Understanding Intelligent Design: Everything You Need to Know in Plain Language, which I coauthored with Sean McDowell, and for which his father Josh McDowell wrote a bang-up foreword, is now available at Amazon.com (click here).
The book is geared at Christian young people (junior high and high schoolers) as well as for Church groups (e.g., [...]

Some of you might have heard that Jonathan Schaeffer and his team at the U. of Alberta recently solved the game of checkers. It made big news in the computer science world.
I first met Jon at the First Computer Olympiad in London (organized by the famous David Levy of chess and computer-chess fame) at which [...]

Two nights ago, I finally saw the Expelled film.
I had become almost proprietorial about the widely denounced #5 political documentary.  I had first broken the story of its existence last August. I watched it pitch and roll through accusations of trickery, a threatened lawsuit over plagiarism and a real one over intellectual property, production delays [...]

I am completely envious and I, like, totally admit it. This guy Steve Burri (one of the fellows in this picture) is way better than me when it comes to sending up goofy “zillions of universes” cosmology:
The scientists and researchers employed in my secret basement laboratory are quite an ecclectic bunch. We have staff that [...]

Back in 2005, David Berlinski responded to James Randi’s attempt to bribe the Smithsonian to suppress showing THE PRIVILEGED PLANET. Enjoy Berlinski’s response by clicking here.

I just received this press release from Seattle’s Discovery Institute:
Governor Bobby Jindal Signs Historic Science Education Act On Evolution and Education
Baton Rouge – Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal signed into law the Louisiana Science Education Act, ensuring the state’s teachers their right to teach the scientific evidence both for and against Darwinian evolution.
“The bill is [...]

Here is one consequence of evolution being used to justify strict continuity between humans and other forms of life. Discovery Institute’s persistent stress on humans being made in the image of God and that not being a privilege extended to the rest of the animal world makes more and more sense. This action in Spain [...]

BOOK REVIEWED-In Pursuit of the Gene: From Darwin to DNA
by James Schwartz
Harvard University Press: 2008. 384 pp.
Fruitful collaborations were formed in Thomas Hunt Morgan’s fly genetics lab.
When I was a student, ‘doing genetics’ meant crossing two different strains or species. Now it means sequencing DNA, preferably human. Between these two poles lies the history of [...]

I started reading Lenski’s full paper myself to see what raw data was provided and I got no farther than the first paragraph beyond the abstract when I encountered a bias error that a chance worshipper would never notice. My emphasis:
At its core, evolution involves a profound tension between
random and deterministic processes. Natural selection
works [...]

Uncommon Descent member AussieID brought up the point in my previous article that belief in God tends to fall off with increasing IQ. I countered with the point that the very highest IQs tend to come back around, not full circle to a belief in a personal God (such as the God of Abraham), [...]

PZ Myers at the Panda’s Thumb draws our attention to an exchange between Andrew Schlafly and Richard Lenski (the impetus for the exchange is Lenski’s work running tens of thousands of generations of E. coli to produce some interesting, or not so interesting, evolution as the case may be). Myers thinks Lenski gets the better [...]

In the latest Gallup poll in a 26-year series asking the same questions, only 14% of Americans are chance worshippers when it comes to evolution. The other 86% believe an intelligent agent was involved. Of course the poll names the intelligent agent “God” but you know what my old pal William Shakespeare had [...]

Cross posted at The Christian Watershed

One of the biggest issues trends in the West – especially in America – is for people to go ‘green’ in what they do. Whether it be from getting a hybrid vehicle, to eating organic foods, to just installing energy efficient light bulbs, it is not considered chic to be [...]

I watch very little television, but I enjoy The History Channel (THC). I’ve learned a lot from it. When it comes to hard science and engineering they do a very good job. I’ve particularly enjoyed their programs about the history of aviation, since I’m a software engineer in the aerospace R&D industry with hundreds of [...]

This is funny stuff. Jason Rosenhouse, an incurable chance worshipper, fawns over Ken Miller’s gratuitous ID bashing, then goes all negative when Miller starts mouthing telic code-phrases like “the universe was waiting for us” and that “a human-like intelligence was the inevitable result of evolution”. Go to Rosenhouse’s blog at the link above [...]

In his excellent paper, Jeffrey Koperski argues very well that ID has been unjustifiably excluded from rational scientific consideration. He says that motives imputed to ID proponents should not color consideration of the validity of the theory, and that excluding a theory on definitional grounds is not historically or logically valid. He argues not so well that ID [...]

In this, my first column for Uncommon Descent, I’d like to address what seems to be a fundamental contradiction running through the writings of many “theistic evolutionists,” and propose an adjustment to their theoretical framework.
 
Critics of theistic evolution (TE) have often suggested that theistic evolutionists (TEs) have to put themselves through mental contortions in order to remain Christian [...]

Paul Gillin, a veteran technology journalist and formerly editor-in-chief of ComputerWorld, thinks that legacy mainstream media (MSM) are toast.
Sure, lots of people think so, and yet another techhead’s view wouldn’t matter - except that I keep hearing the same thing from journalists who hoped it wasn’t true, and used to say it wasn’t. From Gilpin:
Why [...]

Cross-posted at The Christian Watershed
 
On May 8, 1945 the German government officially surrendered to the Allied Forces, thus ending the War in Europe (the War in the Pacific would continue another three months). The Nazis was a horrible government that aside from its treatment of the Jewish people and other “unwanted,” regularly practiced infanticide. Their [...]

Here are two emails I received, one from the Academic Freedom Consortium, which backs the recent Louisiana legislation allowing public school teachers to present material critical of Darwinian evolution, another from the skeptic society (Center for Inquiry), saying it’s all a ruse for sneaking religion into the science curriculum and therefore violates the First Amendment.
Please [...]

Core ID and ID-compatible hypotheses have various predictions. For example, there’s the confirmed predictions related to junk DNA and genetic nature of the platypus, the predictions about designer drugs, long-term preservation mechanisms for conserving information that is not currently implemented, and retroviruses being capable of being used to implement designed changes. At this time the [...]

An anthology that I started ten years ago is, with the help of two good friends and colleagues, finally out. It is titled The Patristic Understanding of Creation: An Anthology of Writings from the Church Fathers on Creation and Design and can be ordered here. For the table of contents, go here. This is the [...]

Unraveling these crop circles constitutes a design inference that doesn’t just tell us that something was designed but also tells us something about the knowledge of the designer:

SOURCE: go here.

I’ve known Karl Giberson over a decade. In the early days, he was a respectful critic of ID. That now seems to have changed with the publication of his most recent book, Saving Darwin: How to Be a Christian and Believe in Evolution (go here for the Amazon listing). The subtitle is curious. Ordinarily one [...]

Darwin’s theory of evolution through natural selection, which was already as well established as the theory of gravity, has taken a big leap forward. According to the New Scientist (see Dave Scot’s post earlier today), E.Coli bacteria have evolved the ability to digest citrate, after only
44,000 generations. “It’s the [...]

Since I don’t believe in angels, devils, and things of that nature understand that the devil in the title is a metaphor for positive atheists. I wanted to point out that as soon as the atheists have vanquished the more blatant god bothering creationists from post-modern western civilization they’re going to go after the [...]

In New Scientist we find the following article:
Bacteria make major evolutionary shift in the lab
A major evolutionary innovation has unfurled right in front of researchers’ eyes. It’s the first time evolution has been caught in the act of making such a rare and complex new trait.
This is in reference to the E. coli culture in [...]

There’s an interesting story in today’s Washington Times (go here) on Louisiana’s new science policy (shortly to be signed into law by Governor Jindal) advocating that both strengths and weaknesses of evolutionary theory be taught in the public school science curriculum.
The other side (ACLU, NCSE, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, etc.) [...]

In the month of June we have:
Saving Darwin: How to Be a Christian and Believe in Evolution (Hardcover) by Karl Giberson, released June 10, 2008.
Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America’s Soul (Hardcover) by Ken Miller, released June 12, 2008.
Thank God for Evolution: How the Marriage of Science and Religion Will Transform [...]

I watched Miller on the Colbert Report last night. Then I saw this comic. Interesting parallels…

Michael Ruse writes:
“Ken Miller’s new book, Only a Theory, Evolution and the Battle for America’s Soul, is everything we have come to expect from him — informed, witty, and above all deeply serious about matters of concern to us all. He takes so-called intelligent design theory apart, piece by piece, showing it for the sham [...]