Some recent posts by Jerry Coyne brought back memories of this article: So if we don’t have free will, what can we do? One possibility is to give in to a despairing nihilism and just stop doing anything. But that’s impossible, for our feeling of personal agency is so overwhelming that we have no choice but to pretend that we do choose, Why you don’t have free will Pretend? As in “make believe”? As in live one’s life according to a presumed falsehood? A religious person at least has some conviction (even a mistaken conviction) he is following the truth, but Coyne “knows” what he is following is false, but still does it. Nuclear physicist Dave Heddle offers another criticism: Read More ›

Some months back I was invited to speak at this summer’s Portsmouth Institute, which took place last weekend (June 22-24). The title of this summer’s symposium was “Modern Science/Ancient Faith.” See here for the schedule of talks. The speakers included Michael Ruse of Florida State University (keynote), Kenneth Miller of Brown University, John Haught of the Woodstock Theological Center at Georgetown University, Abbot James Wiseman of St. Anselm’s Abbey and the Catholic University, Joe Semmes of the True North Medical Clinic, the Reverend Nicanor G. P. Austriaco of Providence College, and me, representing Discovery Institute. Anyone who knows anything about the science-religion dialogue will realize, simply from scanning these names, that I was the odd man out. When I was Read More ›

After the 2005 Dover trial, Judge John Jones recalled that he “was taken to school” by the evolutionists. It was, Jones recalled, “the equivalent of a degree in this area.” Unfortunately what evolutionists such as Ken Miller “taught” Jones was a series of scientific misrepresentations which you can read about here, here and here. But these were not the only misrepresentations that made their way into American jurisprudence in the Dover trial. For the judge did not enter into his new training as a complete novice. As Jones later explained, “I understood the general theme. I’d seen Inherit the Wind.” It would be like a judge explaining that he already understood the general theme of tornado damage because he’s seen The Wizard of Oz. This Read More ›

Darwin once remarked the tail of the peacock made him sick because the unnecessary extravagance of nature was suggestive of Intelligent Design. What made Darwin sick then still holds true today, he never solved the problem, and it is more in evidence by the problem of Irreducible Complexity (IC). To illustrate extravagance, consider the simple goal of getting a card to lie horizontally. This goal is easily achieved. Simply let a card fall down on a table. But one can take the same card and get it to lie horizontally by making part of the flat roof of a house of cards like this one. Cleary one could argue there is an irreducibly complex core of this system, namely the Read More ›

Professor Moran has graciously replied to my recent post, “Will this do, Professor Moran?” (18 December 2011) in which I attempted to flesh out the argument that irreducible complexity requires an Intelligent Designer. I would like to thank him for taking the trouble to write a detailed rebuttal of my argument. Since Professor Moran is a respected biochemist, I won’t be contesting his claim that the citric acid cycle evolved in a Darwinian fashion. What I’ll attempt to show is that it fails as a counter-example to my argument. “Unlikely” is not the same thing as “impossible” Before I address Professor Moran’s scientific arguments, I’d like to draw his attention to one brief but important passage in my post: Note: Read More ›

Dr ES has kindly provided an English translation (much better than the inevitable oddities of  Google Translate!) of his current blog post summarising in brief the worldview and the scientific level pro and con on ID, and has also kindly given his permission to post here at UD. Clipping, the English Language version (pardon some formatting challenges due to Blogger vs Word Press): _____________________________ >> Thoughts blog, Wednesday, 30 November 2011   Intelligent Design: pro et contra Recently I have been closely following the debate on uncommondescent.com. I just thought it would be a good idea for me to come up with my summary of it. I hope it could be useful to others.   That blog is one of Read More ›

Catholic Darwinist Ken Miller thinks his book will be bought for Texas schools, even though he refuses to follow their “no magic Darwin” guidelines. Curriculum? Guidelines? Actually, it could get worse than magic Darwin … Better stop it there. Follow UD News at Twitter!

Jeffrey Shallit has responded to my new column over at his blog, Recursivity.

Shallit’s reply is interesting.  He starts out on the wrong foot right away, in his subtitle:

“Thomas Cudworth asks why prominent evolutionary scientists did not attend the Evolution 2011 conference in Norman, Oklahoma this summer.”

Actually, I didn’t.  In fact, I pointed out at the beginning of my article several prominent “evolutionary scientists” who were at the conference.  What I asked was why almost no prominent culture-war biologists read or contributed to papers at the Evolution 2011 conference.  Apparently it escaped Shallit’s notice that the whole point of my article was to question the connection between being a loud culture-war crusader for neo-Darwinism and actually being competent in the field of evolutionary biology.

The bulk of Shallit’s response is an explanation, allegedly for my benefit, about how academia works and why academics can’t attend every conference going.  Well, I agree with him that academics can’t attend every conference going (as I clearly conceded in my original article, which he appears to have read hurriedly).

One of the obvious constraints, I acknowledged, is budgetary.  But such restraints clearly do not apply to all the people on the list.  Read More ›

I have often wondered whether the loudness and aggressiveness of many culture-war defenders of neo-Darwinian evolution bears any relationship at all to the actual scientific contributions of those defenders to the field of evolutionary biology.  As it happens, we have at hand some evidence, albeit of a rough and ready kind, relevant to that question.

Read More ›

According to the Bible, God created the universe so that He and His creatures could enter into an eternal, loving relationship. Christians, insofar as they accept that teaching, can readily understand their role in the cosmos and the broader context in which they find life’s meaning. In this context, God acted as both creator and designer: God brought time, space, and matter into existence and then “formed” man out of the dust of the earth.

Like all visionary designers, the God of the Bible knew exactly what He wanted and, like all competent builders, He saw to it that His finished product would conform to his original specifications. What is the point of being an all-wise Creator if you don’t know what you want to create? What is the point of being an omnipotent creator if you can’t get what you want? What is the point of being an all-good creator if you don’t care what you get? Whether or not God used an evolutionary process to produce man’s body is irrelevant to the point. What matters is that, regardless of how God might have arranged for the arrival of homo-sapiens—slowly and gradually, quickly, or in spurts– He intended that result and nothing else. From a Biblical perspective, evolution, if true, could only be a maturation process that unfolds according to the Creator’s plan and produces a result that conforms to His specifications.

Opposing the teleological paradigm, Darwinists posit a non-teleological model, a “purposeless, mindless process that did not have man in mind.” According to this world view, evolutionary change does not aim toward any final end because there is no final end to move toward. Evolution doesn’t know where it is going because the mutations are random and the environment, which determines the selection process, also doesn’t know where it is going. The process does not “unfold” or “mature” because there is no plan to direct the unfolding, nor is there a final end point into which the process can mature. So the purposeless, process moves aimlessly along, producing emergent mindless accidents for no reason at all.

Christian Darwinists, who make up the majority of Theistic Evolutionists, seek to reconcile the Biblical teleological with the Darwinian non-teleological model. In their view, a purposeful, mindful God could have used a purposeless, mindless process to create biodiversity. Of course, anyone who is capable of reasoning in the abstract will immediately understand that such a synthesis is logically impossible. Read More ›

In this UD post Ken Miller is quoted as saying: “The argument for intelligent design basically depends on saying, ‘You haven’t answered every question with evolution,’… Well, guess what? Science can’t answer every question.” No, ID says, You haven’t answered the most fundamental question about evolution: the origin of biological information. In fact, the mechanism you propose as an answer to that question is — logically (the challenge of producing functionally integrated machinery in a step-by-tiny-step process with each step being both functional and progressively advantageous), mathematically (the huge improbabilities created by combinatorial explosion), and empirically (Behe’s demonstration in the field of the severe limits of random mutation and natural selection) — inadequate to the task. In addition, ID theory Read More ›