Intelligent Design

My latest MercatorNet column A choice argument Did you choose to cheat on your taxes? Or snub a friend? Free will makes an unexpected comeback. Possibly no issue between traditionalists and new atheists rankles more than this one: Are we simply the products of our genes and neurons, or can we make authentic choices? Traditional religions encourage repentance for sin, which just means, “I knew what I was doing and it was wrong.” No one repents of slipping on the ice, and ending up in traction. But a new doctrine has been highly seductive. You never choose. In a blog entry, “No soul? I can live with that. No free will? AHHHH!!!,” on the Psychology Today website, Tamler Sommers, professor Read More ›

The debate is over. Thus we are told by the Darwinian establishment. Of course, the debate is not over by definition, because debate continues. What this really means is that “evolution” is a fact, and the “fact” of evolution does not mean that living things have changed over time, but that the Darwinian mechanism of random errors (of any kind imagined or unimagined) filtered by natural selection can explain everything in the history of life, including the most sophisticated computer program ever devised, which is engendered in every cell of every living creature. I am one of those rare people who has actually read the attempts of Darwinists to refute Behe’s irreducible-complexity argument, and the so-called refutations are always the Read More ›

Heaven knows, it’s hard to get attention even for a gut hit like amoebic dysentery , never mind for Blob World in general, but here, with graphic details: Amoeba sex might have been missed because when grown in the lab, many of them don’t show any signs of engaging in sex — they have the ability to reproduce themselves by cloning, or copying themselves, indefinitely. And when they did show signs of sex, researchers may have mistaken it for a rare exception to the no-sex rule.- “Amoebas: Sexier than anyone knew: Once considered the epitome of chastity, researchers say it’s not so” (Jennifer Welsh, LiveScience, 3/22/2011) Like, they’re amoebas. It would rarely occur to them to do anything, anything at Read More ›

So they say:

Researchers at the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC) of the University of Amsterdam have discovered a universal property of musical scales. Until now it was assumed that the only thing scales throughout the world have in common is the octave.The many hundreds of scales, however, seem to possess a deeper commonality: if their tones are compared in a two- or three-dimensional way by means of a coordinate system, they form convex or star-convex structures. Convex structures are patterns without indentations or holes, such as a circle, square or oval. Read More ›

Over on his blog, Why Evolution is True, University of Chicago biologist Jerry Coyne writes critically of a Nature paper published in May of last year, which he describes as “a misguided attack on kin selection.” Coyne asks, If the Nowak et al. paper is so bad, why was it published? That’s obvious, and is an object lesson in the sociology of science.  If Joe Schmo et al. from Buggerall State University had submitted such a misguided paper to Nature, it would have been rejected within an hour (yes, Nature sometimes does that with online submissions!).  The only reason this paper was published is because it has two big-name authors, Nowak and Wilson, hailing from Mother Harvard.  That, and the Read More ›

Note: This post’s date stamp has been advanced, to continue a vital discussion. Newer posts follow MathGrrl’s below.

Bornagain77 writes (in jest I believe):  “MathGrrl posting a thread??? [here.] Is this Uncommon Descent???”

BA’s comment reminds me of a conversation I had with my dad when I was about 13.  I was blessed with a dad who from an early age engaged with me on theological issues.  One of the issues we debated was the “once saved always saved issue” (Calvin’s “perseverance of the saints”).  My dad believes in the doctrine, and one day I decided to be a little provocative and told him I had become an Armenian (the camp that believes a Christian can “fall from grace”).  I expected him to get upset and power down on me and try to push me into recanting that statement.

I will never forget his response.  He said, “OK.”  Read More ›

My thanks to Jonathan M. for passing my suggestion for a CSI thread on and a very special thanks to Denyse O’Leary for inviting me to offer a guest post.

[This post has been advanced to enable a continued discussion on a vital issue. Other newer stories are posted below. – O’Leary ]

In the abstract of Specification: The Pattern That Signifies Intelligence, William Demski asks “Can objects, even if nothing is known about how they arose, exhibit features that reliably signal the action of an intelligent cause?” Many ID proponents answer this question emphatically in the affirmative, claiming that Complex Specified Information is a metric that clearly indicates intelligent agency.

As someone with a strong interest in computational biology, evolutionary algorithms, and genetic programming, this strikes me as the most readily testable claim made by ID proponents. For some time I’ve been trying to learn enough about CSI to be able to measure it objectively and to determine whether or not known evolutionary mechanisms are capable of generating it. Unfortunately, what I’ve found is quite a bit of confusion about the details of CSI, even among its strongest advocates.

My first detailed discussion was with UD regular gpuccio, in a series of four threads hosted by Mark Frank. While we didn’t come to any resolution, we did cover a number of details that might be of interest to others following the topic.

CSI came up again in a recent thread here on UD. I asked the participants there to assist me in better understanding CSI by providing a rigorous mathematical definition and showing how to calculate it for four scenarios: Read More ›

At the risk of doing this subject to death (for those who haven’t noticed, I’m fairly set on bacterial regulation of gene expression and, in particular, flagellar assembly), I recently encountered a somewhat revealing quote from one of my favourite overviews of the flagellum — that is, Pili and Flagella: Current Research and Future Trends. In chapter 6 of that book (entitled, “What Is Essential For Flagellar Assembly?”), contributer Shin-Ichi Aizawa writes, Since the flagellum is so well designed and beautifully constructed by an ordered assembly pathway, even I, who am not a creationist, get an awe-inspiring feeling from its ‘divine’ beauty … However, if the flagellum evolved from a primitive form, where are the remnants of its ancestor? Why Read More ›

An interesting research article was published in Nature this week [Wang, K. C., Y. W. Yang, et al. (2011). “A long noncoding RNA maintains active chromatin to coordinate homeotic gene expression.” Nature]. In the study, a fascinating new regulatory role is identified for long intergenic noncoding RNAs (lincRNAs). Read More>>>

There are minor errors, there are mistakes, there are egregious blunders, there are schoolboy howlers, and then there are absolute whoppers. I’ll let my readers decide how to classify this one from a Mr. Frank Curcio, who is, as we shall see, an educated man.

In a letter entitled “God, science and evolution,” at New Jersey’s largest local website NJ.com, a Mr. Curcio writes in to warn readers:

The creationists are at it again, trying to get their religious dogma taught in public schools as science.

Responding to an earlier letter to NJ.com by a Mr. Michael Wolfe, who wrote that he found it “painful to witness the lengths to which many atheists go in their attempts to deny intelligent design in both creation and perpetuation,” Frank Curcio countered: “I’m a lifelong theist and I do not believe in creationism or intelligent design.” Fair enough. Mr. Curcio later added:

I can assure readers that not every theist wants his or her particular religious beliefs forced on the students in our public schools. A lifelong theist, I have been a scientist and historian since 1959 and from my experience can state that not every religious person is a creationist; not every scientist is an atheist.

I shall let Mr. Curcio’s careless equation of Intelligent Design with creationism pass without comment. Evidently Mr. Curcio is an educated man: a scientist and an historian. I was therefore hoping that his rebuttal of Mr. Wolfe’s views would be a well-argued one, making some substantive points drawn from one or both of his fields of expertise. Instead, Mr. Curcio’s letter betrays a jaw-dropping, bone-headed ignorance of history. I will invite my readers to see how many mistakes they can count: Read More ›

Over at Why Evolution is True, in an article crassly titled, Why God hurt Japan, Professor Jerry Coyne takes pastor Adam Hamilton to task for his personal perspective on the recent magnitude 9.0 earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan on March 11.

Now, I’ve already argued here that suffering does not make it absurd to believe in an omnibenevolent, omniscient and omnipotent God, and I’ve attempted to address the problem of suffering here in an article I wrote in response to Professor Anthony Grayling on the recent disaster that affected Japan, so I shall say no more about the matter in this post. By the way, readers can donate to the Japanese Red Cross here and here, or donate to the American Red Cross earthquake relief response here and here.

The phrase “swallowing camels” is often used to refer to believing incredible things. Professor Coyne appears not to realize that he is a camel-swallower extraordinaire. For the difficulties in accepting the existence of an Intelligent Designer of Nature who is also (as many ID supporters like myself believe) omnibenevolent, omniscient and omnipotent, pale in comparison with the sheer impossibility of a world with no Designer at all. For that reason, I regard Professor Coyne as far more credulous than any of the religious fundamentalists whom he regularly lambastes in his posts. Today, I’d like to briefly explain why.

Near the end of his article, Professor Coyne asks:

What would our world be like if God had not created it, and it had arisen in a purely natural manner?

Talk about leading with your chin! This one’s easy. Read More ›

Here’s the latest from PhysOrg:

The process of “spatial sorting” relies on genes for speed accumulating at the increasingly fast-moving frontline. Unlike natural selection – a process first described by Charles Darwin, stating that traits which help an organism survive and reproduce will build up over time – spatial sorting does not require an animal’s survival or reproduction to be increased by it being quicker. The new process can only work within the limits set by natural selection, but may be an important cause of evolutionary change in species that are expanding their ranges into new territory.

There’s a name for this kind of process, isn’t there? I think you would term this a “sieve-like” process. But, IIRC, Richard Dawkins in the Blind Watchmaker says that a “sieve-like” can’t explain the complexity we see. So, here we have “changing gene frequencies” that have no connection to what NS is purported to be able to do. We simply have changing gene frequencies without any “increase in fitness”. It’s simply a matter of non-random mating patterns, patterns that are imposed simply by proximity of mates. I’m more than willing to concede that these kinds of “changing gene frequencies” happen all the time; but I’m not willing to say that this constitutes “evolution”. I think there is some “microevolution” that takes place, but that the most of what happens is right along this sieving process that is proposed by these experimenters. Share your thoughts. Read More ›

A friend writes about this BoingBoing from a member of a four-generation family of secular humanists (originally, an address to the Harvard Humanist Society, April 2010), asking for comments. See what you think, but this jumps out at me:

There’s a quote I love: “Evil is a little man afraid for his job.” I always thought some famous author said it, but I asked my 200,000 followers on Twitter today, and it turns out that Roy Scheider said it in Blue Thunder.

That’s another classic in not-true catchy slogans. Idi Amin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Stalin … were hardly little men and were not afraid for their jobs.

That “little man” type, hardly an endangered species, is good at stamping in the mail and complaining about his co-workers and his bad back, but he only ever becomes a tool of evil when co-opted by genuinely evil – and not little – men. The worst he could do on his own is fail to call an ambulance when someone showed obvious signs of heart failure because he was busy hanging curtains or something.

Ordinary people can be evil. An older, somewhat flawed, but still useful book on what evil can look like in everyday life is People of the Lie by the late psychiatrist, Scott Peck. He recounts, for example, the case of a young man who had crashed up his car in an apparent suicide attempt. It turned out that his parents had given him the gun with which his elder brother had committed suicide as a Christmas gift. Then Peck interviewed the parents and … He became interested in studying how evil works in everyday life. But none of it was about littleness. Had they been more important people, the scope of their evil would have extended far beyond their own family.

Mostly, the rest of the published address is just more not-quite-truisms about growing up, but then there’s this: Read More ›

Our different senses rely on a complex process known as cellular signal transduction which converts an external stimulus, such as sound or light, to a nerve signal. But the nerve signal doesn’t go straight to the brain. In the case of mammalian vision the massive data stream emanating from the millions of photoreceptor cells undergoes substantial signal processing before the information is sent to the brain. New research is now providing more information about the cellular architecture involved in this intermediate processing stage.  Read more

(This is a sequel to my previous post in response to Professor Anthony Grayling, entitled Is the notion of God logically contradictory?)

In a recent short essay, entitled God and Disaster, Professor Anthony Grayling, a leading atheist philosopher and Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London, lamented the loss of life from the recent earthquake in Japan and the tsunami that followed it. He then went on to voice his perplexity at television reports of people going to church after the massive earthquake which hit Christchurch, New Zealand, on February 22, killing over 200 people. Grayling concluded by wondering how such people could believe in such an “incoherent fiction” as the idea of a Deity. “This,” he wrote, “is a perennial puzzle.”

Before I address the substance of Professor Grayling’s essay, I’d like readers to keep one simple question uppermost in their minds: exactly what does Grayling want God to do, in order to prevent human suffering?

Let me begin with a short word about myself. Like Professor Grayling, I possess a Ph.D. in philosophy. Unlike him, I live and work in Japan, and I was working in Yokohama, Japan, when the earthquake struck on Friday, March 11th at 2:46 p.m. local time. After the quake hit, I spent the night with several hundred people in a shopping mall near Yokohama station, as the trains had stopped running. On the Sunday after the quake, I also attended my local church, where the congregation is almost entirely Japanese. Despite the tragic loss of life – the death toll is expected to exceed 20,000 – the earthquake did not weaken my belief in God. It did, however, reinforce my conviction that attempts to rationalize suffering – such as Leibniz’s optimistic assertion that we live in the best of all possible worlds, which Voltaire savagely satirized in his novel Candide – are fundamentally wrong-headed. Whole towns were swept away by the tsunami following the quake. The suffering that people experience in disasters is absurd and pointless; on this point, the atheists are surely right.

The views I present in this essay are mine, and I take sole responsibility for them. My aim is to show that two mistaken theological assumptions – the notion that God can do anything imaginable and the notion that God always does things for the best – lie at the heart of the contemporary “New Atheist” insistence that senseless suffering renders belief in God irrational. In passing, I also point out examples of invalid arguments for Darwinian evolution which rely on the assumption that that God can do anything imaginable. Read More ›