Discovery has produced a nice promo video for my book In the Beginning and Other Essays on Intelligent Design. The video is of course not designed to make a serious argument for ID, but just to pique the viewer’s interest enough to consider buying the book, and that is of course my reason for posting it here. If you want to discuss the point made in the video, I hope you will first read the Postscript to my 1985 Springer-Verlag book (now Chapter 4 in the new book), where the point is made in more detail, or my 2000 Mathematical Intelligencer article which is now Chapter 3. Actually, the similarities between the development of software and the development of life Read More ›

In Part 1 we argued that Origin-of-life (OOL) was indistinguishable from creationism, but distinguishable from panspermia. In Part 2, we argued that panspermia had not, in fact, solved the problem of OOL by positing infinite space or eternal time. However, we pointed out that panspermia at least recognized that there was a coupling between space-time and OOL, a coupling we identify with the Fourier Transform. In contrast, most OOL theories suppose life began at two points and a line: a point in time, a point in space (microscopic coacervate, etc.) and a line of serially encoded information (DNA, enzyme, etc.) Our goal for this post, is to elucidate what this FT does to the traditional OOL theory, how this transform Read More ›

— Below is a beefed-up version of a piece I posted here at UD  earlier this year. The version below appeared at the Chuck Colson blog. —

Evolution, Theistic Evolution, and Intelligent Design

By William Dembski

In 1993, well-known apologist William Lane Craig debated professional atheist Frank Zindler concerning the existence of the Christian God. The debate was published as a video by Zondervan in 1996 and is readily available at YouTube. The consensus among theists and atheists is that Craig won the debate. Still, Zindler presented there a challenge worth revisiting:

The most devastating thing, though, that biology did to Christianity was the discovery of biological evolution. Now that we know that Adam and Eve never were real people, the central myth of Christianity is destroyed. If there never was an Adam and Eve, there never was an original sin. If there never was an original sin, there is no need of salvation. If there is no need of salvation, there is no need of a savior. And I submit that puts Jesus, historical or otherwise, into the ranks of the unemployed. I think that evolution is absolutely the death knell of Christianity.

Zindler’s objection to Original Sin and the Fall is the subject of my just-published book The End of Christianity: Finding a Good God in an Evil World (see www.godornot.com, which includes a $5,000 video contest connected with the book). What interests me here, however, is the logic that is supposed to take one from evolution to the death of Christianity—and presumably to the death of God generally.

By evolution Zindler means a Darwinian, materialistic form of it, one that gives no evidence of God and thus is compatible with atheism (this is, in fact, what is meant by evolution and how I’ll use the term in the sequel). But Zindler is not arguing for the mere compatibility of evolution with atheism; he is also claiming that evolution implies, as in rationally compels, atheism. This implication is widely touted by atheists. Richard Dawkins pushes it. Cornell historian of biology and atheist Will Provine will even call evolution “the greatest engine for atheism” ever devised.

To claim that evolution implies atheism is, however, logically unsound (even though sociological data supports the loss of faith as a result of teaching evolution). Theistic evolutionists such as Francis Collins, Denis Alexander, and Kenneth Miller provide a clear counterexample, showing that at least some well-established biologists think it’s possible for the two to be compatible. Moreover, there’s no evident contradiction between an evolutionary process bringing about the complexity and diversity of life and a god of some sort (deistic, Stoic, etc.?) providing the physical backdrop for evolution to operate.

The reverse implication, however, does seem to hold: atheism implies evolution (a gradualist, materialist form of evolution, the prime example being Darwinian). Read More ›

Many, many people seem to misunderstand the relationship between Intelligent Design and Common Descent. Some view ID as being equivalent to Progressive Creationism (sometimes called Old-Earth Creationism), others seeing it as being equivalent to Young-Earth Creationism. I have argued before that the core of ID is not about a specific theory of origins. In fact, many ID’ers hold a variety of views including Progressive Creationism and Young-Earth Creationism.

But another category that is often overlooked are those who hold to both ID and Common Descent, where the descent was purely naturalistic. This view is often considered inconsistent. My goal is to show how this is a consistent proposition.
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Bored by bickering relatives or co-workers over the holiday season? Check these out:

1. What makes Darwinism politically correct?

This episode of ID the Future features Robert Crowther interviewing CSC senior fellow Dr. Jonathan Wells on his book, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design. Dr. Wells explains the peer-pressure involved with Darwin’s theory and shares from his studies in 19th century Darwinian controversies and evolutionary development at Yale and UC Berkeley, respectively.

Listen here.

The book’s Web site is here.

In my view, Darwinism is politically correct because it is a tax-funded racket parasitizing real science. It attracts the sort of people who like free form speculation about the tyrannosaur’s parenting skills, Neanderthal man’s sex life and why homo sapiens (modern man) believes in God (not because some had an encounter with God, of course; such an idea could never be entertained).

2. The Design of Life: What the Evidence of Biological Systems Reveals

On this episode of ID the Future, Casey Luskin discusses The Design of Life: Discovering Signs of Intelligence in Biological Systems with author Dr. William Dembski. Is design in nature just an “illusion,” as Richard Dawkins proclaims? Dembski and co-author Dr. Jonathan Wells show the answer is “no.” Biologists have and continue to use the assumption of design successfully, precisely because design in biology is not an illusion but real.

Listen here.

Design is not an illusion, but then neither is the cushy position that current society grants to people who make that claim. Almost any other position, no matter how ridiculous, can be fronted (space aliens, multiple universes … and I suspect that these are only a start.)

3. How to teach responsibly without getting sued? Read More ›

An UD author in a previous post asked: “would ID proponents see ID as part of emergence or as an alternative to emergence?”. I would answer: ID is not an alternative to emergence, rather the only thing that can explain emergence when it implies complex specified information (CSI), because CSI properties cannot emerge without intelligent front-loading. Here are the reasons of my answer.

“Emergence” is a key term often used in the fields of complex systems and complexity theory. Wikipedia defines it so:

“An emergent property of a system is one that is not a property of any component of that system, but is still a feature of the system as a whole.” Read More ›

An interesting article talking about the progress, or lack thereof, in evolution of computer “life”.

Can we make software that comes to life?

A few choice snips:

On January 3 1990, he started with a program some 80 instructions long, Tierra’s equivalent of a single-celled sexless organism, analogous to the entities some believe paved the way towards life. The “creature” – a set of instructions that also formed its body – would identify the beginning and end of itself, calculate its size, copy itself into a free region of memory, and then divide.

Before long, Dr Ray saw a mutant. Slightly smaller in length, it was able to make more efficient use of the available resources, so its family grew in size until they exceeded the numbers of the original ancestor. Subsequent mutations needed even fewer instructions, so could carry out their tasks more quickly, grazing on more and more of the available computer space.

A creature appeared with about half the original number of instructions, too few to reproduce in the conventional way. Being a parasite, it was dependent on others to multiply. Tierra even went on to develop hyper-parasites – creatures which forced other parasites to help them multiply. “I got all this ecological diversity on the very first shot,” Dr Ray told me.

Hmmm… starts out complex and then gets simpler and simpler. Yup. That’s how Darwin described it. Right? Oh hold it. That was our side who said life had to begin with all the complexity it would ever have because RM+NS can’t generate CSI. Read More ›

A friend of mine emailed me the following quotes from Mike Gene’s new book THE DESIGN MATRIX, available from Amazon.com here. “The vast majority of scientists do not view Intelligent Design as science and I happen to agree with them.” (pg. xi) “I should make it explicitly clear from the start that I did not write this book to help those seeking to change the way we teach science to our kids. I do not argue that design deserves to be known as science. At best, Intelligent Design may only be a nascent proto-science and thus does not belong in the public school curriculum. Nor does this book argue that evolution is false and deserves to be criticized in the Read More ›

I found the following research quite intriguing. It has far reaching implications of interest to IDists. One implication requires a front-loading IDist to appreciate. Basically what the researchers found is that there are risk assessments in the promoter regions of genes. If a gene is critical and random mutations to it would be bad news it is marked as high risk and isn’t subject to mutation. If it’s not so critical it is marked low risk and exposed to experimentation.

How does this apply to front-loading? A major problem for front-loading is no known mechanism for conservation of genomic information other than natural selection. Information stored for a distant future that isn’t used in the present is ostensibly destroyed by deep time and random mutation. Other research we’ve blogged here showed compelling evidence that a mechanism for conserving unexpressed information exists. This is even more compelling – tags saying “conserve this”. Now all we need to find is the enhanced error detection and correction mechanism that is employed to conserve information tagged for conservation and there’s our mechanism for presevation of front-loaded genomic information over deep time.

Evolution: When Are Genes ‘Adventurous’ And When Are They Conservative?

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In this week’s Nature, an analysis of the human genome has shown tracing 4,692 homologous recombinations backwards in time leads to “24 distinct groups”. They say their work supports a “‘punctuated’ model of evolution.” I don’t have access to the entire article (maybe somebody does), but the language contained in the abstract is the kind that we might associate with “front-loading”; viz., “Our analysis reveals that human segmental duplications are frequently organized around ‘core’ duplicons, which are enriched for transcripts and, in some cases, encode primate-specific genes undergoing positive selection.”

I did a Wikipedia search for “duplicon” and found nothing; but a Google search gives the following article: Abstract Only. Duplicons appear to be something that is seen at the chromosomal level, and involves low-level repeats of the chromosome. The description this week’s Nature authors give of a duplicon “enriched for transcripts” seems to strongly suggest that the rearrangements that have taken place in the “duplicon” have resulted in more of the genome being expressed. The image I have of what might be taking place comes from my very ancient familiarity with computer programming, and, assuming programming essentials haven’t changed much, it is this: in a computer program there are decision nodes and “go to” nodes that redirect the program to various subroutines, these subroutines being present at some numbered location along the length of the program. If for some reason one subroutine in the program were substituted for another, the program would probably still run, but the output would certainly be different. And, if additional “go to” nodes were “copied”, more subroutines would be expressed. Likewise, if you have genetic instructions along the string of nucleotides that redirects the genetic program to some other downstream part of the genome that allows some particular protein/regulatory function to take place, then, through recombination, different “subroutines” might be inserted, or more signals for transcription might be included.

Maybe this is straining the programming analogy, I don’t know. But in any event, what the authors are reporting doesn’t sound to me like information is being generated (gradualism), but that already present information is being more robustly used (punctuated model of evolution).

Any thoughts?

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The concept of IC is that an IC system has no *functioning* precursors with the same function. Zachriel’s program (and other similar programs randomly generating phrases) don’t challenge IC because the target phrases do not have functioning precursors. As in, they do have precursors but they do not provide the same meaning. Thus, if IC was taken into account normally these words would not promote survivability. If Darwinists would deal with programs instead of phrases they would understand quickly what a functioning precursor is.

Here is a modification of the Phrasenation program that I’d find interesting and possibly even relevant to discussions of ID. I’d like suggestions on how to more accurately reflect the problem Darwinists face.
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Giant Bacteria over half a millimeter long (visible to the naked eye) living in the gut of surgeonfish is found to have over 300 times more DNA (1 trillion base pairs) than humans (3 billion base pairs). I believe this is now the largest known amount of DNA in a single cell having knocked aside the previous record holder amoeba dubia at ~200 times more DNA than humans.

A friend pointed me to an article in the Los Angeles Times, extolling the current “godless chic,” which has attracted the attention of other bloggers here. There is the “your God is a fraud” thing (Jesus never existed; men stupider than him made him up) or Blasphemy Challenge thing (deny the Holy Spirit on YouTube and see if Anyone cares).

This isn’t surprising, of course. Given who is behind blasphemy chic, etc., the atheism in question is materialist atheism*, of which Darwinism is the creation story.

And Darwinism is itself a failing god. The intelligentsia believe with all their hearts but  Read More ›

It is often said that while there are many controversies within evolution as to the specifics of how evolution works, there is no controversy about the fact of evolution. Often times, when ID’ers talk about problems with evolutionary theory, they are accused of misrepresentation — that certainly there are controversies about aspects of evolution, but not controversies about the fact of evolution itself. Thus, any amount of doubt that might be brought on by these criticisms are washed away by the fact that these are mere quibbles over details.
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