In a recent American Spectator article “Evolution—More Certain than Gravity?” I made the point that to not believe in intelligent design, you have to believe that the four fundamental, unintelligent forces of physics alone (the gravitational, electromagnetic and strong and weak nuclear forces) could have rearranged the fundamental particles of physics on our once-barren planet into encyclopedias and science texts and computers and airplanes and Apple iPhones. In a 2017 Physics Essays article “On ‘Compensating’ Entropy Decreases,” I argued that this spectacular increase in order seems to violate the more general statements of the second law of thermodynamics; at least that you cannot dismiss this claim, as is always done, by simply saying, the Earth is an open system and Read More ›

Chapter 6, “Is God Really Good?” of my new Wipf and Stock book Christianity for Doubters is almost the same as the “Epilogue” of my 2015 Discovery Institute Press book In the Beginning and Other Essays on Intelligent Design. What does the problem of pain have to do with intelligent design? A lot, I think, because after 40 years of promoting intelligent design, it is obvious to me that many of the strongest opponents of design, for all their talk about defending science, are completely immune to scientific arguments, they will never look objectively at the scientific evidence until they can find answers to some very legitimate theological questions they have, three of which I try to address in chapters Read More ›

Scientists now know a lot more about the genetic changes that helped give rise to mammoths, thanks to a recent study led by Vincent Lynch, PhD, assistant professor of human genetics at Penn State University, and published in Cell Reports on July 2. The study raises a fascinating question for Intelligent Design proponents who are interested in pinning down the “edge of evolution”: were woolly mammoths designed? University of Chicago science reporter Kevin Jiang summarizes the methods used by Lynch and his team, in a Science Life article titled, The genes that make a woolly mammoth a woolly mammoth (July 2, 2015): To thoroughly characterize mammoth-specific genes and their functions, Lynch and his colleagues deep sequenced the genomes of two Read More ›

Here are links to O’Leary for News’ posts on what research tells us about animal minds. This page is a work in progress; feel free to check back or leave comments. 1. First, there is no fixed “tree” or “scale” of animal intelligence. See, for example,  Matching Darwin’s “Tree of Life,” the “Tree of Intelligence” comes crashing down” (2014 12 08) It is true that chimps can learn to spring simple snare traps that are set for them without getting hurt. But does that really put them on a continuum with humans? They do not do nearly as well as human toddlers on an abstract reasoning test. Not only is there a vast gulf between human and chimpanzee intelligence but chimpanzees Read More ›

Professor Krauss, author of “A Universe from Nothing,” has responded to Eric Metaxas’s Wall Street Journal article, Science Increasingly makes the case for God with a rebuttal titled, No, Astrobiology has not made the case for God (New Yorker, January 24, 2015). Having read Krauss’s rebuttal, I found it to be utterly devoid of quantitative reasoning, scientific predictions or novel arguments. That should tell you something: it’s a polemic masquerading as science. A question of bias Let me note for the record that Krauss is not merely an atheist, but a self-described antitheist. On the subject of God, he does not pretend to write as a disinterested scholar: he openly admits that he has an ideological axe to grind. As Read More ›

Paula Kirby is one of the more thoughtful contemporary critics of religion. A few years ago, I was much struck by a remark she made in one of her essays, that even Christians don’t all believe in the same God. This, to my mind, is a much more powerful argument against religious faith than the puerile “One God further” objection which is frequently hurled against believers by the New Atheists, and which has been ably refuted by Barry Arrington on Uncommon Descent, and also by the Thomist philosopher (and former atheist), Professor Edward Feser (see here and here). In all fairness, I have to acknowledge that there is some truth to Paula Kirby’s contention: even within a single Christian denomination, Read More ›

Over at The Skeptical Zone, Dr. Elizabeth Liddle has written an interesting essay, titled, Proof: Why naturalist science can be no threat to faith in God, in which she argues that even if scientists were to discover that the appearance of complex life was inevitable, with or without an interventionist God, that discovery should not dent people’s religious faith in the slightest degree: “finding out that life is perfectly possible in the absence of an interventionist God tells absolutely nothing at all about whether God exists.” Dr. Liddle’s essay is cleverly argued and thought-provoking; however, I believe it is marred by several serious flaws. Framing the question properly In the opening paragraph of her essay, Dr. Liddle frames the question Read More ›

Professor Larry Moran is mightily offended at a recent post of mine, claiming that he supports the use of ID-compatible science textbooks in Texas classrooms. I have absolutely no intention of withdrawing that claim. But if he really wants to expose what he regards as the “IDiocy” of the Intelligent Design movement, then I have an interesting proposal for him. I’ll say more on that at the end of this post. Before I continue, I’d like to highlight a remark Professor Moran made in his latest post, in response to mine: So, why did Vincent Joseph Torley misrepresent my position? Is it because he’s too stupid to understand what I was talking about or is it because he deliberately wanted Read More ›

In my last post, The Edge of Evolution?”, I drew readers’ attention to a 2011 paper by the Croatian biochemist Dr. Branko Kozulic, titled, Proteins and Genes, Singletons and Species, which argues that the presence of not one but literally hundreds of chemically unique proteins in each species is an event beyond the reach of chance, and that since these proteins exhibit specified complexity (as the amino acids which make up the polypeptide chain need to be in the correct order), each species must therefore be the result of intelligent planning. (A parallel argument can be made for de novo protein-coding genes.) In this short post, I’d like to discuss a few falsifiable predictions which I believe are entailed by Read More ›

In my previous post on Rev. William Paley’s argument from design, I showed that the argument was carefully formulated to rebut Hume’s criticisms of design arguments that were current in his day. I also demonstrated that Paley’s argument was not (as is commonly believed) an argument from analogy; that it was not intended to be an inductive, probabilistic argument but a deductive proof; and that it was intended to establish the existence of a Deity Who is no absentee landlord or impersonal Force, but a living, personal Being Who continually maintains Nature in existence and keeps the various systems in the universe running, in addition to having designed them. In this post, I’m going to address another myth about William Read More ›

In a recent thread which has attracted a lot of lively comment, Dr. Elizabeth Liddle (a highly respected critic of Intelligent Design who surely needs no introduction here) mounted a vigorous defense of methodological naturalism (“MN”). She began by developing her view of the way science works, in a post on the thread: [T]he idea that any scientific theory stops science is completely false. Science never stops, and a successfully supported hypothesis is a trigger for more research, not less. In a subsequent post, Dr. Liddle then proceeded to explain why her view of science necessitates the adoption of methodological naturalism: Yes, rejection of “MN” is religious, for a very simple reason. It is not possible to investigate a non-material Read More ›

Professor Chris Hogue is a Canadian biochemist/bioinformatician who works on protein folding (among other things) at the National University of Singapore. Professor Hogue has recently started a new series on complexity and evolution on his Website. It turns out that Hogue is highly critical of the Intelligent Design movement. But what makes his criticisms especially interesting for ID theorists is that they focus on the process of human design itself, which Hogue argues is indistinguishable from an incremental process of evolution. In his first post on complexity and evolution, Professor Hogue begins with a short summary of his professional background: As a mid-career scientist I spend my time teaching, building software, and researching topics on molecular assembly and evolution. My Read More ›

[Image courtesy of Jurgen Schoner and Wikipedia.] Here’s an old joke: how do snails move? Philosopher Julian Baggini, writing in The Guardian (“Religion’s truce with science can’t hold”, October 14, 2011) seems to have forgotten that there are two answers to this question. Here’s the scientific answer: “By gliding along on their muscular foot, which is lubricated with mucus.” And here’s the other answer: “Very slowly.” As we’ll see, this humorous example perfectly illustrates what’s wrong with secular humanists’ complaints about religion encroaching on the domain of science. As readers of this blog are well aware, Intelligent Design theory makes no claims about the identity of the Designer. However, since Dr. Baggini criticizes the claims of religion in his article, Read More ›

(Globe of Science and Innovation at CERN. Courtesy of Adam Nieman and Wikipedia.) Dr. Victor Stenger is a physicist who worked for 30 years with neutrinos until his retirement in 2000. He is also an outspoken New Atheist and a leading critic of Intelligent Design. In a recent Huffington Post article (No cause to dispute Einstein), Dr. Stenger has some very sensible things to say about the latest CERN experiments suggesting that neutrinos can travel faster than the speed of light, and not surprisingly, his verdict on the CERN results is negative: “[I]f I were a wagering man, I would bet the effect will go away because of some systematic error no one has yet been able to think of.” Read More ›