Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community
Topic

Natural Theology

New paper by Steiner Thorvaldsen on intelligent design and natural theology

Thorvaldsen: Intelligent Design is a relatively new scientific research program that investigates the effects of intelligent sources, and challenges basic parts of contemporary Darwinism. Fred Hoyle first issued the ideas of Intelligent Design in modern times when he discovered the unique energy level of the carbon atom in the 1950s. Read More ›

Book by classical philosopher of design in nature is now available after 200 years

At Amazon: The Lectures on Natural Theology were not included in the ten-volume Edinburgh Edition of Reid's collected works. Moreover, while two earlier editions of these lectures exist, both contain serious mistakes of transcription and annotation. For these reasons, this carefully revised edition of this important text fills an important gap in the literature. Read More ›

Design Disquisitions: Design & the Problem of Intelligibility

Many critics of intelligent design argue that not only is ID false (or at least unscientific), but that it is basically meaningless. Such lines of criticism come from philosophers such as Sahotra Sarkar and Elliott Sober. They argue that the general concepts that are assumed in ID discussions like ‘design’ and ‘intelligence’ are too primitive and vague to be of any use in a coherent scientific theory. Sarkar in particular claims that ID’s concepts can only be propped up by using analogies inherited by the natural theological tradition, and so cannot be formulated in a non-theological/scientific manner. In this article I have attempted to take a good stab at this objection. Though this article is quite in-depth, it is actually a Read More ›