Intelligent Design

TED granted Jill Tartar her wish to: “empower Earthlings everywhere to become active participants in the ultimate search for cosmic company”. TED and Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) has set up SETIQuest.org to:

. . . make vast amounts of SETI data available to the public for the first time. It will also publish the SETI Institute’s signal-detection algorithm as open source code, inviting brilliant coders and amateur techies to make it even better. . . . You are officially invited to join the search for extraterrestrial life. . . .With available cloud storage and processing resources, we can prov de digital signal processing experts and students with a lot of raw data … and invite them to develop new algorithms that can find other types of signals that we are now missing,”

The Challenge for ID
1) Is SETI’s methodology valid? Read More ›

Those of us who are ID proponents often hear the following from ID deniers (hey, if it’s good for the goose, it’s good for the gander): “You mindless, science-destroying, knuckle-dragging, religiously fanatical ID clowns keep talking about complexity. What’s the big deal about complexity? Complex stuff happens all the time by chance and necessity. Get a life, and stop trying to impose a theocracy on those of us who have it all figured out. The science is settled.”

So goes the highly persuasive, ever-logical, empirically validated, ideologically neutral argumentation of the ID denier.

The problem is that living systems are not just transparently intelligently designed; they are intelligently engineered. It’s not just ID; it’s IE.
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Stephen Barr misunderstands the place of natural laws and regularities in design inferences. Barr writes:

…whereas the advance of science continually strengthens the broader and more traditional version of the design argument, the ID movement’s version is hostage to every advance in biological science. Science must fail for ID to succeed. In the famous “explanatory filter” of William A. Dembski, one finds “design” by eliminating “law” and “chance” as explanations. This, in effect, makes it a zero-sum game between God and nature. What nature does and science can explain is crossed off the list, and what remains is the evidence for God.

Frank Beckwith (in the comments following Barr’s post) echoes the misunderstanding:

As I have already noted, the ID advocate tries to detect instances of design in nature by eliminating chance and necessity (or scientific law). This implies that one has no warrant to say that the latter two are the result of an intelligence that brought into being a whole universe whose parts, including its laws and those events that are apparently random, seem to work in concert to achieve a variety of ends.

Hm. To quote Hamlet (Act 2, scene 2): “Nay, that follows not.” Here’s a vignette to make the point.
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Justin Brierley asked me to publicize this. If you’re near London on the 27th, please attend. Premier Christian Radio invites you to “Expelled” the Movie. Due to popular demand an additional screening of the controversial Intelligent Design film “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed” and a debate to follow will take place on Saturday 27th February 6.30pm at Imperial College London, South Kensington. The event will be hosted by Justin Brierley of Premier Christian Radio’s faith discussion programme “Unbelievable?” For details and booking for this significant event visit www.premier.org.uk/expelled. The post screening debate and Q&A time will include: Dr. Alastair Noble (Former Inspector of Schools) and Dr. Vij Sodera (Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons) who advocate intelligent design and Prof. Read More ›

Not content with their virtually complete hegemony over public school science education, now the Darwinists have a new ploy to eradicate ID from scientific consideration: just re-classify it away. In a petition, some PSU science students are demanding the complete re-classification and re-shelving of ID related books to a non-science category. Apparently the instigators of this petition believe that the mere presence of an ID related book on a science shelf serves to further confuse an already confused public about what is and is not science. Citing a recent survey by the NSF that “70 percent of Americans do not understand the scientific process,” the petition claims that “further confusion surrounding what is and is not science is particularly problematic.” According to the petition, (and the NSF), the general public is just to stupid to know the difference between “real” science, and philosophy masquerading as science. Read More ›

In case we haven’t mentioned it previously at UD, I thought today would be a good day to remember Robert Jastrow, one of the stars of the pro-ID movie Privileged Planet.

Jastrow passed away February 8, 2008, a little more than two years ago today. He was the founding director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and author of the celebrated ID-sympathetic book: God and the Astronomers (available at www.ARN.org).

Now we see how the astronomical evidence leads to a biblical view of the origin of the world…
The details differ, but the essential elements in the astronomical and biblical accounts in Genesis are the same: the chain of events leading up to man commenced suddenly and sharply at a definite moment in time, in a flash of light and energy.

Robert Jastrow
God and the Astronomers

Here is the tribute written in the NY Times:
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Imagine if, back in 1859, Charles Darwin explained that evolution proceeds in fits and starts. Species rapidly appear as if planted there, and then go unchanged for eons. There would have been, as we say today, no bounce. In fact Darwin would have been laughed off the stage, and he knew it. Darwin had to present a narrative of gradualism. Funny thing is, the fits-and-starts narrative is today precisely what evolutionists tell us.  Read more

Evolutionists have a wide range of explanatory mechanisms from which to draw when trying to figure out how the species evolved. But sometimes these supposed mechanisms look more like a cover-up than an explanation. For instance, the differences between the human and chimp DNA instructions are not sprinkled, more or less at random, throughout our genome. Rather, these differences are found in clusters. Even more interesting, at these locations the chimp’s genome is quite similar to other primates–it is the human that differs from the rest, not the chimp. Evolutionists refer to these clusters as human accelerated regions (HARs) because they believe the human genome evolved from a human-chimp common ancestor. These HARs cause several problems for evolution. For instance, Read More ›

I’d like to critique Jason Rosenhouse’s critique of Stephen Barr’s critique of ID. I know, round and round we go, where we stop, no one knows. Rosenhouse appreciates the first paragraph of Barr’s analysis, but is disappointed with the rest. I am disappointed with it all. But Rosenhouse does make a few good points in taking stock of the ID movement’s influence with the public:

I hope he is right about no one being moved toward religious belief by ID writing, but I do not think he is. The ID folks are tapping into deep intuitions people have that complex, functioning structures do not arise from natural, non-intelligent causes. Many are already uncomfortable with the naturalism of modern science and see evolution as dehumanizing and implausible. They like the idea that modern science can provide some rational support for theism. My experiences at ID gatherings suggest to me that an awful lot of people are being led just where they want to go. Certainly the public opinion polls show a great deal of sympathy for ID, to the point of wanting it taught next to evolution in science classes.

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Premier Radio, one of the UK’s leading Christian radio stations, has been featuring several interviews/debates in recent weeks on matters related to ID, some of which have been flagged here and here. The most recent one bears the title of this post and was aired last weekend (6th Feb), in which I debated the question with the historian Thomas Dixon, who basically holds that while we may have needed God to do science, we don’t need the deity anymore. My own view is that if we mean by ‘science’ something more than simply the pursuit of instrumental knowledge, then that quest still doesn’t make much sense without the relevant (Abrahamic) theological backdrop.  I continue this line of argument in a Read More ›

Steve Barr and I used to be friends. I’m not sure he would consider me one any longer. According to his latest posting at First Things (go here), “Religion has a significant number of friends (and potential friends) in the scientific world. The ID movement is not creating new ones.” And since creating new friends for religion among his scientific colleagues seems to have become Barr’s overriding concern, that presumably makes me and the ID movement the enemy.

I first learned of Barr back in 1992 through a friend of mine from the University of Chicago doing a postdoc at Caltech. Knowing my interest in the science-religion discussion, he told me about a talk he had heard at Caltech from a U. of Del. physicist named Stephen Barr. My friend sent me a typescript of the talk and I was intrigued. Barr quoted the Church Father Minucius Felix: “If upon entering some home you saw that everything there was well-tended, neat and decorative, you would believe that some master was in charge of it, and that he was himself much superior to those good things. So too in the home of this world, when you see providence, order and law in the heavens and on earth, believe that there is a Lord and Author of the universe, more beatiful than the stars and the various parts of the whole world.”

I called Barr and we had a nice chat. He indicated an openness to design in biology but felt that the better design arguments were to be made at the level physical law (God having designed the laws of the universe). Fair enough. In that first conversation back in 1992, I urged Barr to write a book on his law-based approach to design and thoughts about science and religion — he seemed to have an enthusiasm for the subject and the smarts to pull it off. As a research scientist, he stressed how busy he was and at the time dismissed my proposal out of hand. In following years Barr and I kept in touch. I had him invited to the MERE CREATION conference held at Biola in 1996, which he attended and at which he was a valuable participant.

Then, in 2003, ten years after our first conversation, he published a fine book titled Modern Physics and Ancient Faith (I like to think, and believe evidence supports it, that I was part of the causal chain in its production). In an email with subject header “Can you help me out,” he asked me to help promote the book, asked me to write a blurb for it, and even asked me to direct him to others who might write blurbs for it (the blurb on the back cover by Peter van Inwagen was probably at my instance). In any case, I was happy to give him the following blurb: “Stephen Barr has an exceptionally clear style and a gift for illustrating complex ideas and making them understandable. More significantly, here is a free mind joyfully relating the physics he loves to the faith that sustains him, unconcerned about the reaction of the ‘professionals’.” I meant the blurb at the time and still think it’s a fine book (indeed, I’ve used it in some of my seminary classes).

But I’m not sure I can honestly say that Barr is unconcerned about the reaction of his colleagues any longer. Indeed, given his First Things piece, he seems overly concerned to distance himself from his past ID connections and to score points with a more socially acceptable community of scholars. He protests too much. A colleague of mine, reading his First Things post, reacted this way: Read More ›

Joe Carter connects the dots.

Below Dr. Dembski replies to Dr. Barr over at First Things.  Dr. Torley has also posted an excellent rebuttal at FT that I reproduce here: 

Professor Barr, 

With the greatest respect, you are sadly mistaken about ID, and about design arguments in general. I have a Ph.D. in philosophy, and I’ve been following the ID movement closely for a few years now. I’m neither a young-earth nor an old-earth creationist; I’m quite happy to accept common descent, although I would not be at all perturbed if it were proved false. The way I see it, there are at least five good design arguments for the existence of God. All of them are probabilistic, all of them use abductive reasoning (appealing to the best-known explanation of an observed fact), and all of them are scientifically falsifiable.  As we shall see, ID design arguments are not particularly different from the others.  Let’s summarize the design arguments briefly. Read More ›

It has long been understood that elaborate explanations can always be contrived in order to explain observations. But why should we believe they are true? The backward motion of planets can be explained by a series of epicycles, designed specifically to fit the peculiar motion. But with heliocentrism no such adjustments are required—the backward planetary motion is a natural outcome. So while complicated narratives are needed for bed-time stories and soap operas, parsimony is valued in science. Nature, and only nature, should be explained. Scientists become suspicious when a theory becomes increasingly complex to accommodate failed expectations—when particular explanations are needed to adjust to contradictory findings.  Read more

Fred Pearce in the Guardian asks whether Climategate will lead to changes in the way science is reviewed, from peer review to open access review. ‘Climategate’ was PR disaster that could bring healthy reform of peer review – Peer-review was meant to be a safeguard against the publication of bad science but the balance is shifting towards open access