Intelligent Design

In a comment to a prior post vjtorley responds to Beelzebub (presumably not THE Beelzebub) with a nice cogent summary of the grounds for believing in a personal God. I think it deserves its own post, so here it is:

Beelzebub writes:

Hart presumably considers the non-contingent ground of being to be the Christian God. This in itself seems to be an unwarranted assumption. Why must existence be underwritten by a god at all, much less the specific personal God of the Christians?

vjtorley responds:

I take it that by “god” you mean a personal being of some sort. Very briefly (and please remember this is just a bare-bones outline), the main lines of argument that have been adduced for believing in a personal God are as follows: Read More ›

In “The Secular Inquisition”, Melanie Phillips writes (Spectator, May 4, 2009),

I am an agnostic if traditionally-minded Jew; not a scientist, not a philosopher, not a subscriber to any kind of -ology but a mere journalist who has always gone wherever the evidence has led and, trying not to make too many mistakes, has formed her conclusions and her opinions from that process.

I hold no particular brief for ID, but am intrigued by the ideas it raises and want it to be given a fair crack of the whip to see where the argument will lead. What I have also seen, however, is an attempt to shut down that argument by distorting and misrepresenting ID and defaming and intimidating its proponents.

Well, yes, of course. But if makes perfect sense to me, because I have been covering this controversy extensively for about seven years now.

I can explain it really simply: Read More ›

Apparently, under a new Alberta (a Canadian province) law, evolution classes will be optional. (Evolution classes optional under proposed Alberta law, CBC, April 30, 2009). Frank Bruseker, the head of the Alberta Teachers’ Association, is meeting with Hancock on Monday to raise his concerns. “If parents don’t want that kind of education for their children they have a couple of options,” Bruseker said. “One would be home schooling or private school. So for a public school to start excluding based on religious preference, I think is a mistake.” Bruseker said it would be difficult for teachers to avoid the topic of evolution in science or geography classes. Okay, let’s set the record straight here. This is self-exclusion, not exclusion by Read More ›

Here, Tribune asks “What problem does Collins have with ID,” in response to my post on his new venture BioLogos, “US government genome mapper Francis Collins fronts new BioLogos theory, preferred to “theistic evolution””

Well, first, truth in advertising, I have written three reviews of Collins’s book, The Language of God, two of which were quite favourable, and the third more thoughtful and critical. The first two merely recommend to book as suitable for a student at Christmas, for example, and I would stand by that. If the student comes home raving that he is an atheist because all scientists are, well, Collins thinks otherwise, is famous, and is an easy read.

But while Collins is an outstanding geneticist, I don’t find him a deep thinker in these matters. So I am not sure how fruitful it would be to worry about what bothers him individually about ID, in an age when even an atheist like Bradley Monton thinks ID discussable and another atheist, Thomas Nagel, thinks ID discussable in schools.* Read More ›

I am reading Atheist Delusions by David Bentley Hart and set forth a lengthy quote below. The topic of this thread will be Hart’s assertions in the last two quoted sentences. Instead of putting everything in the sometimes hard to read block quote format of WordPress, I notify one and all that everything past this sentence is a quote from the book: Nothing strikes me as more tiresomely vapid than the notion that there is some sort of inherent opposition – or impermeable partition – between faith and reason, or that the modern period is marked by its unique devotion to the latter. One can believe that faith is mere credulous assent to unfounded premises, while reason consists in a Read More ›

Francis Collins, the US government’s genome mapper, whose book The Language of God I reviewed here, has launched BioLogos, to advocate a sort of rebranded theistic evolution:

BioLogos

BioLogos is most similar to Theistic Evolution. Theism is the belief in a God who cares for and interacts with creation. Theism is different than deism, which is the belief in a distant, uninvolved creator who is often little more than the sum total of the laws of physics. (For more on God’s involvement with creation, see Questions 11 and 14 about Miracles and Divine Action.) Theistic Evolution, therefore, is the belief that evolution is how God created life. Because the term evolution is sometimes associated with atheism, a better term for the belief in a God who chose to create the world by way of evolution is BioLogos. (For more about the definition of evolution, see Question 2 on What is Evolution?) BioLogos comes from the Greek words bios (life) and logos (word), referring to the gospel of John:

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

Just exactly why Collins is doing this, I am not sure. Giving a new name to “theistic evolution” is like putting ballroom slippers on a horse. It won’t help either the slippers or the horse. But I am pretty sure which party will come out ahead. Read More ›

Nicola Scafetta has demonstrated that Diffusion Entropic Analysis can identify physical phenomena underlying complex time series, including non-Gaussian Levy and other series. This appears an important development in detecting complex physical phenomena resulting in time series measurements.

Scafetta’s work promises to be important in detecting and distinguishing Complex Specified Information from natural complex phenomena. e.g. for Jill Tarter of SETI to detect and distinguish extra terrestrial communications from complex natural phenomena. Read More ›

On this episode of ID the Future, Anika Smith interviews writer Robert Deyes on The New Spontaneous Generationists, who argue that “matter and energy somehow self-originated into complex forms without outside intelligence.” While we may have moved beyond expecting rats to materialize from garbage heaps and maggots from decaying meat, materialists today are trying to simulate the origin of first life without intelligent agency — and they’re failing. Listen in to learn why, and read Deyes’ article at ARN’s ID Report for more.

Here’s our newest paper: “Life’s Conservation Law: Why Darwinian Evolution Cannot Create Biological Information,” by William A. Dembski and Robert J. Marks II, forthcoming chapter in Bruce L. Gordon and William A. Dembski, eds., The Nature of Nature: Examining the Role of Naturalism in Science (Wilmington, Del.: ISI Books, 2009). Click here for pdf of paper. 1 The Creation of Information 2 Biology’s Information Problem 3 The Darwinian Solution 4 Computational vs. Biological Evolution 5 Active Information 6 Three Conservation of Information Theorems 7 The Law of Conservation of Information 8 Applying LCI to Biology 9 Conclusion: “A Plan for Experimental Verification” ABSTRACT: Laws of nature are universal in scope, hold with unfailing regularity, and receive support from a wide Read More ›

A reader wrote to me to say,

I greatly enjoy your writing and I would like to ask your opinion about something I really find puzzling.

Well, once someone has decided to praise my writing, how can I resist responding? Anyway, this person goes on to say,

My question concerns the so-called “agent detection device” and the affirmation that it disproves God’s existence beyond any reasonable doubt.

Sounds like a scam to me, but then I have shut the door on the feet of so many people selling winter home heating plans that I may have an innate door-shutting mechanism that “evolutionary psychology” can explain … (Like, it would never have anything at all to do with suspicion that the new plan would end up sticking me with more expenses than the present one – or anything else that suggests that the human mind is real, right?)

According to many experimental studies, human beings seem to have an innate mechanism enabling them to identify the presence of an agent under some circumstances. ( if one is in a deep wood, the shuffling of trees and bushes and a sudden silence would lead one to believe some creature is present).

Well, all I can say is, when that happens to me in the deep woods, I institute my wilderness survival plan immediately.

Admittedly, the last time that happened to me, wandering down a trail in Muskoka, the creature I nearly collided with was a fox that had apparently missed his rabbit. So the fox ran off. But what if it had been a bear who had missed his deer? …

Anyway, my correspondent went on to explain,

However, this mechanism can easily fool us. What if we are, for instance, alone in an old house and hear some noise. We may be inclined to assume, too easily, that someone or something must be there, even if other explanations (like wind) would be much more likely.

Okay, not me. I’ve never had any trouble detecting the difference between, say, a fox and a ghost. Read More ›

A scientist friend writes to say,

I am a part of an email list of scientists—another is just beginning an “enquiry” because he committed the crime of loaning DVDs on ID to colleagues who wanted them. No one complained of being harassed, but the person’s views are “incorrect.”

Well, that wouldn’t be any news to a Canadian, believe me.

Pardon me a digression. If you are an American, you will need to learn to deal with this problem, because some people will want to ride out the recession by getting a government job bossing you around:

People you don’t know can probably complain on your behalf, and get you in trouble just for wanting to know what is going on.

Think of all the Canadian Muslims who didn’t really care much one way or the other about Mark Steyn’s famous article in Maclean’s Magazine. But the Canadian Islamic Congress (not to be confused with the much bigger and more representative Muslim Canadian Congress) went after him in three different jurisdictions for hate speech (and in an amazing display, lost out on all their cases, while costing the defendants vast sums of money. The defendants must pay but the CIC is funded by government.).

I don’t happen to agree with Steyn’s position on this subject (principally because I have heard the same sort of birth rate fears from Philip Longman about Christian and Mormon populations in North America – and we Christians and Mormons have been around long enough to know that it isn’t true – but that’s a story for another day). But the idea that Steyn would not be allowed to say it is an affront to civilization.

Anyway, my friend goes on to say,

Someone else sent the following.

An item in the September 25/08 issue of Nature had an interesting item relevant to these events.

The item was part of an article entitled “Which science book should the next US president read?” (pp. 464-467)

Several prominent scientists recommended such books as The Blind Watchmaker.

Well known palaeontologist Kevin Padian recommended a book called Undermining Science by Seth Shulman.

In this context Padian remarked: “Democratic candidate Barack Obama might use Shulman’s book to discover which recent science-agency appointees passed the test of right-wing fealty rather than of scientific objectivity…. the present administration [Bush] has sown loyalists of questionable competence into science bodies — from NASA to the US Weights and Measures division — that it will take a considerable effort to root them out.” (p. 467)

It seems as if these events are all part of a very large agenda.

Well, yes, it is a large agenda, friend. It’s an agenda to enshrine science as an updated form of nonsense, equivalent to mediaeval saint’s legends. We are required to believe that Read More ›

Sternberg needs to write a book debunking junk DNA. Shoddy Engineering or Intelligent Design? Case of the Mouse’s Eye By Richard Sternberg www.evolutionnews.org/2009/04/shoddy_engineering_or_intellig We often hear from Darwinians that the biological world is replete with examples of shoddy engineering, or, as they prefer to put it, bad design. One such case of really poor construction is the inverted retina of the vertebrate eye. As we all know, the retina of our eyes is configured all wrong because the cells that gather photons, the rod photoreceptors, are behind two other tissue layers. Light first strikes the ganglion cells and then passes by or through the bipolar cells before reaching the rod photoreceptors. Surely, a child could have arranged the system better Read More ›

This from the SPECTATOR. Melanie Phillips is also quite the favorite at RichardDawkins.net. ——————————————————————————————— Creating an Insult to Intelligence By Melanie Phillips Wednesday, 29th April 2009 www.spectator.co.uk/melaniephillips…insult-to-intelligence Listening to the Today programme this morning, I was irritated once again by yet another misrepresentation of Intelligent Design as a form of Creationism. In an item on the growing popularity of Intelligent Design, John Humphrys interviewed Professor Ken Miller of Brown University in the US who spoke on the subject last evening at the Faraday Institute, Cambridge. Humphrys suggested that Intelligent Design might be considered a kind of middle ground between Darwinism and Creationism. Miller agreed but went further, saying that Intelligent Design was nothing more than an attempt to repackage good Read More ›

I received this email from a colleague in London who used to have an office in the place where the Shard London Bridge (a massive skyscraper) is being built. His insight about design detection requiring a trained eye is good. His insight about Darwinists having purposely (by design?) trained their eyes not to see design is great. Indeed, if you can’t see design in biology … Hi Bill … Look at this http://www.shardlondonbridge.com. This will become the tallest building in the whole of Europe. It is being built in the place of a semi-tall building I was working in not more than 3 months ago. I have since moved close by to another office because of the building work. I Read More ›

Here is, I am told, a new ID blog in Portuguese . Paulo writes: I have been reading some Intelligent Design blogs, like Uncommon Descent, Telic Thoughts, etc, for a long time. I thought that portuguese speakers should have access to opinions and information about alternatives views to Darwinism too. So, in 2007, I created a blog named Design Inteligente . It is in portuguese. Sometimes I translate others views from english, sometimes I post my own views. Recently I have talked about the misinformation on portuguese TV about Darwinism, sometimes creationism is referred as a danger to science, and Intelligent Design is presented as a form of creationism or it is simply ignored. Well, good luck, Paulo. One problem Read More ›