them. That is essentially a different religion from Christianity, and I was indeed surprised that Christianity Today failed to observe the fact. Would they have given over their pages to the proposition that perhaps Christians should be Buddhists? It would make more sense. Buddhism is not a dishonorable creed; far from it. Christians don’t think that Buddhism reflects ultimate reality. But there is world of difference between, say, Buddhism and Darwinism. Darwinism not only doesn’t reflect ultimate reality, it defaces it.

But here I want to focus on the argument for euthanasia. It was succinctly captured in the title of a movie some years back: They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?

I rarely meet a convinced Darwinist who does not support euthanasia (and abortion, and human embryonic stem cell research).

I rarely meet Read More ›

At UD we have many brilliant ID apologists, and they continue to mount what I perceive as increasingly indefensible assaults on the creative powers of the Darwinian mechanism of random errors filtered by natural selection. In addition, they present overwhelming positive evidence that the only known source of functionally specified, highly integrated information-processing systems, with such sophisticated technology as error detection and repair, is intelligent design. [Part 2 is here. ] This should be obvious to any unbiased observer with a decent education in basic mathematics and expertise in any rigorous engineering discipline. Here is my analysis: The Forrests of the world don’t want to admit that there is design in the universe and living systems — even when the Read More ›

        Here: In Never Let Me Go, a novel by the Japanese-British writer Kazuo Ishiguro (and now a motion picture), children at a boarding school in the beautiful English countryside are raised with little contact with the outside world. The truth about the origin and identity of the students of Hailsham School is veiled.But by picking up on subtle clues and hints dropped in guarded conversations, one might begin to figure out that the children are all human clones, whose sole purpose is to become, after reaching adulthood, sources for organ “donations.” After three or four such donations, a clone would “complete,” that is, die. It gets better … Salvo is currently fundraising and any donation will Read More ›

Vid. (opens on click), courtesy Wintery Knight Here’s a summary:

Behe’s first book – the bacterial flagellum

Keith Fox: Here are a couple of papers that show how parts of the flagellum evolved

They are possible pathways.

Michael Behe: No, those are studies that show that there are similarities between bacterial flagella in multiple organisms

Similarities of proteins between different organisms do not necessarily imply a developmental pathway Read More ›

[This post will remain at the top of the page until 8:00 am EST tomorrow, June 5. For reader convenience, other coverage continues below. – UD News]

Ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce you to Tyro, Drew, Ray Moscow, Andrei, Dr. I. Needtob Athe, Anatman, Chris McNeely, Marcello, John Salerno, Miles, Mark, TheShortEaredOwl, Solomon Wagstaff, Evan Guiney, KP, Sven DiMilo, Patrick, Kevin Anthoney, Ftfkdad, Happy Cat, Prof. Pedant, Ben Goren, Qbsmd and Tim Byron. Most of these guys are card-carrying atheists, but by the time you’ve finished reading this post, you’ll absolutely love them.

I have argued before (see here) that the best refutations of arguments for atheism are often those written by atheists themselves. But wait, there’s more! Funnily enough, it turns out that atheists can do a better job of defending key religious doctrines than religious believers themselves.

As readers are well aware, Intelligent Design Theory is not about defending any religious doctrine: its methods are scientific, and its concern is with patterns in Nature that are best explained as the product of intelligent agency. Nevertheless, many Intelligent Design proponents are religious believers, and this post is on a topic that will interest those who are. One key religious doctrine that has been getting a lot of attention lately (see this article by Darrel Falk at Biologos and this recent article by Richard Ostling in Christianity Today) is the doctrine that all human beings are descended from a single pair: Adam and Eve. Read More ›

The average American commentator would likely say of the Ark Encounter venture, under way in Kentucky, what Americans United for Separation of Church and State head Barry Lynn did in fact say:

“The state of Kentucky should not be promoting the spread of fundamentalist Christianity or any other religious viewpoint … Let these folks build their fundamentalist Disneyland without government help.”

After all, the project’s purpose is to prove that Noah could have fitted two of every animal onto the Ark.

Here are some constraints on any decision: Read More ›