Bradley Monton, author of Seeking God in Science: An Atheist Defends Intelligent Design (Broadview Press, 2009), asks, After much seeking, you finally reach the oracle. You’ve come equipped with a long list of questions, but when the Oracle sees you, she says: “Look, I’m busy, I only have time to answer one question. I know you’ve been thinking about intelligent design, and I’m glad you understand the doctrine now; Monton has given the right definition. I’ll give you two options. Do you want to know whether intelligent design in science, or do you want to know whether intelligent design is true?” (P. 75) Well?

It’s Sunday, and here’s UCLA law professor Daniel Lowenstein questioning Oxford Christian mathematician (and ID sympathizer) John Lennox and on grounds for faith (April 6, 2011). Here’s Lennox vs.Christopher Hitchens. Here he gets Richard Dawkins to admit that a serious case can be made for God. He had debated Dawkins before.

Holly Bailey tells us, courtesy Yahoo News, (Apr 11, 11:41) “Will President Obama and the House GOP ever agree? Science suggests no”: Using data from MRI scans, researchers at the University College London found that self-described liberals have a larger anterior cingulate cortex–a gray matter of the brain associated with understanding complexity. Meanwhile, self-described conservatives are more likely to have a larger amygdala, an almond-shaped area that is associated with fear and anxiety. “Previously, some psychological traits were known to be predictive of an individual’s political orientation,” lead researcher Ryota Kanai writes of the study in the latest issue of Current Biology. “Our study now links personality traits with specific brain structure.” A caution is offered: While the London study Read More ›

Here are some excerpts from Nancy Pearcey’s Saving Leonardo, and some articles, not for the faint of heart. For example, Secularism has crippled America’s ability to respond effectively to such threats, because it reduces morality to the subjective level—to personal feelings or ethnic tradition. These are things that cannot be rationally debated.Persuasion gives way to emotional manipulation and personal attacks. “Racist!” “Hater!” “Intolerant!” “Islamophobe!” The word tolerance once meant we all have the right to argue rationally for our deepest convictions in the public arena. Now it means those convictions are not even subject to rational debate. Canadian free speechers, alas, wrote the book on that.

From the “earlier than thought” files, galaxies
From ScienceDaily (Apr. 12, 2011):

Using the amplifying power of a cosmic gravitational lens, astronomers have discovered a distant galaxy whose stars were born unexpectedly early in cosmic history. This result sheds new light on the formation of the first galaxies, as well as on the early evolution of the Universe.Johan Richard, the lead author of a new study says: Read More ›

(Contest is now judged. Results are here.) First, here’s Nobel Prize winner Steven Weinberg: … There is also a less creditable reason for hostility to the idea of a multiverse, based on the fact that we will never be able to observe any subuniverses except our own. Livio and Rees, and Tegmark have given thorough discussions of various other ingredients of accepted theories that we will never be able to observe, without our being led to reject these theories. The test of a physical theory is not that everything in it should be observable and every prediction it makes should be testable, but rather that enough is observable and enough predictions are testable to give us confidence that the theory Read More ›

Here, kind readers were invited to “predict Darwin’s doom (or not)”, and win free stuff, either an Expelled or a Privileged Planet DVD.

Here are the winners: Read More ›

“It must be acknowledged that there is a big difference in the degree of confidence we can have in neo-Darwinism and in the multiverse. It is settled, as well as anything in science is ever settled, that the adaptations of living things on Earth have come into being through natural selection acting on random undirected inheritable variations. About the multiverse, it is appropriate to keep an open mind, and opinions among scientists differ widely. In the Austin airport on the way to this meeting I noticed for sale the October issue of a magazine called  Astronomy, having on the cover the headline “Why You Live in Multiple Universes.” Inside I found a report of a discussion at a conference at Stanford, Read More ›

Here Ann Gauger and Doug Axe respond to Todd C. Wood’s critique of their recent paper ruling out a proposed Darwinian pathway for enzymes:

he excuse for shrugging it off would, I expect, be that the transition we examined isn’t actually one that anyone thinks occurred in the history of life. That’s true, but it badly misses the point. As Ann and I made clear in the paper, our aim wasn’t to replicate a historical transition, but rather to identify what ought to be a relatively easy transition and find out how hard or easy it really is. We put it this way in the paper: Read More ›

Here Gwyneth Dickey Zakaib tells us that the gene that codes for colour in the Darwin textbook icon, the peppered moth, has been located (“The peppered moth’s dark genetic past revealed: Researchers find that a single ancestor is responsible for the ‘best example’ of natural selection.”).

The sacred story is recounted in a muted form, which is as much acknowledgement as Nature News (April 14, 2011) could accord to the considerable body of evidence that it is more aptly called the peppered myth: Read More ›

Here Darwin stalwart Nick Matzke gamely attempts to defend Barbara Forrest in the Beckwith Synthese affair, by pretending that there is some important discrepancy as to Beckwith’s unsympathetic views re intelligent design theory. Some background here.

Matzke must hope that everyone will overlook the fact that it was Forrest’s responsibility to get her facts right before she attempted a character assassination on Beckwith, and she signally failed to do so. Why Matzke and others can’t just accept that and move on remains a mystery.

Beckwith has always maintained a principle that may be difficult for some  to grasp: Read More ›

… as the God of the Gaps. Has anyone ever noted an ID theorist to use the term “gaps”, to support an argument for apparent design? Can anyone attest that Collins has ever read an actual ID theoretic work? See also here and here where Collins appears to have backed away from an earlier claim that so-called “junk DNA” proves that there is no design in life.

In “Survival of the Frummest: Darwinism and Judaism on Dating, Mating and Procreating,” Talia Kaufman of Yeshiva U enlightens us (April 14, 2011):

Human Mating Is Inherently StrategicOur subconscious has a whole lot more influence on our animalistic desires than we realize. Every aspect of attraction is subliminally dictated by our drive to find the mate that will best carry on our genes.

It is hard to think of a proposition more consistently refuted by human experience than the idea that people have a “drive to find the mate that will best carry our genes.” Read More ›

Thought you all might be interested in this video on whether or not mutations are random. It covers both why we originally thought mutations were random plus more current information which shows that the random mutation idea is not the whole picture.

Read More ›

ID community reb Moshe Averick does not see the point of “Rabbis Without God (?!)”, as his punctuation would seem to suggest. (Algemeiner , April 14, 2011) He describes Rabbi Greg Epstein, the humanist chaplain at Harvard University, is a “humanist rabbi, ordained by the International Institute for Humanistic Judaism.” He graciously informs the interviewer that “he’s not out to poach souls [for atheism] from the nearby Hillel House, the Catholic Newman Center, or any of the other august religious institutions…on the campus of the country’s most prestigious university.” What he doesn’t tell us is the obvious reason why he’s not out to poach souls; as an atheist he does not believe in the existence of the soul. In the Read More ›