Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Christine Shellska: “Discovering the Discovery Institute” (NOT)

An entire PhD dissertation about the Discovery Institute is being put together by Christine Shellska. Her claim is: I argue that the Discovery Institute has “rebranded” creationism as ID, and that its strategies include attempts to disrupt the translation of evolution into education and the broader public. Discovering the Discovery Institute Some problems with her thesis: 1. “creation science” was the term used in the book Pandas and People and later changed to “intelligent design”. Even presuming purely for the sake of argument the change to from “creation science” to “intelligent design” was for nefarious purposes, that name change cannot be attributed to the Discovery Institute since they weren’t the publisher this work or any other such work (at least Read More ›

Evolutionists Are Losing Ground Badly: Both Pattern and Process Contradict the Aging Theory

It just doesn’t make sense that the entire biological world spontaneously arose all by itself. But the challenges to evolution go far beyond the intuition. When Charles Darwin proposed his unlikely idea in 1859 it defied much of what was known about biology in that day. Today, the situation has only become worse. If there was ever a modern-day myth this is it and science is increasingly revealing this with its empirical findings dealing with both biological patterns and processes.  Read more

ID Conference Suggestions?

The recent Engineering and Metaphysics conference (abstract and videos available here) came about because of what I saw as a glaring need in the ID community – a place for mid-level ID researchers to come together and openly talk about topics of interest. Most ID conferences, historically, have been by a fairly closed group of people, often by invitation only. Therefore, those who want to do research in ID are left without venues to present and discuss their ideas. This is not a good state of affairs for a budding research area. Therefore, I decided to team up with some people and put on a conference of interest to ID people. Not specifically ID – there’s no reason to be Read More ›

“The Bible says it, therefore I believe it”

The Bible says it, therefore I believe it Sal wonders why someone might say “the Bible said it, therefore I believe it”, unless they are “supremely gullible”. This is an epistemological question. I approve of the formula, so I’ll try and answer why. Firstly, let’s clear away some possible misunderstandings. The formula presupposes that the Bible really does say whatever the “it” is. Someone might choose to apply the formula to something the Bible doesn’t say. The Bible teaches the world ended last Tuesday, therefore I believe it – except that, it doesn’t. Those reading the Bible can be caught up in misunderstanding, misinterpreting, twisting, mistranslating, and the like. Such cases are not in view in this discussion. Secondly, the Read More ›