Dobzhansky got it backwards: The unity of life at the biochemical level is evidence for Message Theory, and against evolution.

Message Theory is a testable scientific explanation of life’s major patterns.

Andrew Sibley has drawn attention to the recent Theos survey of the UK public’s beliefs in evolution, creationism and intelligent design. Wearing my sociologist’s hat, one overriding conclusion comes through in this survey: It was very poorly designed. Theos should get its money back from the social researchers they hired.

Theos wants to give the impression [...]

This week marks the publication of the Darwin book that has so far received the most advance publicity in the UK, Darwin’s Sacred Cause: Race, Slavery and the Quest for Human Origins, by Adrian Desmond and James Moore (Allen Lane). Desmond and Moore, both together and separately, have written some of the best histories of [...]

A Book Review of John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark and Richard York, Critique of Intelligent Design: Materialism versus Creationism from Antiquity to the Present (Monthly Review Press, 2008).

There are many interesting features of this book, authored by academic Marxists (or at least people who used to be Marxists) and published by a historically Marxist [...]

I have posted on my website an audio recording of the talk I gave this past Tuesday at the Oxford Centre for Christianity and Culture, kicking off their Darwin Year series. My talk was entitled ‘Darwin’s Original Sin: The Rejection of Theology’s Claims to Knowledge‘. If you scroll down to the bottom of this [...]

To test the real difference that theodicy makes to ID, Timaeus posed a thought experiment (see post 33) involving a team of scientists of various religious persuasions who conclude that the malarial cell is a designed entity. However, the scientists’ ability to infer why a deity would have created such a malignant cell [...]

In this instalment, I begin to address both Andrew Sibley’s and Timaeus’ (see post 33) questions concerning my interest in reviving a full-blooded (i.e. early modern) sense of theodicy, especially as part of the ID agenda. I will need another post to complete this task because more assumptions about theodicy in its original robust form [...]

This post originally began as a response to Andrew Sibley but the issues here may resonate with others wanting to reconcile science and religion, coming at it mainly from the religious side. My concern here, as an interested bystander, is that apologetics tends to be much too apologetic. Christianity, in particular, has a much stronger [...]

 
I have been reflecting on the critical responses to my posts, which I appreciate. They mostly centre on the very need for ID to include theodicy as part of its intellectual orientation.
 
The intuitive basis for theodicy is pretty harmless: The presence of design implies a designing intelligence. Moreover, in order to make sense of the [...]

 I will be opening the 2009 series of lectures on ‘Darwin Reconsidered’ at the Oxford Centre for Christianity and Culture on Tuesday, 20th January, at 5 pm. My topic is ‘Darwin’s Original Sin: The Rejection of Theology’s Claims to Knowledge’. You can find out more about the series here. The talk will deal with the [...]

In response to an earlier post of mine, DaveScot kindly pointed out this website’s definition of ID. The breadth of the definition invites scepticism: ID is defined as the science of design detection — how to recognize patterns arranged by an intelligent cause for a purpose. But is there really some single concept of [...]

This is the first of a series of posts on ‘The Science of God’, aka my response to the charge that ID is indistinguishable from Pastafarianism. Let me start with a familiar Q and A:
 
Q: What, in a nutshell, is the Darwinist argument against ID?
A: First of all, nature doesn’t exhibit the sort of [...]

I have accepted an invitation to comment regularly on Uncommon Descent for the Darwin Anniversary 2009 (200 years for Darwin himself and 150 years for Origin of Species). My plan is to draw attention to some ideas, arguments, articles and books relating to the ongoing ID-evolution debate. I’ll also say something about when and where [...]

Are the stickleback fish in Lake Washington really reversing evolution, as the media releases claim? Or just tailoring their existing design?
A much more remarkable example of apparent reverse evolution is a little fish in Washington State, U.S.A. The threespine stickleback is named for its bony armour plate. But as Seattle’s Lake Washington became highly polluted [...]