Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Del Ratzsch on Design in the (Online) Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Del Ratzsch’s entry on “Teleological Arguments for God’s Existence” is now available online in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy at http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/teleological-arguments and includes some remarks about ID. Del is simultaneously a critic and supporter of ID. His book Nature, Design, and Science (SUNY Press, 2001) is worth reading.

Lakatos on Science and Pseudoscience

“To sum up: [The hallmark of empirical progress is not trivial verifications: Popper is right that there are millions of them. It is no success for Newtonian theory that stones, when dropped, fall towards the earth, no matter how often this is repeated. But, ] so-called ‘refutations’ are not the hallmark of empirical failure, as Popper has preached, since all programmes grow in a permanent ocean of anomalies. What really counts are dramatic, unexpected, stunning predictions: a few of them are enough to tilt the balance; where theory lags behind the facts, we are dealing with miserable degenerating research programmes.” Evolutionists read this against ID. ID proponents read this against evolution. Time will tell who is right. For the MP3 Read More ›

While I haven’t actually read the book or seen the movie …

[William Tucker writes:] I haven’t seen the movie, but I did read the excerpt from the book, The Privileged Planet, in the March 2004 issue of The American Spectator. I don’t know whether I’d call authors Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay Richards’ argument “religious.” “Creepy” would seem a better term. MORE

The Transhumanist Critique/Embrace of ID

James Pinkerton offers a transhumanist critique of ID at Tech Central Station titled “The Real Intelligent Designers.” Transhumanists believe in enhancing the human person through technology (for some the goal is to upload the human to a more efficient technology, thereby dispensing entirely with our current wetware). Read More ›

Intentional Design / Intelligent Design

George Ellis, physicist and Templeton Prize winner, in today’s Nature has an interesting short article titled “Physics, Complexity, and Causality.” In it he remarks that the physical sciences offer no insight into “intentional design.” The article itself includes the following image and caption: The question you need to be asking yourself is why is Nature giving such respectful treatment to ID, in effect conceding that ID has focused on a major conceptual problem for science. For more on the significance of Ellis’s article as well as for links to it and related articles, see Paul Nelson’s remarks at IDthefuture (go here).

Deposition in New Orleans

I’ve been out of pocket a few days to attend the deposition of Barbara Forrest in the Dover County ID Case (I’m an expert witness for the ID side and was advising the ID side’s deposing attorney; by the way, Forrest struck me as very nice in person). I expect I’ll be reporting more on this case at some point. Though seemingly insignificant (a tiny community’s school board enacts a seemingly trivial concession to ID), this case could well blow up with huge implications for ID in high school biology curricula.