Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

“The Irrationality of Richard Dawkins” — by Frank Beckwith

This just appeared at FIRST THINGS: The Irrationality of Richard Dawkins By Francis J. Beckwith Wednesday, June 20, 2007, 6:47 AM In his 2006 book, The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins laments the career path of Kurt Wise, who has, since 2006, held the positions of professor of science and theology and director of the Center for Theology and Science at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. Prior to that, Wise had taught for many years at Bryan College, a small evangelical college in Dayton, Tennessee, named after William Jennings Bryan, three-time Democratic presidential candidate and associate counsel in the 1925 Scopes “Monkey Trial.” MORE: www.firstthings.com/onthesquare.

The European Council for the Advancement of Atheism

The Council of Europe may justly be renamed as “The European Council for the Advancement of Atheism.” To believe in a God who acts in the world (aka theism) henceforward constitutes “religious extremism.” It will be interesting to see at what point advocacy of ID is regarded in Europe as a “hate crime” against … science? … society? … humanity?

Oh, your’re wondering what this is all about. Check out the following report by the Parliamentary Assembly of the CU (assembly.coe.int):

Doc. 11297
8 June 2007

The dangers of creationism in education

Report
Committee on Culture, Science and Education
Rapporteur: Mr Guy LENGAGNE, France, Socialist Group

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Summary

The theory of evolution is being attacked by religious fundamentalists who call for creationist theories to be taught in European schools alongside or even in place of it. From a scientific view point there is absolutely no doubt that evolution is a central theory for our understanding of the Universe and of life on Earth.

Creationism in any of its forms, such as “intelligent design”, is not based on facts, does not use any scientific reasoning and its contents are pathetically inadequate for science classes.

The Assembly calls on education authorities in member States to promote scientific knowledge and the teaching of evolution and to oppose firmly any attempts at teaching creationism as a scientific discipline.

A. Draft resolution

1. The Parliamentary Assembly is worried about the possible ill-effects of the spread of creationist theories within our education systems and about the consequences for our democracies. If we are not careful, creationism could become a threat to human rights, which are a key concern of the Council of Europe. Read More ›

How much information is needed to construct a human?

A commenter in another thread prompted this. I didn’t approve the comment because it was so impoverished but thought the discussion warranted a thread of its own. The commenter basically said that 30,000 proteins w/regulatory regions is enough – a mere fraction of the DNA in a human egg – implying that plenty of DNA can be functionless junk. While that number of regulated proteins might possibly be enough to define myriad cell types and tissue types there is an awful lot more required. The list of things I can think of (which is likely not complete) includes: 1) cell types 2) tissue types 3) organs 5) body plan 6) autonomic control system 7) instinctive behaviors Since complex system design Read More ›

Evolutionary biologists: Allstar atheists, apparently, or — very occasionally — teddy bears for Jesus

In “Evolution, Religion and Free Will” (American Scientist, Volume 95, 294ff), Gregory W. Graffin and William B. Provine found that, of 149 eminent evolutionists polled, 78% were pure naturalists (no God) and only two were clearly theists (traditional idea of God). Some were in between these poles. The authors describe most of them as deists (some sort of divinity might have got things rolling but it is not God in any sense that Christians understand).

They note that the evolutionary biologists scored the lowest so far in any such poll. They described the vast majority of their respondents as Read More ›

How many honorary doctorates does Judge Jones have now?

Here is Judge John E. Jones III receiving an honorary doctorate just six months after rendering his decision in Kitzmiller v. Dover (check out Dickinson College’s reasons for conferring the degree). How many honorary doctorates has the Judge racked up since then? (I’m told four, but I have yet to confirm that.) Not bad for someone who went from head of the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board to towering intellect of American jurisprudence. There’s a lesson in all this. ID is often presented as a “conservative thing.” But conservatives and liberals alike are intent on pleasing and being rewarded by the pro-Darwin lobby (witness the Republican Judge Jones — I expect the biggest worry weighing on him in Kitzmiller was how Read More ›

Scientist Says Global Warming Stopped in 1998

High price for load of hot air by Bob Carter, June 18, 2007 12:00am Professor Bob Carter is an environmental scientist at James Cook University who studies ancient climate change. Here’s some of what he has to say: The salient facts are these. First, the accepted global average temperature statistics used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change show that no ground-based warming has occurred since 1998. Oddly, this eight-year-long temperature stasis has occurred despite an increase over the same period of 15 parts per million (or 4 per cent) in atmospheric CO2. Second, lower atmosphere satellite-based temperature measurements, if corrected for non-greenhouse influences such as El Nino events and large volcanic eruptions, show little if any global warming since Read More ›

So many ID books, so little time! ID-sympathetic book by Gingerich (2006)

Biologist John Lynch seems to think there is surprising silence over Behe’s book. I speculated that his perception is due to the fact that there are so many pro-ID or ID-sympathetic books and activities out there now. In addition to the activities of the ID community, there is renewed activity in the creationist community. There are at least two creation museums opening in 2007 — one in the USA and one in Canada!

It was through Uncommon Descent that important pro-ID books have gotten some promotion like ReMine’s Biotic Message and Sanford’s Genetic Entropy, or Barrow and Tipler’s Anthropic Cosmological Principle. I will hopefully post in detail on ReMine’s Biotic Message and Davies The Mind of God. It should be noted Barrow and Davies won an almost combined 3 million dollars in the form of Templeton Prizes for their (perhaps unwitting) ID-sympathetic works. Some of the best ID literature is in places you’d least expect!

Uncommon Descent will from time to time point out other books like Tipler’s Physics of Christianity and now this (unwitting) ID-sympathetic book by renowned scientist Owen Gingerich: God’s Universe

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Michael Ruse Reviews The Edge of Evolution

The whole review can be found for free here.

One of the first things to note is repetition of a common fallacy about ID being illegal to teach due to the Dover decision. Michael writes:

IDT has been remarkably successful. George W. Bush is one among many who have stated flatly that it should be taught in schools alongside evolutionary biology. Although it is illegal to do so – another court case in Dover, Penn., in 2005 ruled that it, too, violates the separation of church and state – estimates are that at least 20 per cent of American schools already teach it. One suspects that it is not entirely unknown in biology classes north of the border, either.

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Jerry Coyne: The Henry Ford of Evolution?

Jerry Coyne in his disastrous attempt to educate laypersons in evolutionary dogma has this to say: If evolution is a car, then natural selection is the engine and mutation is the gas. … Although Darwin had no idea where this variation came from, we now know that it is produced by mutation–accidental changes in the sequence of DNA that usually occur as copying errors when a molecule replicates during cell division. And if Henry Ford were Jerry Coyne he’d say that assembly line mistakes turned the Ford Quadricycle into the Ford GT What a maroon. I’m not complaining mind you. The likes of Mark Chu-Carrol, Sean Carrol, and Jerry Coyne are certainly entertaining in a slapstick kind of way but Read More ›

With enemies like Coyne, who needs friends?

The attempted refutation of Behe’s work by the Darwinists has been so anemic that even the prominent names in the Darwinist blogsphere are beginning to lament the lackluster performance of their All-Stars against Michael Behe.

For example, Jason Rosenhouse, one of the most brilliant authors at PandasThumb, has decided to break ranks and openly criticize world-renowned Darwinist Jerry Coyne.

In Coyne Lays an Egg, Rosenhouse writes:

[Coyne’s] review of [Behe’s Edge of Evolution] EoE is a terrible piece of work. It’s all snideness and ridicule with very little in the way of good arguments. It really infuriates me when someone like Coyne is given such a terrific platform, several thousand words in a classy magazine like The New Republic, and then writes as if the whole project is beneath him.
….
Behe will have a good time lambasting Coyne for not reading very carefully.

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Darwinism Is Rocket Science!

As some UD readers may be aware, I earn my living in the aerospace research and development field, with a specialty in guidance, navigation and control (GN&C). When asked what I do for a living, I usually respond, “Well, it’s basically rocket science.” This brief audio file, which our aerospace engineers have studied with much interest, elucidates the essential principles of missile guidance algorithms. Upon reflection, I realized that Darwinian logic is indeed rocket science! After listening to the brief lecture provided above, the similarities between Darwinism and rocket science should be obvious to any unbiased observer.

Evolution Theory Fails? “It can’t be true!”

“To knock out 2 megabases and not have an effect—that’s remarkable,” says Jim Hudson, a geneticist at Open Biosystems in Huntsville, Alabama. “It can’t be true,” says a skeptical Arend Sidow of Stanford University.

Arend Sidow is not a dumb or unqualified guy. He’s the principal researcher at Stanford University’s Sidow Lab. In fact this is his lab’s primary area of investigation: Much of our work rests on a simple, fundamental, principle of evolution: functionally or structurally important sites in the genome are subject to selective constraints;

So why can’t it be true? Because if evolutionary theory (natural selection) is true then it MUST BE TRUE that conserved (constrained) regions of DNA have biological activity. Arend won’t entertain natural selection at the DNA sequence level not being true. The knockout experiment, if there is no mistake, overturns his faith in evolutionary theory. So the experiment must be flawed. “It just can’t be true.” Arend is having a crisis of faith. Isn’t that just precious?

THE BIOLOGY OF GENOMES MEETING: Disposable DNA Puzzles Researchers
Elizabeth Pennisi
11 JUNE 2004 VOL 304 SCIENCE

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Digital Counters Discovered Controlling Gene Expression

Yet another parallel with human-engineered systems is discovered in the living cell – digital counters that control the number of protein molecules expressed. The researchers obviously aren’t electronic engineers as this particular circuit isn’t analogous to a clock. It’s a counter circuit. It counts from zero to a preset maximum number of operations then stops when the maximum count is reached. This is a very common function employed in digital electronic devices often implemented with what’s called a serial shift register. The shift register starts out containing all zeros. One bits are fed into the input and zeros shift out the other end like putting marbles into an empty tube. When the shift register is full then ones start coming out the other end. Some action is taken when the first one bit emerges at the output. Shift registers can have any arbitrary number of bits.

Isn’t it fascinating how many things conceived by intelligent human designers are found in the molecular machinery of living cells? But hey, ignore the man behind the curtain. Nothing to see here. Click your heels together three times while repeating “It’s all just chance & necessity!” 🙄

Clocking In And Out Of Gene Expression Read More ›

Nelson D. Taylor loses civil suit against Finch Foods’ Mutation Paste

In a landmark decision, despite repeated pleas by Taylor to “Just look at me!,” Judge Jones rules FDA approval is science and scientists cannot be wrong. At emotional Times Square news conference, Taylor vows to continue his crusade against Finch Foods and mutation paste. [Details]. [Transcript of Mr. Taylor’s final day of testimony].