Darwin’s theory of evolution – essentially, that life, including human life, occurs without purpose and perishes without consequence – popularized points of view that would have been considered unacceptable to most Westerners in earlier times. Indeed, that has always been its greatest appeal, to judge from the thousands of editorials on how Darwin’s great feat was to show that man is just a two-legged animal – a biped who affects trousers. Excerpt: West quotes political philosopher Leo Strauss, explaining that scientific materialism triesto understand the higher in terms of the lower: the human in terms of the subhuman, the rational in terms of the subrational (p. 4). To test his assumption, take a pop science mag and make a mental Read More ›

No Intelligence Allowed! By Tom Bethell Published 2/19/2008 12:07:57 AM It’s not often that I attend private screenings, so when I was invited to see the director’s cut of Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, starring our own Ben Stein, I jumped at the chance. It was shown in downtown Washington, D.C. at the Goethe Institute. I didn’t even know that such a place existed, but then downtown Washington has been rebuilt in recent years, with whole neighborhoods reconstructed. It’s actually beginning to resemble a real city. The film, a documentary, is about scientists and researchers who acknowledge the scientific evidence for the intelligent design of life and who have been ostracized or denied tenure as a result. In a word, they Read More ›

Could Florida’s Darwinian regulations be “evolving” from “fact” to free inquiry? In More on the vote on evolution and Florida’s new science standards Leslie Postal reports that teaching Evolution in schools is now mandated, but officially as the “scientific theory of” Evolution.

Will students now be able to seriously study evolution as “a scientific theory” – with all the testing, probing, and skepticism required by the scientific method? Or will they be Expelled for exercising their unalienable rights to free speech? – that founded the Declaration of Independence (which heads the US Codes Organic Laws) and are preserved by the First Amendment.
In a Special Report on the American Spectator Ben Stein writes::

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Charles Walcott, secretary  of the Smithsonian, had found the equivalent of Noah’s Ark. He found every animal phylum, or – as physicist Gerald Schroeder puts it – the “basic anatomies” of all animal life forms today. Cause for rejoicing? No, because there was a problem. The problem was that the find obviously did not support Darwin’s theory of evolution: So what did he do?

Michael Ruse on Richard Dawkins “The God Delusion” (heavily edited) “God is getting a bit of a bashing these days. Above all, there is the smash-hit best seller The God Delusion, by the brilliant science writer Richard Dawkins. Why this sudden enthusiasm for atheism? The new skeptics are writing brilliant works, bringing reason and evidence to bear on the God question, and showing in altogether new ways why religion is false and dangerous to boot. Dawkins is brazen in his ignorance of philosophy and theology (not to mention the history of science). Dawkins is entirely ignorant of the fact that no believer – has ever thought that arguments are the best support for belief. John Henry Newman wrote: “I believe Read More ›

La Mirada, Calif. — Ben Stein, known for his lead role in the film Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and his Comedy Central show Win Ben Stein’s Money, believes in liberty and truth. In recognition of this, Biola University’s masters in science and religion program will present him with the 2008 Phillip E. Johnson Award for Liberty and Truth on March 27, a month before the release of his major controversial motion picture, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. In his new movie Expelled, Stein wonders whether humans were designed by an intelligent being or whether we were simply the result of an ancient natural accident. In his search for an answer, he discovers an elitist scientific establishment that punishes the scientific proponents Read More ›

In the thread I deleted “A Sterling Example of Anti-Religionists” one of the commenters noted that the URL linking to the offensive article had undergone a point mutation. One letter in it changed that made the link go somewhere else. He implied that this didn’t happen at random and that someone purposely changed it. Guilty as charged. I changed that one letter – a k to an h to make it difficult to see at a casual glance. But let’s look at how my design was detected. We all know that bits can flip at random in computer data from various causes just like they can flip at random in DNA from various causes. This wasn’t a complex mutation. A Read More ›

UD member Timothy in another thread writes

But in principle it is possible to arrive at this particular unique combination of symbols using a simple brute force algorithm (like, for example, an elementary counting algorithm) that works through all the possible combinations of symbols. Thus, given such a systematic algorithm, all the books of the world, those written and those yet to be written, are implied by it.

I thought this was important enough to deserve a thread of its own. Read More ›

The best argument for Intelligent Design is to clearly state the opposing view, which is that physics explains all of chemistry (probably true), chemistry explains all of biology, biology explains intelligence, and intelligence explains computers, science textbooks and the Internet; ergo, physics explains computers, ergo, my little parable “My Failed Simulation”, which has now appeared at Human Events here . They re-titled it and added a subtitle that I don’t like, but otherwise I’ll take responsibility for the content. I added the adjective “imaginary” to “friend” in the third paragraph to make sure no one took this parable too literally, but it looks like that may not have been sufficient, to judge by the first comment.

As some UD readers are aware, one of my interests is artificial-intelligence computer programming, especially games-playing AI (here, here, and here).

In producing retrograde endgame databases for the game of checkers, with massive computational resources (two CPUs performing approximately a billion integer operations each per second over a period of two months, for a total of 10,000,000,000,000,000 [ten thousand trillion] mathematical calculations), some very interesting results were produced, including correction of human play that had been in the books for centuries. But did the program produce any new information? Well, yes, in a sense, because the computer found stuff that no human had ever found. But here’s the real question, which those of us at the Evolutionary Informatics Lab are attempting to address: Was the “new information” supplied by the programmer and his intelligently designed computational algorithm, or did the computer really do anything original on its own, in terms of information generation?

The answer is that computers do not generate new information; they only reshuffle it and make it more easily accessible. Here’s an example:

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I deleted this thread because I found the comments offensive. Let’s keep postings and comments germane to ID. Addendum by DaveScot: For the same reason I deleted the “Sterling Example of Anti-Religionists” thread due to many complaints that it was offensive. I want to extend my apologies for my own vulgar contributions that many found to be offensive. When I find myself among the crude and vulgar I tend to participate at the same level rather than rise above it as I should.

The same publisher that brought you DARWIN’S BLACK BOX and THE EDGE OF EVOLUTION (i.e., The Free Press) is paying Richard Dawkins $3.5million for his next book, to be titled ONLY A THEORY? I’m told, however, that other titles are still in the running, including MERELY A HYPOTHESIS MERE DARWINISM (this and the last to attract fans of C. S. Lewis) THE NADIR OF SCIENCE DARWIN’S DEAD IDEA EVOLUTION: THE ILLUSION OF POSSIBILITY DARWINISM DEVOLVING EVOLUTION: THE SENESCENT YEARS $3.5million is a lot of money. The question I have is whether Dawkins still worships exclusively in the temple of Darwin or if he now also attends services at the temple of Mammon.

For me, the importance of this piece in Nature is not so much that, by assuming what is to be proven, it is possible to demonstrate the obvious (that heavily spined fish will not have an advantage where there are no predators). The significance is that this trivial example of existing trait filtering and selection is then touted as a major discovery of Natural Selection at work in the fossil record. Is this not an admission that microevolution is the best that the fossil record ever shows? Evolutionary biology: Darwin in the fossils Andrew P. Hendry (heavily edited excerpts) “Although adaptation by natural selection is thought to drive evolution, it has been difficult to confirm this process in the fossil record. The evidence has been there Read More ›

Posted by Denyse O’Leary for Jane Harris At one time, hybrids were thought to be common among plants but rare among animals. But as more animal hybrids are found, some scientists ask whether hybrids are not a more common means of creating new species than previously thought. … An intense focus on Darwin’s theory that natural selection is the main cause of new species has often meant that other possibilities are neglected. For more, go here.

I’m not sure what inspired Professor Dembski to quote C.S. Lewis on Bulverism at this particular point in time but the recent and somewhat unexpected rise of Barack Hussein Obama over Hillary Rodham Clinton in the democratic primaries might have been it. I predict that whatever legitimate criticism is leveled at him the Bulverians will be out in great number rejoining with “You’re only saying that because he’s black.” Mark my words. That is going to become a household phrase before November. My support, of course, will be for John McCain. I preferred McCain over Bush in 2004 and nothing has changed. I hope to see him team up with Mike Huckabee as VP. I don’t envy them the task Read More ›