Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Jonathan Wells Party in DC October 11, 2006

For those in the Washington, DC area, the Discovery Institute announced the following on their public website: Author Lecture with Jonathan Wells You are invited to meet Jonathan Wells for a special reception, discussion and booksigning at Discovery Institute’s Washington DC office, located at 1015 Fifteenth Street, NW Suite 900, on Wednesday, October 11th from 5:30 to 7:00 p.m. Refreshments will be served, and copies of the book will be available for purchase at a discounted rate. There is no cost to attend. To register, contact Logan Gage at lgage@discovery.org or call (202) 558-7085. I’m planning on being there. Hope I get to meet some of you all.

Unveiling overwhelmingevidence.com — give us your young people . . .

The Darwinists have had your young people long enough to shape, subvert, and corrupt. Send them to www.overwhelmingevidence.com and mobilize this sleeping giant! The old guard is not going to change. The hope of the future lies with our youth. The new overwhelmingevidence.com site is modeled on Xanga and Myspace and aimed at concentrating the power of youth to throw off the indoctrination that is being shoved down their throats by groups like the NCSE and enforced by inept judicial rulings like those of Judge Jones (note the image of Jones on the splash page). The NCSE, the ACLU, Jones, etc. have effectively disenfranchised our young people when it comes to the teaching of biological origins. Today’s high school and Read More ›

Question re High Ross speaking in Toronto …

In the comments box to my post of yesterday, someone wrote re Hugh Ross speaking at the ID conference in Toronto: I also find folks like Hugh Ross who’s speaking there in Toronto somewhat unsavory (if I may use such a word). He should be a big supporter of Intelligent Design, yet his article in the first issue of Salvo (http://www.salvomag.com/subscribe.html) was just terrible. Y’all should have a look in preparation for the conference—or is there still hope to win him over and so even we had better be nice? From Denyse: Well, Hugh Ross is currently our guest in Toronto, so we will give him a polite hearing no matter what he says. My own view is that Ross Read More ›

Gil Has Never Grasped the Nature of a Simulation Model

Tom English challenged me with this:

I say categorically, as someone who has worked in evolutionary computation for 15 years, that Gil does not understand what he is talking about. This is not to say that he is trying to mislead anyone. It is simply clear that he has never grasped the nature of a simulation model. His comments reflect the sort of concrete thinking I have tried to help many students grow beyond, often without success.

The reason for Tom’s lack of success is that he, and Darwinists in general, try to explain everything with an overly — indeed catastrophically — simplistic model. Here’s what’s involved in a real-world computer simulation:

Read More ›

There are 2 guys named Tom English in the ID debate

Since many IDEA members read this weblog and this could be a point of confusion for other readers, I wanted to clarify something. Thomas D. English is a part of the IDEA Center Advisory Board. Thomas M. English is the Tom English that frequents Uncommon Descent.
Read More ›

E. O. Wilson has been transferred to the make-nice platoon?

BIll Dembski wrote,

E.O. Wilson thinks that after years of reaming religious believers he can now ingratiate himself with them. Fine. Let him and his colleagues give up their monopoly on the teaching and government funding of materialistic evolutionary theories.

Can E. O. Wilson really save the world?
Ivan Semeniuk
New Scientist, 30 September 2006

http://www.newscientist.com/channel/opinion/mg19125711.300-can-e-o-wilson-really-save-the-world.html

Often cited as Darwin’s true heir, E. O. Wilson has an audacious planet-saving strategy: to unite evangelical Christians and scientific secularists

Oh, and the ID cause is going belly up according to a recent Ken Miller talk, as quoted in  another Dembski post below.

Okay, so why have I been running around these last few days getting ready for a conference on ID at the University of Toronto? (which so far has not been cancelled – it would never have been cancelled  due to lack of interest, but due to admin fear)

There’s a stack of stuff here I haven’t even read yet, to do with ID, and I don’t have time to blog in general, and don’t have a moment to call the shots on who will win the Liberal leadership race in Canada, even though I am supposed to broadcast on that later today.

This is a pretty lively dead, if you ask me. 

Anyway, re E. O. Wilson, swatched above, here’s what an old comrade Nancy Pearcey (www.npearcey@aol.com) says about what it really means when people who have sneered at religious folk in the past suddenly start to make nice:

 … the strategy here is what Phil Johnson described as switching off between the offensive and the defensive teams.  When Darwinists are feeling confident, they send out the offensive team, which takes the Dennett/Dawkins line that evolution has debunked religion. 

When they realize that for PR purposes they have to tread more carefully, they send out the defensive team, which takes the line that religion is fine as long as it stays in its place.  The important question is how they define its place.  Just like Gould, this SciAm editorial puts all the real facts on the side of Darwinism, while defining religion as a comforting gloss people can put on the facts of materialistic science if it makes them feel better. 
Religion can be tolerated if it helps weaker folks “reconcile” themselves to the hard-edged materialism that the real scientists are courageous enough to hold. 

The depressing thing isn’t that Wilson tries it on. Read More ›

Ken Miller up to his old tricks . . .

This just in from a colleague and posted with his permission. For the record:

  1. I did not withdraw from the Dover case — the Thomas More Law Center fired me over a perceived conflict of interest relating to my role as academic editor of the Foundation for Thought and Ethics (the publisher of the book in question — OF PANDAS AND PEOPLE). I was frankly looking forward to being deposed by the ACLU and staring them down at the trial. Perhaps another trial is in the offing, and Ken and I can finally have our day in court.
  2. The Vise Strategy was first announced here and posted on my designinference.com website after the trial (http://www.designinference.com/documents/2005.11.Vise_Strategy.pdf), yes, but I wrote it for the Thomas More Law Center prior to the trial to assist them in their preparation (I didn’t post it till afterward so as not to advantage the other side).
  3. For a movement that is in its death throes, I, as one of its principal advocates, am looking at more speaking engagements than I can fulfill and very generous honoraria (I suspect more than Ken Miller receives). A good gauge for when a movement enters death throes is when people stop talking about it being in death throes and simply ignore it as something that is of no consequence and indistinguisable from something that doesn’t exist. In short, when Ken Miller stops giving public talks against ID, we’ll know that the movement is in its death throes (that, or he’ll have converted to our side).

Wednesday’s annual Cultural Lecture by Ken Miller at
the NIH was on ID vs. SCIENCE. As told in mainly a
historical narrative, we were taken to Bill Dembski’s
blog, shown files from the Discovery Institute, the
cover of “The Lie” by Ken Ham, cartoons from Answers
in Genesis, shown textual modifications in “Of Pandas
and People”, arguments from horse, whale and fish
fossils, chromosmal differences between humans and
chimps, and accounts of the Dover trial—which
included deposition lawyers finding a smoking gun at a
Texas hotel, as Bill Dembski mysteriously didn’t
show—he speculated that DI told everyone but the 3
pro-ID witnesses to drop out of the trial, because
they realized that no one could actually defend ID in
a court of law. It was a tour de force 1 hr roller
coaster that was quite emotion grabbing, and I’m
leaving out the funniest part, which was his showing
his appearance on “The Colbert Report”. While that had
comedic value, it was interesting that he used that
clip to show how the issue of Darwinism quickly
changes to religion, as though Stephen Colbert asks
his questions in sincerity and not for hilarity. Read More ›

ACLU Alarmed Over Well Going Dry

The Public Expression of Religion Act of 2005 passed by a 244-173 house vote Tuesday. The bill bans the award of attorney fees in establishment clause cases (like Kitzmiller v. Dover). The ACLU has turned establishment clause cases into a cottage industry for underemployed lawyers. Naturally, they are quite alarmed at this turn of events. More at Stop The ACLU.

Can’t we all just be friends?

E.O. Wilson thinks that after years of reaming religious believers he can now ingratiate himself with them. Fine. Let him and his colleagues give up their monopoly on the teaching and government funding of materialistic evolutionary theories. Can E. O. Wilson really save the world? Ivan Semeniuk New Scientist, 30 September 2006 http://www.newscientist.com/channel/opinion/mg19125711.300-can-e-o-wilson-really-save-the-world.html Often cited as Darwin’s true heir, E. O. Wilson has an audacious planet-saving strategy: to unite evangelical Christians and scientific secularists Often cited as Darwin’s true heir, E. O. Wilson has an audacious strategy for saving the planet: encourage evangelical Christians and scientific secularists to unite in caring for the ecosystems and biodiversity that he calls the Creation in his latest book. Ivan Semeniuk asked him if Read More ›

A Realistic Computational Simulation of Random Mutation Filtered by Natural Selection in Biology

All computational evolutionary algorithms artificially isolate the effects of random mutation on the underlying machinery: the CPU instruction set, operating system, and algorithmic processes responsible for the replication process. If the blind-watchmaker thesis is correct for biological evolution, all of these artificial constraints must be eliminated. Every aspect of the simulation, both hardware and software, must be subject to random errors. Of course, this would result in immediate disaster and the extinction of the CPU, OS, simulation program, and the programmer, who would never get funding for further realistic simulation experiments.

I Think We All Know

Dawkins says Given that 93% of the National Academy does not believe in any kind of personal god, a statistician would expect that at least some members of Congress, if not a majority, would also be atheists. Yet, as far as I can discover, the number of avowed atheists among the 535 members of Congress is not 93%, not even 10%. It seems to be zero. What is going on here? I think we all know. Yeah, I think we all DO know, Richard. The National Academy membership is a self-elected body where your chances of becoming a member if you’re not an avowed atheist is akin to passing a camel through the eye of a needle. The National Academy Read More ›

The Dawkins Delusion a.k.a. The God Delusion

A more apt title for Dawkins’ tome, based on his essay describing it, would be The Dawkins Delusion.

More pap from it:

If, as Francis Crick and Leslie Orgel once playfully speculated, life on this planet was deliberately seeded by a payload of bacteria in the nose cone of a rocket, we still need an explanation for the intelligent aliens who dispatched the rocket.

Playfully? Let’s see about that. Read More ›

And The Hits Just Keep On Coming…

Dawkins says Lamentably, the scientific education of most British and American students omits all mention of Darwinism, and therefore the only alternative to chance that most people can imagine is design. Hello? Earth to Richard Dawkins. Do you copy? From What Do The State Science Standards Say About Evolution and Intelligent Design? The Education Week Review According to a 2005 Education Week survey of state science standards from 41 states, 39 state standards documents offer some description of biological evolution and how it accounts for the diversity of species that exist today, while 35 of these documents go further and give similar treatment to Darwin’s principle of natural selection. Note that the title of the article has “Intelligent Design” in Read More ›

Intelligence Arrives Later In Some Cases Than Others…

In the extreme, it never arrives at all. A case in point below. Dawkins says Intelligent, creative, complex, statistically improbable things come late into the universe, as the product of evolution or some other process of gradual escalation from simple beginnings. They come late into the universe and therefore cannot be responsible for designing it. In Dawkins’ case intelligence appears to have never arrived at all. What does he base his claim on that intelligence (among other things) come late into the universe? A sample size of one. In typical Darwinian fashion he takes one thing that he knows in the present (intelligence in the form of humanity appearing some billions of years into the history of the universe) and Read More ›