In this thread, I will suggest the identity of Intelligent Designer of life. The question of the identity of the Intelligent Designer is outside of ID proper, but if a design is detected, it inspires the question, “who is the Designer?”

If the identity of the Intelligent Designer is outside of ID proper, is it outside the speculations of science? I think not. As Dawkins himself once remarked:

You then realize that the presence of a creative deity in the universe is clearly a scientific hypothesis. Indeed, it is hard to imagine a more momentous hypothesis in all of science.

Richard Dawkins
as reported in Dawkins on the Discovery Institute Payroll?

In that spirit, rather than offer a theological speculation, I will offer a speculation based on inference from scientific observation. And I will argue scientific observation suggests the Intelligent Designer is a Deity of some sort.

To begin, I point out this essay in the prestigious scientific journal Nature in 2005 by physicist Richard Conn Henry:

“The ultimate cause of atheism, Newton asserted, is ‘this notion of bodies having, as it were, a complete, absolute and independent reality in themselves.’”
…
The 1925 discovery of quantum mechanics solved the problem of the Universe’s nature. Bright physicists were again led to believe the unbelievable — this time, that the Universe is mental.
…
According to Sir James Jeans: “the stream of knowledge is heading towards a non-mechanical reality; the Universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine. Mind no longer appears to be an accidental intruder into the realm of matter…we ought rather hail it as the creator and governor of the realm of matter.”
….
The Universe is immaterial — mental and spiritual.

Richard Conn Henry
The Mental Universe: Nature Volume 436

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Michael Ruse is not happy with Jerry Fodor’s new book (described here at UD). As Ruse begins his review in the Boston Globe: “What Darwin Got Wrong is an intensely irritating book….” . Here is the conclusion of Ruse’s review: The Darwinian does not want to say that the world is designed. That is what the Intelligent Design crew argues. The Darwinian is using a metaphor to understand the material nonthinking world. We treat that world as if it were an object of design, because doing so is tremendously valuable heuristically. And the use of metaphor is a commonplace in science. Why then do we have these arguments? The clue is given at the end, when the authors start to Read More ›

The disgraced former head of a U.N. backed climate research center admits 1.  No global warming in the last 15 years. 2.  It might have been warmer in medieval times than now.

I see where Evolution Weekend, brainchild of the Clergy Letter Project, has come and gone again: Evolution Weekend is an opportunity for serious discussion and reflection on the relationship between religion and science. One important goal is to elevate the quality of the discussion on this critical topic – to move beyond sound bites. A second critical goal is to demonstrate that religious people from many faiths and locations understand that evolution is sound science and poses no problems for their faith. Finally, as with The Clergy Letters themselves, which have now been signed by more than 13,000 members of the clergy in the United States, Evolution Weekend makes it clear that those claiming that people must choose between religion Read More ›

The evolutionary expectation was that species adapt by unguided variation. Sometimes, it was thought, this blind process happens to stumble upon an improved design which has a reproductive advantage, and so becomes more prevalent in future generations. This evolutionary model could hardly be more wrong. We now have glimpsed the profound complexity of biology adaptation mechanisms. They are anything but a blind process and recent research adds yet more insight into this fascinating aspect of biology that contradicts evolution.  Read more

My grandfather was a prolific arrowhead collector.  He spent countless hours walking back and forth over the plains, hills and creek bottoms of Texas looking for “points,” as he called them, and by the time he passed away his collection ran into the hundreds.  When I was a young boy in the 60’s papa sometimes let me come along with him to look for points, but I did not have the patience required for this game.  Instead of emulating my grandfather’s painstaking and systematic search techniques, I mainly wondered around with my head in the clouds.  From time to time I would snatch up a random rock and run to show it to papa, yelling, “What about this one?”  My efforts invariably yielded the same response.  Papa would glance at the rock and hand it back to me while shaking his head and muttering “shah, shah, shah” under his breath.

What was the difference between my random rocks and the points my grandfather was looking for?  The rocks he rejected and the rocks he collected were all rocks, so what made the “points” special?  Just this.  In my grandfather’s judgment each rock he added to his collection was different from the thousands upon thousands of rocks he rejected because it bore complex marks that conformed to a specified pattern.  In short, like every other archeologist who has ever separated artifacts from natural objects, he made a design inference.  Read More ›

Ever tire of chasing down all those evolutionary fallacies? Dustin Penn and co workers have solved the problem by collecting them in one place: at the European Society for Evolutionary Biology (ESEB) website. Their goal is to improve public education and understanding of evolution. If that means revealing the various strawmen, mischaracterizations, twisting of science, and other logical fallacies, then they have greatly succeeded.  Read more

2010 sees the beginning of a new series in Spanish exploring key findings from contemporary science that support the intelligent design inference. The series Paseos Por La Naturaleza (A Walk Through Nature) aims to further strengthen the global influence that the Intelligent Design movement already enjoys and raise awareness of important academic resources that are today challenging orthodox Darwinism and revitalizing the call for a fresh perspective on scientific discourse. Second installment can be found at: Paseos Por La Naturaleza See also: Organización Internacional para el Avance Científico del Diseño Inteligente Un nuevo libro sobre el diseño inteligente: Un hito en la lucha contra el naturalismo científico, by Robert Deyes and Carolina Deyes (transl: New Intelligent Design Book A Landmark Assault On Read More ›

Today is the closing day of “Evolution Weekend”. The weekend is promoted by The clergy letter project. This is a weekend dedicated to glorifying Darwinism in churches.

Curiously one of the scientists on call to help clergy and parishioners promote the glories of Darwinism was Amy Bishop, she is listed here:

Name: Amy Bishop, Ph.D.
Title: Associate Professor
Address: Department of Biological Sciences
University of Alabama in Huntsville
Huntsville, AL 35899
Areas of Expertise: neuroscience, molecular biology, genetics, evolution of the human brain
Email: ——-@uah.edu

Amy Bishop was charged in the murder of several people recently. Now, there are some very fine Darwinists like Francis Collins, and I don’t mean to say Amy Bishop is representative of all Darwinists. But I’d recommend that if the Clergy Letter Project wishes to put on a good face for Darwinism, they might consider disassociating themselves from Amy Bishop.

They may not want to promote “survival of the fittest” in their sermons today. That would be kind of poor taste in light of the fact a presumed societal degenerate (Bishop) is the “fittest” survivor while 3 (possibly 4) innocent victims are the “unfit” dead. Think I’m overstating the case against Darwinism? Consider what Evolutionary Psychologist David Buss argues in his book The Murderer Next Door: Why the Mind Is Designed to Kill

murder is the product of evolutionary forces and that the homicidal act, in evolutionary terms, conveys advantages to the killer.

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Synopsis Of Chapter Eleven, Signature In The Cell, by Stephen Meyer
ISBN: 9780061894206; ISBN10: 0061894206; Imprint: HarperOne

How well neoDarwinian evolution is established and the universal “consensus” over it is demonstrated by:
Bird-from-Dinosaur Theory of Evolution Challenged: Was It the Other Way Around?

ScienceDaily (Feb. 10, 2010) — A new study just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences provides yet more evidence that birds did not descend from ground-dwelling theropod dinosaurs, experts say, and continues to challenge decades of accepted theories about the evolution of flight. Read More ›

TED granted Jill Tartar her wish to: “empower Earthlings everywhere to become active participants in the ultimate search for cosmic company”. TED and Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) has set up SETIQuest.org to:

. . . make vast amounts of SETI data available to the public for the first time. It will also publish the SETI Institute’s signal-detection algorithm as open source code, inviting brilliant coders and amateur techies to make it even better. . . . You are officially invited to join the search for extraterrestrial life. . . .With available cloud storage and processing resources, we can prov de digital signal processing experts and students with a lot of raw data … and invite them to develop new algorithms that can find other types of signals that we are now missing,”

The Challenge for ID
1) Is SETI’s methodology valid? Read More ›

Those of us who are ID proponents often hear the following from ID deniers (hey, if it’s good for the goose, it’s good for the gander): “You mindless, science-destroying, knuckle-dragging, religiously fanatical ID clowns keep talking about complexity. What’s the big deal about complexity? Complex stuff happens all the time by chance and necessity. Get a life, and stop trying to impose a theocracy on those of us who have it all figured out. The science is settled.”

So goes the highly persuasive, ever-logical, empirically validated, ideologically neutral argumentation of the ID denier.

The problem is that living systems are not just transparently intelligently designed; they are intelligently engineered. It’s not just ID; it’s IE.
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Stephen Barr misunderstands the place of natural laws and regularities in design inferences. Barr writes:

…whereas the advance of science continually strengthens the broader and more traditional version of the design argument, the ID movement’s version is hostage to every advance in biological science. Science must fail for ID to succeed. In the famous “explanatory filter” of William A. Dembski, one finds “design” by eliminating “law” and “chance” as explanations. This, in effect, makes it a zero-sum game between God and nature. What nature does and science can explain is crossed off the list, and what remains is the evidence for God.

Frank Beckwith (in the comments following Barr’s post) echoes the misunderstanding:

As I have already noted, the ID advocate tries to detect instances of design in nature by eliminating chance and necessity (or scientific law). This implies that one has no warrant to say that the latter two are the result of an intelligence that brought into being a whole universe whose parts, including its laws and those events that are apparently random, seem to work in concert to achieve a variety of ends.

Hm. To quote Hamlet (Act 2, scene 2): “Nay, that follows not.” Here’s a vignette to make the point.
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