Intelligent Design

In an earlier post I lamented the apparent extinction of what I called “Nietzsche atheists,” by which I meant atheists with the courage and honesty to accept the bleak conclusions logically compelled by their premises. Some of our atheist friends seemed to not know what bleak conclusions I was referring to. Here is a comment that sums it up nicely. This post is adapted from kairosfocus’ comment to that earlier post. He refers to Hawthorne on ethics and evolutionary materialist atheism and writes: Make two assumptions: (1) That atheistic naturalism is true. (2) One can’t infer an “ought” from an “is.” Richard Dawkins and many other atheists should grant both of these assumptions. Given our second assumption, there is nothing Read More ›

Some [men] kill because their faiths explicitly command them to do so, some kill though their faiths explicitly forbid them to do so, and some kill because they have no faith and hence believe all things are permitted to them. Polytheists, monotheists, and atheists kill – indeed, this last class is especially prolifically homicidal, if the evidence of the twentieth century is to be consulted. Men kill for their gods, or for their God, or because there is no God and the destiny of humanity must be shaped by gigantic exertions of human will . . . Men will always seek gods in whose name they may perform great deeds or commit unspeakable atrocities . . . Then again, men Read More ›

Australia’s Hiram Caton writes to say,

Hello Denyse!

I’m sending you this latest version of my synopsis of the Darwin Legend. There are two new entries since our last contact–Darwin’s Biggest Fib, and Charles Darwin, Abraham Lincoln and Race. The fib is his claim, in the 6th ed of Origin, to have been the first to have argued the case for evolution. The other article draws attention to belief in the superiority of the Caucasian race espoused by Darwin and Lincoln. Darwin also believed that the lower races were on the path to extinction. Any comments will be appreciated.Cheers! – Hiram Caton

Synopsis of the Legend

++Belief that the Origin was a ‘revolutionary’ scientific breakthrough conflicts with the fact that public opinion was at the time saturated by the evolution idea. It was so widespread that in 1860 the showman P T Barnum put on display a freak, Zip the Pinhead, alleged to be the ‘missing link’ between apes and humans. In the Historical Sketch preface to the Origin, Darwin acknowledged 34 prior evolutionists.

[When I was in school 45 years ago, we learned that Evolution was a big, general idea in mid-nineteenth century Britain. It wasn’t until I had to listen to wearisome rants by new atheists and Darwin lobbyists seeking funds that I discovered that Darwin had supposedly invented the idea.] Read More ›

Skepticism Examiner has attempted (April 13, 2009) to shed some light on why Amanda Gefter’s recent, foolish story on why materialism is right and design is wrong was pulled from New Scientist. The only copy I have been offered has a problem with its security certificate, so I cannot recommend going there, unfortunately.

I still don’t understand what the problem with the story is.

I thought the story silly, but considered pulling it a gross shame. As I have made clear in all communications on the subject, despite the fact that Gefter misrepresents me and has persistently done so, I was not the person who complained.

I have no idea what happened, but fear that the most likely answer is – yet another cock-up due to Britain’s unreformed libel laws. Today, people troll the planet looking for foolish jurisdictions that do not have clear libel laws.

Let me recommend a sound, traditional English Common Law approach: Read More ›

Bill Dembski asked me to post something on this at Uncommon Descent a while back, but hassles prevented me from getting to it until now:

From Canadian civil rights lawyer Ezra Levant, author of Shakedown:

“That’s your bloody free speech zone”

By Ezra Levant on April 8, 2009 9:40 PM

A reader sent me this letter to the editor that appeared in the Southern Utah University newspaper. Here’s the link; allow me to reprint it in its entirety:

—

In light of SUU officials plan to designate “Free Speech Zones” on campus, I thought I’d offer my assistance. Grab a map. OK, ready?

All right, you see that big area between Canada and Mexico, surrounded by lots of blue ink on the East and West? You see it?

There’s your bloody Free Speech Zone.

Jeffrey Wilbur
Senior communication major from Bountiful

—

Something tells me that Young Jeffrey is the type of guy who, if he were a Canadian, would attract human rights commission busybodies like flies. And he wouldn’t bow down to them for a minute, either.

I look forward to the day — not long from now, I hope — when such a clarion call would resonate in Canada in the same way. It ought to — free speech is as much our legacy as it is America’s. We just need to remind ourselves that, despite thirty years of being told we’re actually a censored people, we remain a free people.

Yes, we do.

From Denyse: Lo, I tell you a great mystery! There is a giant hockey heaven – far bigger than anything you could ever imagine or believe – north of the United States. In Hockey Heaven, many of us have recently started shoving “human rights” nannies hard into the boards. You’ve no idea how quickly that reduces their numbers.

As we say here: Fine, whatever. See you on the ice tomorrow.

Or, if you need me to put it in a more elegant way: Here we discuss ideas, and maybe reject them as out of bounds, but we don’t declare them illegal, unless they involve seriously advocating a crime.

Or at least, we didn’t used to. And we are in the process of ridding public life of the people who have started social engineering our society so that all sorts of ideas that do not involve advocating a crime are forbidden … .

Or, even more elegant still (you people really must have the most elite tray of tea sandwiches, must you? Very well, … Waiter!, the top tier tray, please. No canned tunafish. All fresh salmon!!): Read More ›

Check out this video at TED. Note the phrase “finding new patterns in the information.” That’s the business of ID. Can the AlloSphere be used as an engine for detecting design? Here’s the link.

Now that the moaning and hand-wringing are over, there’s talk of mounting some legal challenges to the new science standards in Texas. At issue aren’t the standards themselves, but the personal motivations of some of the Board members who advocated for these standards.

Now the issue is whether there is enough prima facie evidence to challenge the Constitutionality of the wording now, or wait for the textbook review process in two years.

“They have shown clear religious motivations that certainly raise some questions,” Quinn said. “But if the board requires phony religious arguments in the science textbooks, I can’t imagine somebody won’t challenge it.” Publishers may end up producing a textbook for Texas and other conservative states and a separate version for other states—because under the new guidelines, a Texas textbook “will be poison in states that value education,” [Dan Quinn, a spokesman for the Texas Freedom Network].

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Here’s some research done 100 miles down the road from me. Note the sentence highlighted. The actual phylogenies here were experimentally known and yet standard evolutionary theory drew completely wrong conclusions. Oh, but it was a small population, small genomes, and intense selection pressure. Spare me. “Exceptional Convergent Evolution in a Virus” Bull JJ, Badgett MR, Wichman HA, Huelsenbeck JP, Hillis DM, Gulati A, Ho C, Molineux IJ. Department of Zoology, Institute of Cellular and Molecular Biology, University of Texas, Austin 78712, USA. bull@bull.zo.utexas.edu Replicate lineages of the bacteriophage phiX 174 adapted to growth at high temperature on either of two hosts exhibited high rates of identical, independent substitutions. Typically, a dozen or more substitutions accumulated in the 5.4-kilobase genome Read More ›

Things have been a bit quiet here recently, but in case you wondered, that’s because most list authors are Christians and this is the Triduum (last three days) of Holy Week.

Some are busy with religious matters and others won’t post on principle. I am also indexing a book (always a rush job in principle because the index is the only thing that keeps a book from the press at that point – so no one cares that it’s Holy Week for me).

But as this is Holy Saturday, I am going to talk briefly for a moment about … Religion.

One of the dumbest things I hear “new atheists” say is that faith means “belief without evidence.”

I don’t know what kind of a sheltered life such people can have lived, but their views might have something to do with tenure at tax-supported universities.

Religious doctrines are believed for a variety of reasons. For convenience, I’ll refer only to my own, Catholic Christian, tradition, and this is by no means an exhaustive list, just five reasons for now: Read More ›

In my earlier post about the Texas Science standards, I noted the hand wringing over the new language by Eugenie Scott, at the NCSE. Well, the moaning continues. An article has appeared in Education Week entitled Retooled Texas Standards Raise Unease Among Science Groups Read More ›

From EXPELLED Dr Caroline Crocker. “Recently I attended a lecture by Michael Shermer at the UCSD Biological Science Symposium (4/2/09). His title was, “Why Darwin Matters,” but his topic was mostly religion. He started by defining science as “looking for natural explanations for natural phenomena” and said that his purpose was to “debunk the junk and expose sloppy thinking.” We were all subjected to an evening of slapstick comedy, cheap laughs, and the demolition of straw men. His characterization of ID was that the theory says, 1) If something looks designed, 2) We can’t think how it was designed naturally, 3) Therefore we assert that it was designed supernaturally. (God of the gaps.) Okay everyone, laugh away at the stupid ID Read More ›

Recently, in the “stuff we know that just ain’t so” files, I referenced Niko Tinbergen’s Nobel Prize for supposed discoveries about herring gull chicks – a discovery that turned to ashes. A friend writes to say:

I remember going to Niko Tinbergen’s Nobel Prize party in the Oxford University Zoology Department many years ago. I believe he shared the prize with a couple of other guys – and it was the Nobel for Medicine, of all things.

Of course Tinbergen and the his co-laureates were all animal behaviorists, and there was an undercurrent at the party that found the committee’s decision rather strange to say the least. Also, I seem to remember being told at the party that his brother had got the Nobel for economics. However, I could never really understand what Niko Tinbergen had done to get the prize. Read More ›

 On 31 March, I gave one of the keynote addresses at the annual meeting of the British Sociological Association’s Religion Study Group in Durham. This meant that I could not watch the first airing of ‘Did Darwin Kill God?’ on BBC2.  I recommend that you watch this show over the next couple of days, while it’s still available on-line at the BBC website. It may be the most sophisticated treatment of this general topic on television, though as you’ll see from my comments below I found it profoundly unsatisfying. The person who scripted and presents the programme is Conor Cunningham, an academic theologian, about whom more below. Even those who disagree with his take on things – as I do – should welcome what he has done here. The challenge is to do better. Read More ›

Congratulations to Michael Behe, Eric Anderson, David Chiu, Kirk Durston (members of ISCID). They were mentioned in the peer reviewed journal International Journal of Molecular Sciences. References were made to Darwin’s Black Box by Michael Behe, “Irreducible Comlexity Reduced” in ISCID’s PCID by Eric Anderson, and peer-reviewed works by David Chiu and Kirk Durston.

Here is the paper: The Capabilities of Chaos and Complexity

Great paper!

The cause and evolution of complexity are frequently addressed in the literature [10, 134-141]. How complexity relates to life has attracted innumerable papers [6, 142-148]. Systems Biology emphasizes the growing genomic and epigenetic complexity [149-151]. Attempts to deal with Behe’s “irreducible complexity” [152] are appearing more often in scientific literature [153-157].

The much vaunted Avida community is indirectly criticized:

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Don’t you think Evolution excludes God from being the Creator? How can you support it them being a Catholic?

After I got over raging at that guy for living in a place that is actually warm and sunny (how dare he?), I replied: Read More ›