Intelligent Design

The discussion thread to vjtorley’s excellent post below veered off on the issue of the nature of “Truth.” The issue is: Does science say anything that is “True” with a capital “T”? That is to say, does science make absolute statements? That is an issue that deserves its own post. To answer this question, we must answer some preliminary questions first. The most basic question is this: What does it mean for a statement to be “true”? Here Kairosfocus quotes Aristotle: “to say of what is, that it is, and of what is not, that it is not, is true.” (Metaphysics 1011b). Just so. This is the classic formulation of the “correspondence theory of truth.” True statements are those statements Read More ›

My book, By Design or by Chance?, provides an entertaining and informative explanation for lay people of why there is an intelligent design controversy. Speaking of whys, why did I burn up so much time and career over that? Why do I still? Two reasons: First, most of what passes for media coverage today is just a reverent rehash of the claims of voluble Darwinists. To say nothing of a warm welcome to Darwin lobbies stumping for economic rent.* In fairness, the dying legacy media are too busy bunkering down and yammering to government for welfare to start asking the critical questions one associates with journalism. Second, I had noticed, about a decade ago, an inverted news funnel. Intelligent design, Read More ›

There’s an item today at PhysOrg concerning an article in this week’s Science magazine. According to the study conducted on a bacterial population using a technique wherein mutations could be inserted anywhere along the length of the genome, each and every bacterial mutation had the same small effect on fitness of 0.5%, no matter if the mutation took place in a protein sequence or in a so-called non-coding section. I’m just bringing your attention to it. It would seem that for those who wish to use the RM + NS motif of Darwinian evolution, this study pretty much spells this motif’s deathknell. If the average mutation reduces fitness, how does any living organism improve? And, how can NS distinguish between Read More ›

I have blogged before on infinity, which holds a certain fascination for me. For one thing, I’m working on a thesis involving self-reference and the retreat into infinite recursion. And early in my Presbyterian life, I had to defend divine sovereignty and the infinities of power, knowledge and goodness from the inroads of Arminian rationalism and free will. So with a little practice, I’ve gotten quite comfortable with infinity, sort of like driving 80mph in the dark in a thunderstorm–the important thing is not to think about it too long. In this post, I want to think about it long enough to show that the Multiverse doesn’t save Darwin. Georg Cantor, of course, couldn’t stop thinking about it and was Read More ›

William Dembski will be debating Christopher Hitchens at the Prestonwood Baptist Church in Plano, TX, Nov. 18th, on the question of God’s goodness.

“Does a Good God Exist?”

Debate between Dr. William Dembski and Christopher Hitchens

Two intellectual heavy weights will square off toe-to-toe on the existence and goodness of God.

Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, where Dr. Dembski is a research professor, has an article on the debate.

Dembski and Hitchens will debate the existence of a good God during a conference for the Biblical Worldview Institute at Prestonwood Christian Academy in Plano, Texas. The debate will be hosted in the worship center at Prestonwood Baptist Church from 8:40 a.m. to 11:00 a.m. It will also be webcast on www.pcawebcast.com.

“Huh?” I hear you say. “Why would anyone think that?”

The reason, according to a recent blog article by Dutch biologist Gert Korthof, is that a God who designed malaria, and who allowed Hitler’s atrocities to take place, could not possibly be the same Deity as a God who upholds the sanctity of human life, and who condemns abortion, euthanasia and the atrocities committed by Hitler:

But there are two Gods. The God of the Sanctity of Human Life and the God of the Free Will Defense. They disagree strongly. The God of the Sanctity of Human Life is against abortion and euthanasia, and also against the atrocities of Hitler. The other God, The God of the Free Will Defense, allows the atrocities of Hitler.

However, Intelligent Design proponents fail to recognize that these attributes are mutually incompatible, so they end up believing in a schizophrenic Deity who somehow combines them all. Dr. Korthof argues that believers who engage in this intellectual juggling act end up paying a terrible personal price: they become desensitized to human pain and suffering, because they have learned to rationalize its occurrence in God’s cosmos.

Dr. Korthof is aware that this conclusion will evoke skepticism and even incredulity from many readers, so he skilfully sets forth his case, which rests upon two pillars: first, a quotation from the writings of a scientist and notable Intelligent Design proponent, Professor Michael Behe (who is also a Roman Catholic Christian) on the malaria parasite; and second, quotes from two Christian philosophers (John Hick and Richard Swinburne), who use the Free Will Defense to justify God’s allowing atrocities such as the Holocaust.
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Not only do biological organisms adapt before our eyes, but in recent years researchers have developed robots that adapt via Darwinian selection. As one recent research paper explained:  read more

When I first encountered epigenetic research, some 10 years ago, (where epigenetics is the modification of the genome by environmental factors) I remember the thrill of seeing Darwinism being disproven, well, the Neo-Darwinist Theory (NDT) synthesis anyway. Darwin himself had this archaic idea of “gemmules” carrying traits from the body to the gametes, but Mendel blew all that nonsense out of the water. Not until 50 years after Darwin’s death did his theory get resurrected with the discrete gene as the bearer of the all-important genetic blueprint. This led to the central dogma of NDT, that genes are the DNA blueprints for the cell, producing the RNA transcriptions that get converted into the proteins that make up a cell, a Read More ›

Michael Shermer and I are taking our ID versus Darwinian Evolution show back on the road, this time at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff. The date is Tuesday, November 16, and the venue is Prochnow Auditorium; here are some details: Debate on Evolution vs. Intelligent Design with Michael Shermer and Paul Nelson. This event is only open to NAU students, faculty and staff and is free with a ticket and ID. Tickets can be picked up at the NAU Central Ticket Office starting October 26. A limited number of tickets will be available at the door. Please… bring NAU ID with you to the event. This event is part of SUN Entertainment’s Lecture and Debate Series. Here’s the Facebook entry Read More ›

It is all over the news, “Scientists discover Liberal Gene!”  All my colleagues had the same question, “Does that mean there is a cure?” This is a serious question, and one that has wide repercussions. If there is a gene for homosexuality, then that means it can’t be cured, right? And groups such as Exodus Intl, which specialize in curing it, are acting contrary to nature, as is the DSM (prior to IV edition) which recommended a cure. Of course, Darwin would be spinning in his grave if someone had told him that sterilization could be an inherited trait. Nevertheless, if by some rationale (which merely demonstrates just how infinitely flexible is the Darwinian faith) we could find a gene Read More ›

Check out the following paper at arXiv. It gives yet another incarnation of Dawkins’ WEASEL. Let me suggest that Darwinists next try a horror version of it: “The WEASEL That Wouldn’t Die.” Perhaps Michael Moore can help make it.  There’s plenty of time for evolution Herbert S. Wilf Department of Mathematics, University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, PA 19104-6395 wilf@math.upenn.edu> Warren J. Ewens Department of Biology, University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, PA 19104-6018 wewens@sas.upenn.edu> October 28, 2010 Abstract: Objections to Darwinian evolution are often based on the time required to carry out the necessary mutations. Seemingly, exponential numbers of mutations are needed. We show that such estimates ignore the effects of natural selection, and that the numbers of necessary mutations are thereby reduced Read More ›

Sir Roger Penrose, the brilliant Oxford mathematical physicist, who has made contributions to cosmology (in a famous paper with Stephen Hawking where he disproves the oscillating Big Bang [BB] theory), to the mind-matter problem (The Emperor’s New Mind), recreational mathematics, five-fold symmetry in crystals, and now revisits the Big Bang. In an interview with BBC HardTalk, he defends his book thesis (Cycles of Time) that the BB, despite never oscillating, can continue expanding and recycling forever. As Sir Roger puts it (at the 0:50 mark) “it is crazy enough to have a chance,” which echoes the comment the grandfather of Quantum Mechanics, Niels Bohr, made at a Columbia University meeting in 1958, when Wolfgang Pauli said he knew his theory Read More ›

Philippa Foot (1920-2010) was one of the greatest moral philosophers of the 20th century, but she insisted that she was “not clever at all” and “very uneducated.” She was greatly influenced by the philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe, whom she described in an interview as “more rigorously Catholic than the Pope,” but she herself was a card-carrying atheist. She was also one of the founders of Oxfam, a life-long socialist, and the grand-daughter of U.S. President Grover Cleveland. To the public, she is best known for her formulation of the trolley problem, a moral dilemma which she first raised in a now-famous essay. The recent death of such a great philosopher should make us pause and ask: what did she live for? Foot finally revealed what drove her in an interview in 2003: a life-long quest to show that there is such a thing as objective right and wrong. Throughout her academic life, she was passionately opposed to subjectivism in ethics. The story of how she got into moral philosophy is a fascinating one:

“I’ll tell you a bit of biography. During the war I went to London to work as an economist as war work, and then I came back and started to work on philosophy. I was just really getting going on moral philosophy when the photographs and films of Belsen and Birkenau came out, and it’s really not possible to convey to people who are younger what it was like. One would have said such a thing on that scale could not happen, human beings couldn’t do this. That was what was behind my refusing to accept subjectivism even when I couldn’t see any way out. It took a long time and it was only in the last fifteen or twenty years that I managed it. But I was certain that it could not be right that the Nazis were convinced and there was no way that they were wrong and we were right. It just could not be.

“That’s why I could never accept Charles Stevenson, say, whose emotivism implies that in the end that you simply express one attitude and I express another… That is what has driven all my moral philosophy.”
(Excerpt from an interview with The Philosophers’ Magazine, originally given in 2003 and republished on October 6, 2010.)

Foot made several attempts to answer the question “Why be moral?” on rational grounds, and in this post, I’d like to discuss her last and most systematic attempt. In 2001, Foot wrote a book called Natural Goodness. She has given an account of the central thesis of her book in interviews. What I propose to do is quote a few choice excerpts and then throw the floor open to readers. Do you think Foot’s naturalistic ethics succeeds in establishing that there is such a thing as objective right and wrong?
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