Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Britain’s Royal Society is considering casting out God … so who is surprised?

Zoë Corbyn reports (25 September 2008) that in the wake of he uproar over the firing of Michael Reiss: All references to “God” would be removed from the founding charter of the Royal Society under an idea mooted by some of its senior figures, Times Higher Education understands. The society has three charters, drafted between 1662 and 1669, that set out its aims and that are used today. The 1662 charter refers to fellows’ “uprightness of character and piety”. The 1669 document requires the society’s president and deputies to take an oath “upon the holy Gospels of God” to faithfully execute matters of office. Go here for more. Related stories: Intelligent design and popular culture: The BBC spin on British Read More ›

In Obama’s Own Words

From the responses to a Q&A sent out by Nature here. Do you believe that evolution by means of natural selection is a sufficient explanation for the variety and complexity of life on Earth? Should intelligent design, or some derivative thereof, be taught in science class in public schools? Obama: I believe in evolution, and I support the strong consensus of the scientific community that evolution is scientifically validated. I do not believe it is helpful to our students to cloud discussions of science with non-scientific theories like intelligent design that are not subject to experimental scrutiny. Any questions? HT to Winston Macchi Update (added by DaveScot): In Biden’s own words yesterday: “When the stock market crashed, Franklin Roosevelt got on Read More ›

Canadian Earth Scientists “extremely concerned” about creationism/ID

I have been alerted by a reader to the fact that the Canadian Federation of Earth Sciences has recently (September 19, 2008) warned:

Canadian media report growing public pressure to introduce Creationism and its equivalent Intelligent Design (ID) in school curricula, hinting that Creationism/ID is a ‘theory’, thus suggesting that it shares common ground with science-based theories. Such reporting ignores the fundamental difference between faith and measurable facts. CFES-FCST is extremely concerned about this trend, and not only because of the demonstrated importance of science to Canadian society.

They don’t say which Canadian media, where or when.

This much I know is true: Last year, I was pestered by several TV crews filming hit documentaries intended to show that intelligent design was a big THREAT in Canada.

I don’t even know if any of those docs ever got made. But I told them, last I heard, it is still legal for Canadians buy and read books about why the universe shows evidence of intelligent design and/or books that offer evidence against Darwinism and/or a variety of other establishment science topics. That is pretty much what is happening now.

And if it’s a crime, I are guilty, ossifer. I have on my shelves books that span the spectrum of support and dissent.

Speaking for myself, I have always been a strong advocate of teaching basic skills in education (4Rs = reading, writing, arithmetic and research skills) and of allowing students to ask questions – as long as the purpose is not to trap and

My view: These “rock stars” want attention. And sadly, rocks can’t love ya. Sure, they rock, but they can’t love ya.

Also at the Post-Darwinist: Read More ›

Traditionalists More Rational Than Others

With the media swooning over Dicky Dawkins’ fulminations against all things religious, who would have thought that the Dickster actually belongs to the less rational (statistically speaking) group:  Check out the report at the WSJ.  Here’s an excerpt: The reality is that the New Atheist campaign, by discouraging religion, won’t create a new group of intelligent, skeptical, enlightened beings. Far from it: It might actually encourage new levels of mass superstition. And that’s not a conclusion to take on faith — it’s what the empirical data tell us. “What Americans Really Believe,” a comprehensive new study released by Baylor University yesterday, shows that traditional Christian religion greatly decreases belief in everything from the efficacy of palm readers to the usefulness Read More ›

Presidential Politics on Uncommon Descent

Many of you are wondering why the UD adminstration decided to take an aggressive stand promoting the McCain/Palin presidential ticket. There are two reasons. The first is that both Senator McCain and Governor Palin are on record supporting “teach the controversy”. Senator Obama is on the record against it. Our goal is not to vanquish the Darwinian narrative by legal chicanery. That’s a tactic our opponents employ. Our goal is to let young people in public schools hear both sides of the argument in a religiously neutral manner and thus stop the early indoctrination into the Darwinian narrative by presenting it in a vacuum devoid of criticism or alternative hypotheses. The second reason is that our opponents in the academic Read More ›

Mathematics and Darwinism — Plus a Math Problem to Solve

Over at Telic Thoughts Bradford resurrected a discussion based on my UD essay, Writing Computer Programs by Random Mutation and Natural Selection. In reference to the quote, “The set of truly functional novel situations is so small in comparison with the total possible number of situations that they will never occur, which is the point of the original post,” I commented as follows:

That was the main point of my essay, that combinatorics produce such huge numbers so quickly and totally swamp islands of function. My 66-character program, assuming only the 26 lower-case letters, produces 2.4 x 10^93 possible outcomes, or the number of subatomic particles in 10 trillion universes.

In fact, the C programming language is case sensitive and uses all 92 characters on a standard keyboard, which produces 4 x 10^129 possible combinations in a 66-character program, or the number of subatomic particles in 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,
000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 universes.

Evolutionary biologists put blind faith in chance and necessity and arbitrarily invoke “deep time” to make the impossible imaginarily possible. The problem is that deep time is not actually all that deep. There are only about 10^17 seconds in five billion years.

Hard numbers put things in perspective. The probabilities are not a close call; they are catastrophically lopsided.

Read More ›

Failed Brit Darwinist Michael Reiss – Sinner in the Hands of an Angry God

(A synopsis of a play in three acts)

If we go by the recent Michael Reiss drama, Brit Darwin fans seem to be going round the bend on hockey skates …

Act One: Well-meaning Brit clergyman wants kids to know “Darwin loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life … “

On September 11, 2008 Michael Reiss, a biologist, ordained minister in the Church of England, professor of science education at the Institute for Education, and director of science education employed by the Royal Society, wass quoted in an article in the Guardian by James Randerson as telling attendees at the British Association Festival of Science that, 

Creationism and intelligent design should be taught in school science lessons, …

The Rev Prof Michael Reiss, director of education at the Royal Society, said that excluding alternatives to scientific explanations for the origin of life and the universe from science lessons was counterproductive and would alienate some children from science altogether.

[ … ]

Reiss said he used to be an “evangelist” for evolution in the classroom, but that the approach had backfired. “I realised that simply banging on about evolution and natural selection didn’t lead some pupils to change their minds at all. Now I would be more content simply for them to understand it as one way of understanding the universe,” he said.

(Here’s the audio.)

So Reiss was definitely thumping the tub for Darwin. Let no one doubt this. In fact, he made tiresomely clear that he is totally sold on “evolution”, and anyone who doubts has “worldview” problems:

Just because something lacks scientific support doesn’t seem to me a sufficient reason to omit it from a science lesson. When I was taught physics at school, and taught it extremely well in my view, what I remember finding so exciting was that we could discuss almost anything providing we were prepared to defend our thinking in a way that admitted objective evidence and logical argument.

So when teaching evolution, there is much to be said for allowing students to raise any doubts they have (hardly a revolutionary idea in science teaching) and doing one’s best to have a genuine discussion. The word ‘genuine’ doesn’t mean that creationism or intelligent design deserve equal time.

[ … ]

Creationism can profitably be seen not as a simple misconception that careful science teaching can correct. Rather, a student who believes in creationism has a non-scientific way of seeing the world, and one very rarely changes one’s world view as a result of a 50-minute lesson, however well taught.

So Reiss had apparently decided, from experience, that it is better to listen first, and encourage people to talk before offering a solution. That, of course, is standard modern practice in any kind of evangelism, whether for Darwin, drugs, Christianity, jihadism, or animal rights terrorism. For whatever reason, most people, offered a choice of

1. Think my way,

or

2. Go to hell,

provided that no firearms are pointed directly at them – tend to respond, “Excuse me while I go check the weather news on the temperature down in hell. Back soon, … uh, honest!”

So, as Reiss made clear, he was earnest about looking for a way to convert the non-materialist sinners to random, purposeless Darwinian evolution.

Ah, but in the most faithful hearts, a seed of doubt may be nourished … Read More ›

November Apologetics Conference — We need more than good arguments

Announcement immediately below plus my commentary afterward: The Nation’s Leading Christian Apologists to Speak at The National Conference on Christian Apologetics, November 7th and 8th in North Carolina Contact: Deborah Hamilton, 215-815-7716 CHARLOTTE, North Carolina, Sept. 10 /Christian Newswire/ — The nation’s leading Christian apologists will speak at Hickory Baptist Church in Charlotte, NC on November 7th and 8th to present The National Conference on Christian Apologetics, presented by the Southern Evangelical Seminary. The theme of this year’s conference is, “A Summit On Defense of the Biblical Worldview.” Plenary and elective sessions will provide solid apologetics content, touching on how the Christian worldview relates to the home, the church, and the culture. This year’s keynote speaker will be Dr. James Read More ›

More Evidence for Front Loading

Once one overcomes their prejudice and admits intelligent design as a live option for science to consider then you start to look at “evolution” as an engineering project instead of a big accident. Everything in macroevolution makes sense from this perspective. One of the predictions of front loading is that we may find genomic building blocks for things like complex organs and body plans in organisms lacking those things and whose ancestors never had those things. Those things are there for the future. Chance & necessity can’t build things for future use. Intelligent design is a proactive mechanism which can implement contingency plans for future circumstance. Chance & necessity is a reactive mechanism that cannot plan for the future – it can only react to the present circumstance.

Note that in this case an intelligent designer needn’t be “God”, although it could be. The intelligent designer only requires rather advanced (beyond current human level) expertise in biochemistry and genetic engineering. Intelligent design can be considered without regard or resort to anything from revealed religious scriptures. The meme Intelligent Design is really Scientific or Biblical Creationism is a red herring designed to thwart the introduction of ID into the public school setting through legal chicanery.

Add the following to the growing mountain of scientific evidence pointing to design in the history of life:

Science 22 August 2008:
Vol. 321. no. 5892, pp. 1028 – 1029
DOI: 10.1126/science.321.5892.1028b

GENOMICS: ‘Simple’ Animal’s Genome Proves Unexpectedly Complex

Elizabeth Pennisi

Aptly named “sticky hairy plate,” Trichoplax adhaerens barely qualifies as an animal. About 1 millimeter long and covered with cilia, this flat marine organism lacks a stomach, muscles, nerves, and gonads, even a head. It glides along like an amoeba, its lower layer of cells releasing enzymes that digest algae beneath its ever-changing body, and it reproduces by splitting or budding off progeny. Yet this animal’s genome looks surprisingly like ours, says Daniel Rokhsar, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Berkeley (UCB) and the U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute in Walnut Creek, California. Its 98 million DNA base pairs include many of the genes responsible for guiding the development of other animals’ complex shapes and organs, he and his colleagues report in the 21 August issue of Nature.

Read More ›

Sarah Palin Unlikely to Push Evolution Issue was ‘Creation Science Enters the Race’

No sooner was Sarah Palin’s candidacy announced, than the Anchorage Daily republished an October 2006 article giving highlights of the then gubernatorial race between three candidates, Palin being one.

Almost immediately, the paper has been deluged with request for comments, interviews, and transcripts to feed the frenzy, keeping their editors and writers quite busy.
Read More ›

Dawkins undermines the Royal Society statement

Why was Richard Dawkins battering away at his keyboard before breakfast on Tuesday morning (16 Sept. 08), before his toast, marmalade and English tea were cold? The statement later published on the New Scientist website, apparently received just before the formal announcement from the Royal Society, contradicts the official reason Reiss was removed. Richard Dawkins in the New Scientist The official reason was that Reiss had been misrepresented by others, thus apparently leading to damage to the Royal Society’s reputation. But from Dawkins statement: + Dawkins didn’t think Reiss’s comments were inappropriate, and Dawkins has debated creationism in schools himself for his own documentary. + Dawkins thinks that the call from some RS Fellows to remove Reiss because he was Read More ›

Darwin Denied – The Cost of Liberal Social Engineering

Democrats in congress are trying to deny any blame in the credit crisis. The fact of the matter is they are wholly culpable and if they hadn’t succeeded in subverting what I’m going to term “lending to the financially fittest” none of this would have happened. Watch the video below the fold which I had published separately but decided fit better melded into this article.

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microRNA role larger than thought

Well, not larger than I thought, but larger than most biologists thought. If biologists were engineers and knew something of designed systems they wouldn’t find their thinking was wrong so often.

And sparc, please make a note, microRNAs don’t just target the 3′ UTR.

RNA Interference Plays Bigger Role Than Previously Thought

ScienceDaily (Sep. 18, 2008) — In a paper published online in the journal Nature, IBM and the Genome Institute of Singapore (GIS) reported findings from a joint research study that provides new information on how stem cell differentiation is controlled by microRNAs.

Read More ›

Subscribing to TOUCHSTONE

TOUCHSTONE, with its special ID double issue back in 1999, was one of the first periodicals to openly support the ID movement. That double issue became a book, coedited by Jim Kushiner and me, titled SIGNS OF INTELLIGENCE: UNDERSTANDING INTELLIGENT DESIGN (for the Amazon.com listing, click here). Now’s a good time to subscribe to TOUCHSTONE: Big Summer Sale! Touchstone is offering both a $10 discount on a one-year subscription plus a FREE copy of Creed and Culture ($15 value) published by ISI Books: essayists include Russell Kirk, James Hitchock, Thomas Howard, Vigen Guroian. David Mills, S. M. Hutchens, Patrick Henry Reardon and others. Creed and Culture is a great read from cover to cover. It was very favorably reviewed in Read More ›