It’s 1859 and Charles Darwin has just discovered a modern computer, transported back in time to his era. He turns it on. With a microscope he discovers a Core i7 920 CPU. Upon more investigation he discovers that it has approximately 781 million transistors. The computer has a terabyte drive, with an operating system that was compiled from more than 50 million lines of intelligently designed computer code. In my time-travel thought experiment, Darwin is transported into our contemporary era. Much to his amazement, he discovers that modern science has revealed that the simplest living cell is far more complex and sophisticated than the computer he discovered in 1859. What would Darwin do?

When I explained how astronomically unlikely protein evolution is, a professor complained that I had it all wrong. When he saw evolution’s ridiculously long odds he figured I must be assuming that the entire protein sequence space must be randomly sampled to yield functional proteins.  Read more

This post is my personal attempt to reconcile recent statements made by Barry Arrington and Eric Holloway, regarding whether or not a supernatural Designer is required in order to produce a living thing. The claim I am putting forward here is that there are four levels of inquiry in Intelligent Design: (1) Which patterns in Nature can be identified, through a process of scientific investigation, as the work of intelligent agents? That is, which patterns in Nature can be shown to have intelligent agents as their proximate causes? (2) Which of the patterns identified in (1) can be shown to have been caused by intelligent agents outside the observable universe? (3) For which of the patterns identified in (2) as Read More ›

There seems to be a lot of chatter on the news and the Internet about the candidates’ beliefs about origins. While many in the media are using this as a test of scientific savvy (and a way to discredit people they don’t like), I think there are deeper reasons why the question of origins is important to an election.
Read More ›