Intelligent Design

I see where Danish ID proponent Leif Asmark Jensen has put out Rethinking Darwin: A Vedic Study of Darwinism and Intelligent Design (Bhaktivedanta Book Trust, 2011). Jensen I Hare Krishna, and his book offers a Hindu perspective. It includes some chapters by well-known ID theorists as well as his own work. Rethinking is a good companion and comparison piece to the book put out by Hungarian Hindus, Nature’s IQ which provides much excellent photography, including an ant carrying a computer chip. From the little I know about Hinduism, I can’t see it producing a materialist perspective on life, and there would be no reason not to assume that a cosmic mind accounts for design in nature.

“Foresight is an imperfect thing — all prevision in economics is imperfect. And, even more serious, the economist in high office is under a strong personal and political compulsion to predict wrongly. That is partly because of the temptation to predict what is wanted, and it is better, not worse, economic performance that is always wanted.” –John Kenneth Galbraith, MONEY (1975), pp. 269-70. This quote is relevant to the ID debate. People in high scientific office, whether in the straight-up secular world or in evangelical educational circles, would look bad if they were seen as endorsing a grand scientific theory, for which they are on record as saying that this theory contributes to science’s caché, that ends up being thoroughly Read More ›

Elsevier has just published Granville Sewell’s “A Second Look at the Second Law” (Applied Mathematics Letters, June 2011): ABSTRACT: It is commonly argued that the spectacular increase in order which has occurred on Earth does not violate the second law of thermodynamics because the Earth is an open system, and anything can happen in an open system as long as the entropy increases outside the system compensate the entropy decreases inside the system. However, if we define ‘‘X-entropy’’ to be the entropy associated with any diffusing component X (for example, X might be heat), and, since entropy measures disorder, ‘‘X-order’’ to be the negative of X-entropy, a closer look at the equations for entropy change shows that they not only Read More ›

Here is a pdf of that famous article.

Some years back, ID critic Dave Thomas used to tout the power of genetic algorithms for their ability of solve the Steiner Problem, which basically tries to minimize distance of paths that connect nodes on a two-dimensional surface (last I looked, he’s still making this line of criticism — see here). In fact, none of his criticisms hit the mark — the information problem that he claims to resolve in evolutionary terms merely pushes the design problem deeper, as the peer-reviewed research at the Evolutionary Informatics Lab makes clear (go to the publications page there). Now here’s an interesting twist: Colonies of ants, when they make tracks from one colony to another minimize path-length and thereby also solve the Steiner Problem (see Read More ›

My good friend Frank Turek is organizing a conference for training apologetics instructors this August. The dates have just been nailed down and I’ll be speaking there on, what else, ID. Frank’s best known book, co-authored with Norm Geisler, is I DON’T HAVE ENOUGH FAITH TO BE AN ATHEIST. It’s an insightful and fun book. ID is clearly a factor here in undermining faith in atheism. For conference details, go here.

In part 1 of this series, I laid out what I see as some key differences between Thomism and ID. In this post I want to focus on why Thomists should nevertheless support ID – even while granting some or all of the most common criticisms Thomists have of ID.

In order to do that, though, I’m going to have to be a little hair-splitting – particularly, I want to explain just what I mean by “support ID”. I think there’s a few ways this “support” can manifest – some easier to achieve than others, and some harder.

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Did this whiz past me last month? From Science (Science 28 January 2011): Defeating Creationism in the Courtroom, But Not in the ClassroomMichael B. Berkman and Eric Plutzer Just over 5 years ago, the scientific community turned its attention to a courtroom in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Eleven parents sued their Dover, Pennsylvania, school board to overturn a policy explicitly legitimizing intelligent design creationism. The case, Kitzmiller v. Dover, followed a familiar script: Local citizens wanted their religious values validated by the science curriculum; prominent academics testified to the scientific consensus on evolution; and creationists lost decisively. Intelligent design was not science, held the court, but rather an effort to advance a religious view via public schools, a violation of the U.S. Read More ›

In the person of Rabbi Moshe Averick, whose book, Nonsense of the Highest Order: The Confused and Illusory World of the Atheist, has merited the attention of someone or other at Richard Dawkins’s Foundation’s Web site, who is looking for help in refuting the Reb. Moshe offers, “Turns out Richard Dawkins’ watchmaker has 20/20 vision after all.” In his turn, the Reb also identifies a Dawkins schoolboy howler, in the opinion of colleagues: An “all ya gotta do is … ” origin of life. On the same page, we also learn from Robert Shapiro: SHAPIRO: Richard Dawkins wrote a wonderful book, but the place where he absolutely blew it was in a section on the origin of life. He took all Read More ›

I have responded, here, to occasional UD commenter Larry Tanner (a nom de plume, so I can safely use it); who has objected to my background post for the ID Foundations series, on signs, symbols and their significance.

A friend offers “The 6 Crappiest Interview Questions”, groaning “Indeed! (And I’ve been asked many of them). Yes, we all have. Apparently, if you are really good, you will also get to hear from the same source, The Oatmeal, about crappy interviewees. It’s only fair, after all, that some of us should get our own back.

“I know this world is ruled by infinite intelligence. Everything that surrounds us – everything that exists – proves that there are infinite laws behind it. There can be no denying this fact. It is mathematical in its precision.” – Thomas A. Edison

Canada’s National Post tears into the Canadian Association of University Teachers’ “investigations” of Christian universities: The Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) — which describes itself as Canada’s “national voice for academic staff” — says it has investigated four small Christian colleges and universities in the past 18 months because it wants parents to know what kind of institutions their sons and daughters might attend. In other words, we are told, there is nothing nefarious in the 65,000-member union’s action. It is merely performing a valuable public service.This is disingenuous nonsense. The CAUT is on a thinly disguised anti-Christian witch hunt. There is no other way to describe it. [ … ] The investigations were instigated entirely by CAUT executive Read More ›

As if evolution was not silly enough already evolutionists are now claiming that the fact that different plants all have leaves is a compelling evidence for their belief that all of nature just happened to spontaneously arise, all by itself. I occasionally enjoy a good spoof, but this is no joke. You can see this evolutionary logic for yourself right here. Some may find this unbelievable but this example, while stupefying, is actually representative of evolutionary thinking.  Read more