On Christmas Day, WJM put the following hypothetical conversation in a comment. Since he has not headlined it himself, as promised yesterday, I now do so: Typical debate with an anti-ID advocate: ID advocate: There are certain things that exist that are best explained by intelligent design. Anti-ID advocate: Whoa! Hold up there, fella. “Explained”, in science, means “caused by”. Intelligent design doesn’t by itself “cause” anything. ID advocate: What I meant is that teleology is required to generate certain things, like a functioning battleship. It can’t come about by chance. Anti-ID advocate: What do you mean “by chance”? “By” means to cause. Are you claiming that chance causes things to happen? ID advocate: Of course not. Chance, design and Read More ›

In the OK thread, in comment 50, ID objector Mark Frank has finally laid out the root of ever so many of the objections to the design inference filter. Unsurprisingly, it is a worldview based controlling a priori of materialism: [re EA] #38 [MF, in 50:] I see “chance” as usually meaning to “unpredictable” or “no known explanation”. The unknown explanations may be deterministic elements or genuinely random uncaused events which we just don’t know about. It can also includes things that happen as the result of intelligence – but as a materialist I believe intelligence to be a blend of the determined and random so for me that is not a third type of explanation. But, just what what Read More ›

A slide presentation by Professor Robert Greg Cavin and Dr. Carlos A. Colombetti on the subject of miracles, which was used by Professor Cavin in a debate with Christian apologist Mike Licona on the Resurrection earlier this year, raises points of vital importance for Intelligent Design proponents. As readers will be well aware, Intelligent Design theory says nothing about the identity or modus operandi of the Designer of life and/or the cosmos. Nevertheless, Cavin and Colombetti’s presentation is philosophically interesting, chiefly because the authors put forward three arguments to support their claim that Divine intervention in the history of the cosmos is astronomically unlikely: (i) a religious argument that supernatural intervention is antecedently unlikely, which appeals to the Via Negativa Read More ›

My neo-Darwinian friend, Francis Smallwood, has now written a response to my previous instalment in our dialogue. If you want to read it, go here. Below is a small excerpt of the response by Francis. You can read his full response by going to his blog. Follow the link at the bottom of the page. I think that his latest reply is considerably better than his previous writings. Over the past year or so his critique of ID has become sharper and more substantive, and I think he makes some very good points. I still happen to think he is largely mistaken though. It is well worth engaging with this one, so please do discuss some of his points either 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 ›

Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction. Professor Larry Moran has written an astonishing post over on his Sandwalk blog, in which he rejects a proposal by David Evans, Executive Director of the National Science Teachers Association, that Texas students be taught “evolution by natural selection as a major unifying concept in science,” and suggests that they simply be taught “evolution” instead, adding in a comment that “there’s no reason to eliminate the possibility of directed evolution” – a term which is broad enough to include both “theologically-directed evolution” (as one commenter calls it) and “the Flying Spaghetti Monster.” Readers may be wondering what accounts for Professor Moran’s surprising latitude of opinion. It turns out that he’s a big fan of Read More ›

Acclaimed author John Jeremiah Sullivan has recently written an article for Lapham’s Quarterly (Spring 2013), arguing that human beings stand in a psychological continuum with other animals. Sullivan’s article, which is appropriately titled, One of us, reverently concludes that the human mind is but one of a multitude of minds on the animal spectrum: “The animal kingdom is symphonic with mental activity, and of its millions of wavelengths, we’re born able to understand the minutest sliver… This is what the study of animal consciousness can teach us, finally – that we possess an animal consciousness.” The publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species is depicted in the article as the watershed event in history that opened our eyes to this Read More ›

Here’s a question for neo-Darwinists: “If someone could prove to you that the Earth was ten or even one hundred times younger than the currently accepted figure of 4.54 billion years, would you give up your belief in evolution by natural selection? Or putting it another way, what’s the youngest age that you, as a Darwinian evolutionist, would accept for the age of the Earth? How low would you go?” In my previous post, A hypothetical question for neo-Darwinists, on the age of the earth, I challenged neo-Darwinian evolutionists to provide an estimate (to the nearest order of magnitude) of how much time it should take for evolution by natural selection to generate complex life-forms like ourselves from the earliest Read More ›

Recently I came across a fascinating biography of Lord Kelvin over on the creationist Website, crev.info. That article gave me the idea for an interesting hypothetical question, which I’d like to put to evolutionary biologists and other defenders of Darwinism. If Professors Jerry Coyne, Larry Moran or P. Z. Myers want to weigh in, I’d be delighted. Darwin’s biggest problem in the nineteenth century: there wasn’t enough time for his theory of evolution to work First, a little bit of background. Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection had numerous critics in the nineteenth century. By far the most formidable of these critics was Lord Kelvin (1824-1907) (pictured above, portrait by Sir Hubert von Herkomer, Glasgow Museum, image courtesy of Wikipedia). Read More ›

Eugene V. Koonin is a Senior Investigator at the National Center for Biotechnology Information, which is part of the National Library of Medicine, a branch of the National Institutes of Health, in Bethesda, Maryland, USA. He is a recognized expert in the field of evolutionary and computational biology. He is also the author of The Logic of Chance: The Nature and Origin of Biological Evolution (Upper Saddle River: FT Press, 2011, ISBN 978-0-13-262317-9). I think we can fairly assume that when it comes to origin-of-life scenarios, he knows what he’s talking about. In Appendix B of his book, The Logic of Chance, Dr. Koonin argues that the origin of life is such a remarkable event that we need to postulate Read More ›