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Intelligent Design

A Sound of Thunder: Another Fundamental Failure

One of the most fundamental premises of evolutionary theory is that the evolutionary process is indeterminate. The species arose via a process which did not have them in mind. This is because, from mutations to comet strikes, evolution depends on sporadic, unguided events that know nothing of making species. Evolution is contingent on random events and does not know where it is going—there is no teleology.  Read more

Nature “writes back” to Behe Eight Years Later

Eight years ago, biochemist Michael Behe wrote this open letter to the prestigious scientific journal, Nature:

Sir-

As a public skeptic of the ability of Darwinian processes to account for complex cellular systems and a proponent of the hypothesis of intelligent design, (1) I often encounter a rebuttal that can be paraphrased as “no designer would have done it that way.” …
If at least some pseudogenes have unsuspected functions, however, might not other biological features that strike us as odd also have functions we have not yet discovered? Might even the backwards wiring of the vertebrate eye serve some useful purpose?
….
Hirotsune et al’s (3) work has forcefully shown that our intuitions about what is functionless in biology are not to be trusted.

Sincerely, Michael J. Behe
An Open Letter to Nature

Contrast that with Ken Miller’s now falsified claim in 1994:

the designer made serious errors, wasting millions of bases of DNA on a blueprint full of junk and scribbles.

Ken Miller, 1994

Read More ›

Bruce Waltke and the Scientific Orthodoxy

Bruce Waltke, a Professor of Old Testament, has parted ways with Reformed Theological Seminary, perhaps due to controversies over his sympathies with evolution. Rod Dreher at BeliefNet worries that this is a dangerous disregard for science:  Read more

We’re not in Kansas Anymore

I hesitate to bring attention to a blog, called Thoughts from Kansas, written by Josh Rosenau (a grad student completing a doctorate in the department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Kansas), because I don’t think it makes accurate arguments and doesn’t deserve to be promoted, even in a rebuttal. The blog amounts to inaccurate, prideful digs at ID and reminisces over a paper he wrote pertaining to what he perceives are the legal and social histories of Intelligent Design:

The paper’s title, “Leap of Faith: Intelligent Design after Dover” is a reference both to the chalky cliffs of the English Channel, to the town in which ID itself took a fall, and to the politically and economically suicidal effects of pushing creationism into public schools. Along the way, I was able to work in some other subtle digs at ID, including this summary of the recent history of the ID movement…

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PZ Myers: The Anti-Authoritarian Authoritarian

Is there a religious influence and authoritarian tradition in science? Evolutionists such as PZ Myers reject any such notion. Though Myers relies on the usual theological truth claims that are fundamental to evolution, he is sure that science is free of all such nonsense. When he is not busy shutting down scientific inquiry with religious dictates, he reassures his readers that science is a process that empowers questioning and change.  Read more

Illustra Media on YouTube

Illustra Media, which has produced such videos as UNLOCKING THE MYSTERY OF LIFE and THE PRIVILEGED PLANET, has these videos available on YouTube: www.youtube.com/user/IllustraMedia

Simon Conway Morris: Darwin 1, Paley 0

Eighteenth century English natural theology reached a pinnacle in the work of William Paley who was decidedly optimistic about the world. Not only did creation prove design, it was also a very pleasant place. Here is how the Anglican described an English garden:  Read more

When is it Rational NOT to Believe an Expert?

UPDATE: Oops, Barry, my bad. It was a long work day and I overlooked your post. Here’s my essay on VJ’s point #7. vjtorley asks this extremely important question here. VJ’s point #7: The question in dispute relates to multiple disciplines, in several of which you have a limited degree of expertise, whereas the expert you are listening to has a great deal of expertise in just ONE of these disciplines. This is the problem with declarations of certitude on the part of Darwinists. Once it was discovered in the 20th century that living systems are not essentially based on chemical reactions and stochastic processes, but upon information and information-processing systems, the proponents of chance-and-necessity biology left their area of Read More ›

Adding Noise energy to recover Information

ID seeks to reliably distinguish complex specified information from noise. Now Princeton Jason Fleischer and co-author Dmitry Dylov have discovered that there is residual information in “noise” that can be recovered using non-linear optical techniques by “stochastic resonance” with energy from added noise. See:

Turning noise into vision

“Normally, noise is considered a bad thing,” said Jason Fleischer, an assistant professor of electrical engineering at Princeton. “But sometimes noise and signal can interact, and the energy from the noise can be used to amplify the signal. For weak signals, such as distant or dark images, actually adding noise can improve their quality.” Read More ›

Missing Link Found (Again? Yawn)

Headline: “Missing Link Revealed?” I have seen variants of this headline at least dozens, perhaps hundreds, of times. It seems that journalists never seem to tire of trotting out the latest find as the “missing link” despite the fact that, presumably, the dozens of prior headlines were wrong. Why is that?

Expert, Smexpert

IN A RECENT THREAD VJTORLEY WRITES:

Here’s a question for everyone: when is it rational NOT to believe an expert? That’s a difficult one. The following is a (by no means exhaustive) list of “warning signs” which indicate that what an expert says may be open to legitimate doubt: Read More ›

The Evolution of Evolutionary Thought: Why Historians Analyze Evolutionists But Not Evolution

One of the reasons evolutionists are convinced their theory is true is because of the way the species compare to each other. The patterns we find amongst the species, say the evolutionists, prove Darwin’s idea beyond a shadow of a doubt. Such arguments pervade the evolution genre—from textbooks to popular literature—but what exactly do they mean? To understand this we must understand the evolutionary mind. These arguments have circuitous histories and baked-in assumptions that are now long forgotten. But they are worth remembering. Here is one example.  Read more

Coffee!! Evolution in action! Check with your local humane society!

 A friend draws my attention to this lovely little item:

He asks, what about this ?

What you CAN see with small, easily observed creatures like Lenski’s E. coli is evolution in action – new features evolving through random mutation and natural selection. Regardless of what you wish to state about the malaria plasmodia, the best example of evolution in action is the Lenski experiments because he retains the entire record of every genetic event that leads to every change. Now, Lenski’s E. coli changed shape, changed size, changed metabolism and changed food source. How much more MACRO do you expect an organism to evolve?”

I replied:

So the claim is, “changed shape, changed size, changed metabolism and changed food source. How much more MACRO do you expect an organism to evolve?”

Hmmmm. Kittens do this all the time. Read More ›