Intelligent Design

Here at “Does Darwinism depend on evidence?”, Richard Dawkins’ has said we must, because it is the only plausible theory of evolution.

But Fodor responds that being a materialist atheist like himself,  his co-author Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini, and Dawkins has nothing to do with needing to believe Darwinism.

Fodor and Piatelli-Palmarini respond in What Darwin Got Wrong (London: Profile Books, 2010), that physicalism (the basic assumption they share with Dawkins, that everything is ultimately physical = bottom up, not top down) requires no such thing: Read More ›

Agnostic Warwick U sociologist Steve Fuller, author of Dissent over Descent (2008) offers:

One wishes that the US legal system exercised the same diligence in authenticating people’s religious beliefs s their scientific beliefs. Ayala, Miller and Collins claim that their scientific inquiries are driven by their faith in God. Yet, as they are the first to admit, the science they do is indistinguishable from those who do not share that faith.One might reasonably wonder: how exactly does their faith influence their science, especially given the enormous import of their religious commitments? Would it not be reasonable to expect their Christian beliefs, assuming they have some cognitive content, to colour the theories they propose and the inferences they draw from the evidence? If not, why should we think that their Christianity has any impact on their science whatsoever – simply because they say so? Read More ›

When first reported, this hominin was given the name Zinjanthropus boisei. He was considered to be a human ancestor and was portrayed as an upright hairy apeman. Later, he was renamed Australopithecus boisei, but then was moved to a separate genus, receiving the name Paranthropus boisei. He still appears in some presentations of human ancestry. What makes him memorable are his magnificent teeth: “For decades, scientists thought that the large, heavy teeth the primates had were used in cracking open hard foods such as nuts. The common name for Paranthropus was “Nutcracker Man” for this very reason.” [. . .] [The take-home message:] Nutcracker Man is a notable example of how morphology was wrongly interpreted for decades and only recently Read More ›

It really depends on how much care has been taken to preserve them.

Recently, Barry Arrington posted on how we can be sure of something (for example, that bin Laden is dead). The burden of proof is on any who might claim otherwise.

For some, the question has arisen whether the oral transmission of the Torah (the books of Moses in Jewish tradition) could be reliable. What about memory lapses, deliberate alterations, etc., especially during the time when oral memory and transmission were normal, alongside scrolls (which were expensive and time-consuming to produce).

Well, I asked the ID community reb, Moshe Averick, author of Nonsense of a High Order: The confused and illusory world of the atheist, how do you know that the Torah goes back to the time of Moses? Here is what he says, Read More ›

Jan Brueghel the Elder, “Paradise,” 1620. Gemaldgalerie, Berlin.

It’s a common enough complaint. Why don’t we live in a perfect world? After all, wouldn’t we expect God to make one, supposing He existed?

Intelligent Design is, in the words of Professor William Dembski, “the study of patterns in nature that are best explained as the result of intelligence.” As a scientific discipline, it makes no claim to identify the Designer of Nature. There are, however, weighty philosophical reasons for concluding that the Ultimate Designer of Nature could only be an Infinite, Uncaused, Intelligent Being who cannot fail to exist. For the purposes of this post, then, I’m going to assume that the Ultimate Designer is God, and that He not only designed the cosmos but maintains it in existence. So the question we need to answer is: why didn’t God make a perfect world?
Read More ›

This was the question: For a copy of The Nature of Nature , explain why either Richard Dawkins or Francis Collins is the cuter poster boy for selling Darwinism.

The question was first asked (that I ever heard of) by a prominent Canadian cosmologist, who wrote to a number of peers asking for feedback. He wanted a pollster to do a study too, but surely that would be a waste: We should only poll people on matters that will lead somewhere. Essentially, both these men are going to go away and do what they want, no matter what the tally, so why bother?

The winner is StephenB at 21, for clarity of analysis and precision of expression:

So, who is the better con man? In terms of gaining new recruits, I think Dawkins inspires more passion, but Collins probably gets better numbers. So, I give a slight edge to Collins. Whenever possible he avoids clarity of expression and practices the crafty art of “strategic ambiguity,” allowing potential supporters with widely divergent world views to read their own convictions into his message. Notice how, with maddening imprecision, he informs his listeners that there is “no conflict between religion and science,” prompting them to fill in the missing spaces with Christ and Darwin.

StephenB, write me at denyseoleary@gmail.com.

Incidentally, among those who cast a definite vote, it was a tie (not just Dawkins’ “nicer tie”). More below, but watch for the next contest. Read More ›

Yesterday, original Darwinist assumptions about “junk DNA” were offered; today, again courtesy Donald Johnson’s Probability’s Nature and Nature’s Probability LITE: A Call to Scientific Integrity. Now, let’s see what the ID guys had to say about it (p. 57):

“Junk DNA” has been classified as a misnomer by ID proponents as early as 1986 [Den86], since “Junk DNA and directed evolution are in the end incompatible concepts” [Den98] The journal Science refused to print a 1994 letter that pro-ID scientist Forrest Mims wrote warning about assuming that “junk DNA” was useless [Mim94*]*9. Rejected Publications

They’ve been saying it ever since, popular or otherwise. Read More ›

ID friendly philosophers Tim McGrew (of Western Michigan University) and Lydia McGrew offer some thoughts on “undesigned coincidences” as evidence for the reliability of documentary evidence. Using a passage in the Gospel of John, Lydia argues,

… as John is telling the story about the feeding of the five thousand, it would be quite natural for him to say that Jesus asked Philip where they could buy bread if he were really an eyewitness–that is, because he remembered that Jesus did ask Philip. (Tim talks about why it was Philip in the interview.) But John himself might have had to stop and think for a moment if someone had asked him, “Why did Jesus ask Philip rather than any of the other disciples?” Presumably when John told the story, he wasn’t particularly thinking about some special reason for Jesus to select Philip for the question.But if someone were forging the story as fiction, he would have a reason for choosing to use a given disciple as a character at that point in his fictional narrative, and therefore he would be unlikely to choose that character without making the reason clearer to his readers.

Interesting observation. A commenter notes that Read More ›

Last night the media erupted with news that Osama Bin Laden has been tracked down and killed by American forces. President Obama went on national television and proclaimed that Bin Laden is dead. I believe him. Why should I believe Obama? Because no one in their right mind would declare to be true that which can easily be proven false. Think about it. Radical islamists have an obvious interest in disproving the president’s claims, both to make Obama look like a fool and to encourage their followers. They have no interest in allowing the world to believe the Americans have won a major victory in the war on terror. Therefore, simple logic dictates that Obama would not make the claim Read More ›

Consider some feature of the universe, such as its beginning to exist (assuming that it did begin to exist). There are various competing explanations we can consider for such a feature, and one of those explanations will be that the feature was due to an intelligent cause. We may judge this explanation to be the best one but it doesn’t follow that the explanation is true. The right account could be that there’s no explanation at all for why the universe has the feature that it does.

Thus, if the doctrine of intelligent design is as I’ve stated above, with the claim that the best explanation for the features is an intelligent cause, then I endorse intelligent design. Read More ›

In this UD post Ken Miller is quoted as saying: “The argument for intelligent design basically depends on saying, ‘You haven’t answered every question with evolution,’… Well, guess what? Science can’t answer every question.” No, ID says, You haven’t answered the most fundamental question about evolution: the origin of biological information. In fact, the mechanism you propose as an answer to that question is — logically (the challenge of producing functionally integrated machinery in a step-by-tiny-step process with each step being both functional and progressively advantageous), mathematically (the huge improbabilities created by combinatorial explosion), and empirically (Behe’s demonstration in the field of the severe limits of random mutation and natural selection) — inadequate to the task. In addition, ID theory Read More ›

From PR Underground, neurotheology researcher, physician and author, Andy Newburg explains, how fundamentalists Christians and Atheists share a minority view of God. (PRUnderground, April 27th, 2011)

Join Skeptiko guest host Steve Volk for an interview with Dr. Andy Newburg. A distinguished researcher at Thomas Jefferson University Medical College, and professor in Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Newburg discusses his latest book Principles of Neurotheology:

Steve Volk: One thing that’s disappointing to me in these debates between believers and atheists is there’s usually a very narrow conception of God that’s on the table for discussion. It’s the Fundamentalist conception. Read More ›

Here is a current debate on the subject from Cassandra’s Tears and here at Intelligent Reasoning is a comment, if you’d like to weigh in. Many sources think that intelligent design is concerned principally with the plausibility of proposed mechanisms for evolution, not with denying that it occurs. Most ID theorists are skeptical – based on evidence, or in this case lack of it – that certain claimed mechanisms, such as Darwin’s natural selection acting on random mutation, can do all that is claimed for it, or even a tiny fraction. When pigs fly first class, maybe.

Evolution News & Views is reporting on a rather revealing study of Scottish first year students at Glasgow University who doubt Darwinian evolution. In fact, the Times Education Supplement (TES) article reports that “One in 20 first-year biology students at Glasgow University don’t believe in the theory of evolution, according to new research.” The article further reports that, The study, presented at last week’s Edinburgh International Science Festival, at a “Creeping Creationism” seminar run by the Humanist Society, found that 85 per cent of students who reject evolution and 85 per cent of students who accept it were able to identify the definition most closely describing intelligent design (the most recent alternative to Darwinism). And, When asked why they rejected evolution, Read More ›

Interesting discussion at “Don’t defund SETI, science broadcaster pleads.” Could SETI just merge with ID and study evidence of intelligence in signals along those lines? Otherwise, it could merge with astrobiology units at various universities and restrict itself to looking for evidence of bacterial life in outer space. SETI has always been handicapped by the Saganesque silliness about space aliens, which made it vulnerable to any politician looking for a program he can trim or cut, by making it sound ridiculous. Put another way, the unemployed don’t care if there are space aliens or not. But that would cut the heart out of the mission of a project that, through SETI@home, has assembled vast volunteer computational resources. What a waste. Read More ›