Intelligent Design

There are two kinds of evolutionists: Those who deny the massive convergence in biology, and those who deny the implications of the massive convergence in biology. Let me explain. The similarities between species are one of the favorite evidences of evolutionist’s. They argue these similarities, sometimes striking, reveal the underlying evolutionary pathways. There’s only one problem: Striking similarities also show up in patterns that cannot be ascribed to common descent. In fact, such convergences are abundant in biology. But you would hardly know it from talking to evolutionists who say the species form a neat common descent pattern. Yes, they do fit a neat common descent pattern with the data are pre filtered according to the neat common descent pattern. Read More ›

Winston Ewert, George Montañez, William A. Dembski, Robert J. Marks II, “Efficient Per Query Information Extraction from a Hamming Oracle,” Proceedings of the the 42nd Meeting of the Southeastern Symposium on System Theory, IEEE, University of Texas at Tyler, March 7-9, 2010, pp.290-297. Abstract: Abstract—Computer search often uses an oracle to determine the value of a proposed problem solution. Information is extracted from the oracle using repeated queries. Crafting a search algorithm to most efficiently extract this information is the job of the programmer. In many instances this is done using the programmer’s experience and knowledge of the problem being solved. For the Hamming oracle, we have the ability to assess the performance of various search algorithms using the currency Read More ›

Religious doctrinaire PZ Myers claims there is no religion in evolution. That was after he said he believed god wouldn’t make this world, and before he ridiculed a journalist for believing in miracles. But after seeing Paul Nelson and Ronald Numbers discuss the issue, Myers reveals he is deeply in denial:  Read more

According to this story from Fox News a huge battle about changes in public school curriculum is looming in the Lone Star State and will have major ramifications for textbooks around the U.S. Fox reporter Brent Baier will be airing a report on the 6pm news tonight on Fox as well. The story includes a video with Shannon Bream interviewing a panel of parents on the issue as well. The first parent (I believe her name is Hannah) got it exactly right when she referred to evolution as an hypothesis and that children should learn that scientists work to prove or disprove an hypothesis. It’ll be interesting to see the reaction of the Darwinists to this story.

Evolution, the theory that natural processes created all life, is mandated by the religious belief that God would not have created our world. Ironically, a belief about God underwrites a theory that, as Richard Dawkins put it, “made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.” But historians have seen this before. Alan Charles Kors, for example, found that eighteenth century French atheism had come from the church and its culture. Kors wrote:  Read more

I realized after my previous post about Academic Freedom legislation that I did not mention why it is that I care about the ability for teachers to “teach the controversy”.

I have been told by several research leaders that any attempt to change curriculum, or do anything with public schools, is a Bad Idea™. I understand where they are coming from. But let me tell you my personal story, and why it leads me to think that biological science itself needs the controversy to be taught.
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One endless discussion that always happens with the proposal of academic freedom bills in state legislatures is that the Darwin camp always says that they are about introducing religion into science classrooms. Even if the bill says, “this does not permit anyone to introduce religion into the classrooms,” the pro-Darwin crowd somehow misses this clause, or thinks that judges interpret bills based on the “secret agenda” of those proposing them, rather than the actual language of the bill. I think a better way of settling this, is to formally define what constitutes legitimate scientific discussion in a science class. I think that there is, at least for biology, a perfectly reasonable reposity of standard information – Pubmed. Pubmed is run Read More ›

In the early seventeenth century a courageous and brilliant scientist, Galileo Galileo, confirmed heliocentrism, the idea first proposed a century earlier by Nicolaus Copernicus that the sun was at the center of the universe. Heliocentrism challenged geocentrism, the religiously motivated idea that a stationary earth was at the center of the universe. Galileo explained why heliocentrism was true and not surprisingly the church strongly opposed and persecuted the scientist. Ultimately, however, the truth could not be denied and church was forced to, once again, reluctantly give in to the objective truths of science.  Read more

I see where Discovery Institute has put up a podcast with me, on “Is the Brain Just an Illusion? This must be one of the ones I did in Seattle in 2007, when they asked me to come and explain the book. What I always ask is, “If the brain or the mind are an illusion, whose illusion are they?” This question is modelled on the Jewish zen: “If the mind is an illusion, whose arthritis is this?” On this episode of ID The Future, Anika Smith interviews science writer Denyse O’Leary about her book, The Spiritual Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Case for the Existence of the Soul. In the book O’Leary and her co-author Mario Beaurogard, neuroscientist and Associate Professor Read More ›

Bernard d’Abrera is a world-class lepidopterist who writes books that are largely about butterflies but also provide him a springboard for critiquing the sham that is Darwinism and also for promoting intelligent design. Below is a post that appeared here at UncommonDescent in 2005 on the first book that he was kind enough to send me (please read the review of that book linked to my designinference website). Just recently I received his latest, Butterflies of the Afrotropical Regions, Part III. As with all his books, the typesetting and photography (all his own) are superb. The really fun part for me, however, is the introductory material, where he goes after Darwin, Dawkins, the Smithsonian, and other assorted villains. This newest Read More ›

Several factors are combining to increase belief (of the “faith” variety, not the “demonstrated fact” variety) in the multiverse among materialists. Two of these factors are relevant to ID at the biological and cosmological levels. At the biological level materialists are beginning to understand that the probability that life arose by random material processes is so low (estimated in this article written by materialists to be 10 raised to -1018) that infinite universes are required for it to have occurred, the implication being that we just happen to live in the ever-so-lucky universe where it all came together. At the cosmological level, the probability that the fine tuning of the universe necessary for the existence of life arose by sheer coincidence is Read More ›

Check out this lecture by Richard Lindzen: Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 In Part 4 he notes: The IPCC “consensus”: It is likely that most of the warming over the past 50 years is due to man’s emissions. How was this arrived at? What was done, was to take a large number of models that could not reasonably simulate known patterns of natural behavior (such as ENSO, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation), claim that such models nonetheless accurately depicted natural internal climate variability, and use the fact that these models could not replicate the warming episode from the mid-seventies through the mid-nineties, to argue that forcing was necessary and the Read More ›

By Gleaner here at Rob Sheldon’s story on extraterrestrials: If for some reasons the aliens are actually interested in us, I think they are probably already here, and given a certain level of technology, if would probably be easy to hide from us, even on a daily basis. Yes, I should think so. Termites do it all the time. So do the rats at a nearby dumpster. (That’s why the rule of thumb is, for every rat you happen to spot, there are a dozen.) Now, what I’d be interested to know is, the ETs never phone, they never write. Why do we assume they exist? Most of the reasons I have heard are based on attitudes, values, and beliefs, Read More ›

Dr. Dawkins would be happy to debate a bishop, cardinal, Pope, but he won’t debate creationists. What does he think that bishops, cardinals, and Popes are? They are overwhelmingly creationists. And he does debate creation in his books, he just won’t do it in person with the object of his debate in the form of an actual person in William Lane Craig. His word processor doesn’t talk back when he debates creation in writing his books. But He did debate John Lennox, who is, at least, an advocate of Intelligent Design (which he considers to be another form of creation).
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