Intelligent Design

I have often found that the best refutations of arguments for atheism are written by atheists. Raymond Tallis is a splendid example of this rule. In an article entitled “Why I am an atheist,” in Philosophy Now, May/June 2009, 73:47-48 (click here or here to read online), he manages to slay no less than three arguments for atheism, before advancing two much better arguments of his own. Interestingly, however, some of the best online refutations of Tallis’s own arguments for atheism have been written by …. you guessed it, atheists.

The relevance of all this to Intelligent Design should be obvious. Arguments for Intelligent Design are based not only on the existence of complex specified information in living organisms, but also on the fine-tuning of the cosmos. If there were a cosmic Creator, then it would have to be a God of some sort. But if there were compelling or even strong arguments against the existence of God, they would also be arguments against at least the cosmic version of Intelligent Design.

Without further ado, let’s have a look at what Tallis calls the bad arguments for atheism. Read More ›

Proteins consist of hundreds of amino acids attached to each other like train cars, and when they fold up they consistently find the same three dimensional shape. Like a necklace that magically falls into the same shape every time it is dropped onto a table, the consistency of protein folding once seemed like a paradox. For there is an astronomical number of shapes the protein could possibly take on. How does it find the same one so consistently, and so quickly? The answer has interesting implications for evolution.  Read more

Evolution is, as evolutionists like to say, absolutely necessary to do science. Darwin’s theory, in one version or another, is the underlying framework that guides our research. Nothing in biology makes sense, evolutionists like to repeat, except in the light of evolution. But in fact evolution is constantly upended. We are continually finding special cases, anomalies and exceptions, and evolution is more of a confusing patchwork of “On Tuesday’s it looks like this” than a useful theory. Consider just one example from this steady stream of failed expectations: sex determination in chickens.  Read more

You’d better order this one for yourself. It’s the long-delayed outcome of the Nature of Nature conference, which got intelligent design theorists Bill Dembski and Bruce Gordon’s Polanyi Center at Baptist Baylor University shut down.* It features top guns on both sides of the controversy: Unmatched in its breadth and scope, The Nature of Nature brings together some of the most influential scientists, scholars, and public intellectuals—including three Nobel laureates—across a wide spectrum of disciplines and schools of thought. Here they grapple with a perennial question that has been made all the more pressing by recent advances in the natural sciences: Is the fundamental explanatory principle of the universe, life, and self-conscious awareness to be found in inanimate matter or Read More ›

Sometimes a negative result in science is just as useful as a positive one. I believe that applies to Intelligent Design as well. Today I’m going to talk about a structure found in birds, which may or may not have been designed. Not being a biologist, I’d like to hear readers’ opinions before I make up my mind.

There are structures found in Nature which were obviously designed. I blogged recently about one recently in my post, The video that proves Intelligent Design: the ATP synthase enzyme. You can watch the 86-second video here.

There are also many structures in Nature which, we can confidently assume, were not designed. In his book, The Edge of Evolution (Free Press, 2007, pp. 78-80), Professor Michael Behe makes a convincing case that the antifreeze proteins found in Antarctic fish can be accounted for in terms of Darwinian evolution. No need to invoke design here.

And then there are the head scratchers that leave us all wondering. One such example is the syrinx. That’s the name for the vocal organ of birds, which enables them to produce sounds, despite the fact that they lack the vocal chords possessed by mammals. The syrinx comes in varying degrees of complexity, and the Australian lyrebird, which possesses an extraordinary ability to mimic sounds, has the most complex syrinx of any bird. How good is it? If you want to find out, I suggest that you click on this Absolutely Amazing BBC link and watch the two videos of the Superb lyrebird (the larger of the two species of lyrebird). One of these videos features the naturalist David Attenborough. And if you click here, you can also listen to Chook, a male lyrebird at Adelaide Zoo, imitating the sound of construction equipment. Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about the lyrebird’s ability for mimicry:
Read More ›

I once collected and cataloged the various arguments for evolution. It is fascinating to see smart people constructing elaborate schemes for the unlikely. One of the subtle, yet no less bizarre, arguments is the use of vitalism as a null hypothesis, a variation of which the brilliant physicist Ard Louis constructed recently. First, here’s what I wrote about this a year and half ago:  Read more

A Vivisection of the ev Computer Organism: Identifying Sources of Active Information George Montañez, Winston Ewert, William Dembski, Robert Marks   Abstract ev is an evolutionary search algorithm proposed to simulate biological evolution. As such, researchers have claimed that it demonstrates that a blind, unguided search is able to generate new information. However, analysis shows that any non-trivial computer search needs to exploit one or more sources of knowledge to make the search successful. Search algorithms mine active information from these resources, with some search algorithms performing better than others. We illustrate these principles in the analysis of ev. The sources of knowledge in ev include a Hamming oracle and a perceptron structure that predisposes the search towards its target. Read More ›

New research shows that when presented with a barrier, ants don’t just turn around and follow the scent back the way they came. Instead, they perform an advanced search:  Read more

ID critics often complain that ID advocates go ON AND ON (and ON) worrying about Weasel-type models of evolution, as illustrations of how undirected variation and selection can rapidly converge to apparently designed outcomes. No one takes such models seriously as biology, the critics say. Weasels are toys with a strictly limited teaching purpose. Over to the latest issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). Looks like a weasel in the tall grass: Suppose that we are trying to find a specific unknown word of L letters, each of the letters having been chosen from an alphabet of K letters. We want to find the word by means of a sequence of rounds of guessing letters. Read More ›

Astronomer Martin Gaskell, the latest victim of the gluttonous, one-minded, two-headed dragon known as “Evolution Promotion” and “Religious Persecution,” depending on which head one is referring to on the modern beast, has apparently been Expelled due to his critical remarks on evolution and for being “potentially evangelical.” Indeed, Mr. Gaskell was provoking both heads of this modern monster. How? By talking. You see, the beast hates words in plain language with real meaning that describe the eternal enemy called truth. The short, abrupt words with all the sense of sunlight sting its sensitive ears, which need the dark and gray smooth sounds of ambiguities and soft soap of appeasements.  This monstrosity has been spotted at several universities.  The latest sighting was in Kentucky:

No one denies that astronomer Martin Gaskell was the leading candidate for the founding director of a new observatory at the University of Kentucky in 2007 — until his writings on evolution came to light.

Gaskell had given lectures to campus religious groups around the country in which he said that while he has no problem reconciling the Bible with the theory of evolution, he believes the theory has major flaws. And he recommended students read theory critics in the intelligent-design movement.

That stance alarmed UK science professors and, the university acknowledges, played a role in the job going to another candidate.

Now a federal judge says Gaskell has a right to a jury trial over his allegation that he lost the job because he is a Christian and “potentially evangelical.”

Read More ›

Fifty years ago molecular biologists began to uncover the inner workings of the cell and one of their profound discoveries was that genetic information, stored in the double helix DNA molecule, was translated according to a code to produce a string of amino acids which, after being hitched to each other like train cars, folded up to produce a protein that did something useful in the cell. Interestingly, a given protein’s amino acid sequence was found to have some degree of flexibility. Hemoglobin proteins, for instance, across different species revealed quite a few changes to the sequence while still functioning as a hemoglobin.  Read more

jurassicmac has more to say in response to my “Gravity Does Not Account for Itself.”  He writes: I never said that gravity accounted for itself. Gravity explains the motion of the planets. In that same way, the laws of the universe that make evolution possible don’t account for themselves; but they do explain the current state of life. By your reasoning, it seems as if we could never ‘explain’ anything if we could always push the question back a step and say ‘Well, you can’t explain your explanation!’ Just so.  In his great “Abolition of Man” C.S. Lewis wrote: But you cannot go on ‘explaining away’ forever: you will find that you have explained explanation itself away. You cannot go Read More ›

We continue to examine the work of authors George Johnson and Jonathan Losos in their biology textbook, The Living World ((Fifth Edition, McGraw Hill, 2008). In their chapter on evolution and natural selection, these accomplished evolutionists begin by (1) misrepresenting the relationship between microevolution and macroevolution and biological variation here, (2) making a non scientific, metaphysical, truth claim that just happens to mandate the truth of evolution here, (3) making the grossly false statement that the fossils themselves are a factual observation that macroevolution has occurred here and here, (4) making a series of misrepresentations by carefully selecting the evidence to provide to the student and protecting it with circular reasoning here, (5) misrepresenting the molecular evidence here, (6) presenting Read More ›

Here’s da proof. (Note: Frosty the Snowman on the Northwest Mantel in the East Room. White House photo by Susan Sterner.)