ID proponents are often accused of using “God-of-the-gaps” arguments. Of course, there are positive arguments for inferences to design in the natural world, but Del Ratzsch makes an interesting point about gap arguments in this interview.

He comments:

…the SETI program is a gap-searching project — trying to find signals which nature alone couldn’t or wouldn’t produce, then constructing alien-civilizations-of-the-gap arguments. Further, it is nowhere written in stone that nature has no causal or explanatory gaps of the relevant sort… gaps and gap arguments as such are unproblematic in principle.

[…]

…gaps have to do with e.g. mechanical causal histories, whereas design has to do with intentional histories. Those are in many cases intimately related issues. Gaps can be important clues to design, since depending on the context an actual mechanical, causal gap could suggest agency as a causal factor, and it is a relative short step from there to design. But the issues are distinct, and the ritual allegation that design views are all God-of-the-gap theories is inaccurate philosophically, as well as historically and contemporarily.

…It is also worth noting that if nature is designed and if it does contain causal or explanatory gaps, then any prohibition on gap theories will nearly guarantee that science — discarding one failed non-gap theory only by replacing it with another (not yet failed) [non]-gap theory — will not self-correct in the usual advertised way, and that science will never correctly understand the relevant phenomena.

Read More ›

Blogger David Anderson, who has a first-class degree in Mathematics from Oxford University, is putting a bit of pressure on the British Centre for Science Education, quite successfully, it seems. He has uncovered good evidence that they have been less than forthright in the course of some recent parliamentary lobbying: http://bcse-revealed.blogspot.com

Marilynne Robinson, author of Gilead, which won both the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for fiction and 2005 National Book Critics Circle award, says what needs to be said, and no more, about Oxford Professor of the Public Understanding of Science Richard Dawkins’ inane crusade against religion And she says it brilliantly in “Hysterical scientism: The ecstasy of Richard Dawkins”. Reviewing his recent The God Delusion for November’s Harper’s, she notes that “There is a pervasive exclusion of historical memory in Dawkins’s view of science,”observing that, while it is true that Jews were persecuted in Christian Europe, … it is also true that science in the twentieth century revived and absolutized persecution by giving it a fresh rationale – Jewishness was not Read More ›

In reading the following, keep in mind that evolutionists who put out this drivel are themselves evolutionary dead ends, destined for the dustbin of history: Evolutionary theorist Oliver Curry of the London School of Economics expects a genetic upper class and a dim-witted underclass to emerge. The human race would peak in the year 3000, he said – before a decline due to dependence on technology. People would become choosier about their sexual partners, causing humanity to divide into sub-species, he added. The descendants of the genetic upper class would be tall, slim, healthy, attractive, intelligent, and creative and a far cry from the “underclass” humans who would have evolved into dim-witted, ugly, squat goblin-like creatures. MORE: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/6057734.stm

The first paragraph of the following quote appeared in a comment to Gil Dodgen’s post on the Quinn v. Dawkins debate on Irish radio. The succeeding paragraph is quite illuminating and included here. Question: What evidence (since Dawkins is so big on evidence) would help us to decide whether attributing responsibility to others for their actions is simply an adaptive device fobbed off on us by evolution or a reflection of an underlying moral structure to the universe (sometimes called “natural law” or “higher law”)? But doesn’t a truly scientific, mechanistic view of the nervous system make nonsense of the very idea of responsibility, whether diminished or not? Any crime, however heinous, is in principle to be blamed on antecedent Read More ›

At least I hope it’s just confusion. If not, then it looks an awful lot like persecution of a man for his personal views. To see what I’m talking about, go here. It’s stuff like this that makes me glad to see that a rival to Wikipedia is “days away from launching” and is supposed to be “more orderly” in the management of its entries. We’ll see.

Update: It looks like the incriminating part of the “Criticism” section has been promptly removed–after having been up for at least four days! Luckily for you, dear readers, I anticipated this move and saved it:
Read More ›

When it comes to discussing open systems aren’t we getting a little ahead of ourselves here? There are still some very basic problems to solve before getting into hand-waving over the evolution of computers and human minds.

http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/0605863103v1

Solutions with as little as 1% enantiomeric excess (ee) of D- or L-phenylalanine are amplified to 90% ee (a 95/5 ratio) by two successive evaporations to precipitate the racemate [mixture]. Such a process on the prebiotic earth could lead to a mechanism by which meteoritic chiral {alpha}-alkyl amino acids could form solutions with high ee values that were needed for the beginning of biology.

Read More ›

Sorry for the serial posts, but so much is happening. David Quinn, a well-known Catholic commentator and journalist in Ireland recently debated Richard Dawkins on Irish radio. Dawkins comments in the debate: “I’m not interested in free will… Just as before Darwin, biology was a mystery — Darwin solved that…” David Quinn is one sharp cookie. (I love that Irish accent!) Check it out: http://origins.swau.edu/misc/Dawkins2.mp3

For those who are convinced that Darwinism has no meaningful philosophical or theological implications I offer the following quotes from biology textbooks. Special thanks go to ID colleague Casey Luskin.
Read More ›

In a previous UD post I commented on an article by mathematician Granville Sewell, “A Mathematician’s View of Evolution.” Since then Granville and I have corresponded and he forwarded a follow-up piece entitled, “Can Anything Happen in an Open System?”

The essence of the thesis is as follows:

If an increase in order is extremely improbable when a system is closed, it is still extremely improbable when the system is open, unless something is entering which makes it NOT extremely improbable.

Read More ›

I mentioned earlier my delight that the GMU Provost was willing to put his good name behind Francis Collins book tour: GMU Provost hosts The Language of God.

Well, the talk happened and it was amazing! Francis Collins gave his Christian testimony tonight pretty much along the lines of his book. He recounted his conversion from atheism to the Christian faith. He referred to the Design argument and the creation of the cosmos. The word “Design” kept slipping out of his mouth.
Read More ›

http://www.ffame.org/sbenner/cochembiol8.672-689.pdf

The opening discussion:

To decide whether life has a common chemical plan, we must decide what life is. A panel assembled by NASA in 1994 was one of many groups to ponder this question. The panel defined life as a ‘chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution’ [16]. This definition, which follows an earlier definition by Sagan [17], will be used here. Read More ›

George Levine has a new book, Darwin Loves You. The book is silly and superficial, and would not be worth notice except that it serves as Exhibit A for the fact that Darwinism has become a religion, or at least, a “comprehensive doctrine” in the sense of Rawls (John, not Lou), and hence NOT something that a liberal democracry ought to impose on its citizens by force, as is happening now.

Non-Darwinian evolutionary biologists may start to speak up in greater numbers as more ID conferences are held. An ID conference sometimes spotlights those who do not want to be called Darwinists or Darwinians, irrespective of their views on ID.

Readers may recall that at our University of Toronto ID conference a couple of weekends ago, I ran into an interesting biochem textbook author named Larry Moran, an evolutionary biologist who does not seem to be a Darwinist or a Darwinian. He proposes an alternative. Read More ›

The Sci Phi Show interview with Michael Behe is now available! Check it out!

Here is the link Michael Behe on Sci Phi Show.

Read More ›