I am anxiously awaiting a transcript of the recent Ward versus Meyer debate. In the meantime you can check out the transcript of their last debate here:
http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/index.php?command=view&id=3097
Peter Ward is way out of his league in the presence of Stephen Meyer. Frankly, I was embarrassed for Ward.
Here are a few excerpts. Check out the transcript and judge for yourself.
Ward: … evolution I think should be taught in schools. It’s really the major paradigm of biology. It’s certainly going to keep us, let’s hope, through antibiotics and other evolutionary mechanisms, safe, safe from bird flu for instance.
Ward: [ID] is an assertion. It is not a theory.
Ward: Where do you get your funds?
Ward: [To Stephen Meyer] I’m not as smart as you. I mean, my colleagues are in awe of you, and I look at your publication list, you’ve done some amazing work, but I’m here to say, Steve, turn to the evolution side… it is your destiny.
Ward: … none of us can understand how long geological time is. I mean, we’re talking –you hear the old metaphor of given enough time the monkeys can write anything, that’s probably true.
Ward: We’re within 4-5 years, 20 million dollars says Jack Solzdeck at Harvard, of artificially making a DNA molecule. Now look, this is no God involved, this is hard-nosed chemists!
Ward: Steve you said you had to have intelligence to get to information, but look at the Miller-Urey experiment where he just put in some gases, heated it, and out of that gas came some very complex organic molecules including 10 of the 20 amino acids…
Meyer: I don’t think any origin of life theorist today thinks Miller-Urey is relevant, for one because he did it under nonrealistic conditions, but secondly because of the information problem. It’s easy to get the building blocks, but it’s very difficult to get the building blocks to arrange themselves into meaningful or biologically functional sequences, so you can get amino acids, but you can’t get the proteins.
Ward: That’s not true! That’s not true!
Ward: You’re telling students, “You’ll never figure this out because it’s too complicated so don’t even try.†So let’s say we want to have a new anti-ballistic missile system (God forbid), but it’s too difficult, we better let some intelligent designer do it (who doesn’t seem to want to do it), or even better than that, we want a new hydrogen car, but guess what, it’s just too complicated, so let’s not do it.
Ward: We can watch that code being built now. And he’s saying, well, it’s in a laboratory with a guided hand. We can get it done inorganically, we can set up experiments in rock pools, if you want, to build the same darn thing.
Ward: Again, we’re talking about nothing less than the future of our country in producing scientists and engineers. If you bring religion in, you change that.
Dori: I know you want to present this and frame it as a scientific issue. I hope you consider this a fair question, since Peter said it’s a stalking horse for getting creationism in the schools: Are you a Christian?
Meyer: I am a Christian.
Dori: And since I asked Stephen if he was a Christian, are you an agnostic or atheist, Peter?
Ward: I don’t think that’s any of your business.