Question: What qualifications does one need to debunk ID? Here are Hunter Rawlings’s: “Born in Norfolk, Virginia, Rawlings was a 1966 graduate of Haverford College, with honors in classics, and received his Ph.D. degree from Princeton University in 1970. His scholarly publications include a book, The Structure of Thucydides’ History (Princeton University Press, 1981).” (ref)

Intelligent Design and the Place of Religiously-based Ideas in American Politics
By Hunter Rawlings III
Mr. Rawlings is the President of Cornell University. The following article was first delivered in the form of a lecture at the Woodrow Wilson Center, Tuesday, April 25, 2006.

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Evangelical Protestantism has in recent years become ever more potent in American public life, while the voices of secular humanists become ever more strident in their reaction to religious rhetoric. This is a badly polarized state of affairs, as we have recently seen in national debates over the case of Terry Schiavo, abortion, stem cell research, and the opposition of Darwinism and Intelligent Design. What is the right way out of this polarized situation?
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On March 4, 1865, Abraham Lincoln delivered the most moving and probably the most significant speech in American history, his Second Inaugural Address. Lincoln used his presidential platform to give an anguished rumination on the purposes of the Almighty and the consequences for Americans, in both North and South, of practicing slavery. The Second Inaugural is, as many have pointed out, essentially a sermon. Its biblical, indeed prophetic rhetoric has had a powerful effect upon all subsequent Presidential speechmaking, which struggles, never successfully, to emulate it. In spite of our constitutional separation of church and state, America’s chief executives rarely deliver a major address without a direct appeal to God.

In that same epochal year of 1865, Ezra Cornell and A.D. White founded Cornell University as a new kind of American institution of higher learning. Unlike its predecessors like Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Columbia, Cornell was to be a nonsectarian university, “an asylum for Science,” as President White wrote, “where truth shall be sought for truth’s sake, where it shall not be the main purpose of the Faculty to stretch or cut science exactly to fit ‘Revealed Religion.. ..'” Read More ›

Here’s a report from a colleague about a debate last night in Seattle:

Wednesday, April 26, 2006

A packed house at Seattle’s Town Hall saw Dr. Stephen Meyer of the Discovery Institute debate Dr. Peter Ward of the University of Washington on the topic of “Intelligent Design v. Evolution.” Meyer was excellent in his overall presentation. In my view, Meyer convincingly prevailed.

The two had previously debated on a local Seattle radio program. That radio debate was a rather lopsided exchange, with Meyer clearly outshining Ward. Meyer made clear and reasonable arguments about the theory of intelligent design (ID) from scientific data, whereas Ward had offered little-to-no scientific response. Instead, Ward simply attacked Meyer’s personal motives and made wild claims that students learning about the theory of intelligent design would somehow result in scientific decline and an undermining of our national security.

Back to Town Hall. This time Ward did not rely so thorougly rely upon wild claims about the theory of ID being the death of science itself. But attacks of that sort still seemed to be the mainstay of his arguments. He claimed that if students were to learn about the theory of intelligent design that the United States would fall behind in science and technology to China, Japan and other nations. Allowing the teaching of the theory of ID would lead to “intellectual mediocrity” in America, he stated. (To a large number of boos from the audience, I might add.)

Ward, in fact, asserted that ID is not a theory at all. He claimed it wasn’t science because science excludes the supernatural. Ward also repeatedly asked Meyer why he used the terms “neo-Darwinian” or “Darwinist.” At a later point in the debate, Ward claimed that ID proponents used those terms as a caricature to knock down. He also insisted that ID was neither testable nor falsifiable.

Specifically, Ward challenged Meyer to explain how the theory of ID could be tested or falsified. Meyer stated that the competing explanations of Drs. Michael Behe and Kenneth Miller concerning the bacteria flagellum and Type III Secretory Systems is something that could be tested to determine which one came first. Meyer countered that neo-Darwinian evolution had been heuristically unfruitful in leading science to think that non-encoding DNA was simply “junk.” Meyer insisted that design assumptions more readily led one to conclude there was purpose in such “junk DNA.” And he also cited Dr. Jonathan Wells’ hypothesis concerning centrioles and its implications for cancer as research inspired by a design theoretic. Furthermore, Meyer cited recent article in Science purporting to “refute” Behe’s ideas concerning irreducible complexity. Meyer insisted that they disputed the weak claims to have refuted irreducible complexity, but that the important fact was that the scientists were taking the idea seriously enough to try to combat it through scientific research and argument. Read More ›

Whether ID is science isn’t semantics
Judge John Jones gave two arguments for his conclusion that ID is not science. Both are unsound, says Alvin Plantinga
By Alvin Plantinga
(March 7, 2006)

Judge John Jones’ 139-page opinion in Kitzmiller et al. v. Dover Area School District raises questions that go far beyond the legalities of this specific case. I won’t offer an opinion on whether the judge’s decision is correct — although apparently he’s never met an objection to intelligent design he doesn’t like and some of his “findings” seem vastly more sweeping than is appropriate.

First, a general question: What sorts of issues can a judge decide just by fiat?

Jones rules, among other things, that:

* ID is just warmed-over creation science
* ID tries to change the very definition of science
* The scientific community has refuted the criticisms of evolution brought by the IDers
* ID involves a kind of dualism and that this dualism is doomed.

But how can one hope to settle these matters just by a judicial declaration? Read More ›

Debating Design: From Darwin to DNA
by William A. Dembski and Michael Ruse (Editors)
Cambridge University Press, 2004

Review by Gal Kober on Jan 22nd 2006
http://mentalhelp.net/books/books.php?type=de&id=2982

The anatomy of man is a key to the anatomy of ape.” Karl Marx (Introd. to a Contrib. to a Critique of Polit. Economy, 1957)

Intelligent Design and the war waged by its proponents against evolutionary biology and the naturalistic practices of science are more a matter of public affairs than they are philosophical or scientific issues. Debating Design: From Darwin to DNA, a volume recently published by Cambridge University Press, aims at providing “a comprehensive and even-handed overview of the debate concerning biological origins,” and specifically, the more vocal aspects of this ‘debate’, namely, the conflict between evolutionary biology and supporters of intelligent design. Although it succeeds in doing that, it also has a seriously negative side. Read More ›

John A Davison

A Prescribed Evolutionary Hypothesis

1. Introduction
2. The Prescribed Evolutionary Hypothesis
3. The Indirect Evidence
4. The Direct Evidence
5. Conclusion

Abstract. I propose that phylogeny took place in a manner similar to that of ontogeny by the derepression of preformed genomic information which was expressed through release from latency (derepression) by the restructuring of existing chromosomal information (position effects). Both indirect and direct evidence is presented in support of the Prescribed Evolutionary Hypothesis.

Read More ›

Bill! This is a perfect opportunity for plush toy deployment! Get on the horn with Ellerbee and get on the show.

Nick News Explores Issues Surrounding the Teaching of Evolution and Intelligent Design in Schools

Nick News with Linda Ellerbee: God, Science, Politics and Your School – Sunday, Jan. 22, 8:30 p.m. (ET/PT) on Nickelodeon

NEW YORK, Jan. 11 /PRNewswire/ — In Nick News with Linda Ellerbee: God, Science, Politics and Your School, airing on Nickelodeon, Sunday, Jan. 22, 8:30 p.m. (ET/PT), award-winning journalist Linda Ellerbee and Nick News take a look at the on-going controversy surrounding the teaching of the theory of intelligent design alongside the theory of evolution in public school science classes.

“The goal of this show is not to debate the issues of evolution, intelligent design, or creationism,” said Ellerbee. “We just want to give kids a better understanding of what all the shouting is about, not to mention the court cases that have resulted already, and some that are shaping up. We also wanted to hear from kids affected by these disputes.” Read More ›

Adam Wolfson writes a fairly balanced piece on the evolution debate in The Weekly Standard. I take issue with his ending paragraphs saying ID is doomed in public teaching because proponents claim the designer must be God. This conclusion reflects a misunderstanding of ID which is about design detection not designer typecasting and a stereotyping of ID proponents into a mold they all do not fit into. Survival of the Evolution Debate Why Darwin is still a lightning rod. by Adam Wolfson 01/16/2006, Volume 011, Issue 17 WHAT IS IT ABOUT EVEN the slightest dissent from Darwin’s theory of natural selection that drives liberal elites (and even some conservative elites) bonkers? In the 1920s, in the days of the Scopes Read More ›

Concerning Nicholas Kristof’s NYTimes Op-Ed that appeared yesterday:

[From a colleague:] It is ironic that Mr. Kristoff chose to convey his disdain for the humanities by employing language rather than statistics or flow charts.

He writes that the officers of the Third Reich were steeped in Kant and Goethe,” but they were also whizzes in mathematics, the medical science, natural gas, and the technology of efficient transportation, for without
those four the Holocaust would have had far fewer victims. It is not the latter four that impart to Mr. Kistof his belief that the Third Reich was wrong. In fact, his notion that the humanities are less important than the
sciences is not a scientific judgment, but a philosophical claim about the order of things. Mr. Kristof must rely on that which he despises. If he had studied the humanities well, he would have not made such a freshman
philosophy student mistake. But then again, he writes for the New York Times.

Mr. Kristof writes that “the U.S. has bungled research on stem cells, perhaps partly because Mr. Bush didn’t realize how restrictive his curb on research funds would be.” That’s exactly how the Goethe-Kant reading Nazis would have put it if confronted with criticisms of their use of human subjects to find cures for the powerful. Anti-science in the German 1940s meant you were against fewer lampshades made out of people with names like Goldberg and Einstein. This is what happens when we take the “human” out of humanities and let the cultural barbarians dictate to us what is right and wrong. Read More ›

In 2002, Samuel Chen, then a high school sophomore in Pennyslvania, invited Michael Behe to speak at his high school (the event is described here under the title “Darwin’s Dictatorship”). Chen has since graduated and is now a college student at Baylor. Here are his thoughts about the ongoing ID trial Kitzmiller v. Dover — it’s the vitality of younger scholars like him that is going in the end to win the day for ID:

Intelligent Design, Education, and Liberty: What is Going on in Dover?

Dear Friends,

As many of you are now aware, the issue of intelligent design and evolution has continued to escalate in various settings across the United States of America. State legislators have proposed bills and heard testimonies while school districts and state school boards have changed science standards. The debate is currently being spotlighted in Dover Area School District in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Read More ›

In the summer of 2000, I conducted a 6-week seminar on intelligent design and self-organization at Calvin College (go here). Among the people who presented at the seminar were Steve Meyer, Paul Nelson, Jed Macosko, Howard Van Till, Del Ratzsch, Michael Ruse, and Harold Morowitz. Read More ›

THE CASE AGAINST INTELLIGENT DESIGN.
The Faith That Dare Not Speak Its Name
—THE NEW REPUBLIC—
by Jerry Coyne
Post date: 08.11.05
Issue date: 08.22.05
http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20050822&s=coyne082205

Read More ›

Kenneth Miller, Francisco Ayala, and Lawrence Krauss have decided to go to the top, asking Pope Benedict XVI to clarify his views on evolution and design. Read More ›

Leading Cardinal Redefines Church’s View on Evolution
By CORNELIA DEAN and LAURIE GOODSTEIN
Read More ›

Guillermo Gonzalez has issued the following response to the attacks leveled at him following the June showing of the Privileged Planet at the Smithsonian: Read More ›

The Little Engine That Could… Undo Darwinism
By Dan Peterson

What critics of Intelligent Design theory can’t accept is that its proponents are making scientific, fact-based arguments.

The American Spectator, June 2005 Read More ›