Intelligent Design
stcynic | December 9, 2005Jason Rosenhouse has a follow up post on SETI and ID, responding to Dembski's reply to Seth Shostak's article debunking the link between the two. Well worth reading.
stcynic | December 8, 2005Karl Giberson, editor of Science and Theology News, has an interesting commentary making the same argument I made during the Dover trial when Michael Behe insisted on comparing ID to big bang cosmology. He did it so often, in fact, that one morning when they were set to continue Behe's cross-examination, the Judge asked the attorney how long he expected to continue and the attorney replied that he thought it would be proportional to the number of times the big bang is mentioned. The Judge replied, "So you're going to go all day?" and the attorney replied, "It could be quite a while."
As I…
stcynic | December 6, 2005William Dembski has a post about Derek Davis, director of the Dawson Institute for Church-State Studies at Baylor, and the comment he made in the NY Times the other day. I highlighted the same comment in a post on Sunday and pointed out the same thing, that Davis had taken a stand in favor of the constitutionality of teaching creationism in science classes back in 1999. Here is his comment in the Times on Sunday:
Derek Davis, director of the J. M. Dawson Institute of Church-State Studies at Baylor, said: "I teach at the largest Baptist university in the world. I'm a religious person. And my…
stcynic | December 6, 2005One of the longstanding problems with many ID advocates is their misuse of the work of scientists. Since they've never had any actual ID research to point to, they have instead frequently put out lists of articles that allegedly support their arguments from the mainstream literature. More often than not, the cited articles don't support their arguments at all. Many times, in fact, scientists have publicly ripped them for distorting the meaning of something they've written for their own purposes; Sahotra Sarkar is the latest to do so. Dr. Sarkar is a molecular biologist from the University of…
stcynic | December 5, 2005A couple weeks ago, in response to an article about the Miami police staging random "shows of force" at hotels and banks, surrounding the place with swat teams and forcing everyone to show ID to go in or out for no apparent reason, Radley Balko sarcastically commented that if the terrorists hate us for our freedom then clearly attempts to reduce our freedom amount to "appeasement." Oh, blessed irony. I thought of that while reading this article in the National Review by Mustafa Akyol, a Muslim creationist from Turkey, arguing, apparently in all seriousness, that America should embrace "…
stcynic | December 5, 2005In the wake of yesterday's NY Times article that included the Templeton Foundation saying that when they demanded that ID advocates produce actual research that could confirm ID and offered to fund that, they didn't come up with any, William Dembski responded with this post on his blog. He makes the following claim:
I know for a fact that Discovery Institute tried to interest the Templeton Foundation in funding fundamental research on ID that would be publishable in places like PNAS and Journal of Molecular Biology (research that got funded without Templeton support and now has been published…
stcynic | December 4, 2005To hear most ID advocates tell it, ID is only rejected by "Darwinian fundamentalists" who hold fast to "atheistic materialism." Laurie Goodstein has an article in Sunday's New York Times that puts the lie to that claim. She shows that many organizations and academics who would be seen as likely supporters of ID have been put off by the lack of actual substance being offered:
The Templeton Foundation, a major supporter of projects seeking to reconcile science and religion, says that after providing a few grants for conferences and courses to debate intelligent design, they asked proponents to…
stcynic | December 3, 2005Brian Fahling, an attorney for the American Family Association, has written a highly dishonest propaganda piece for Agape Press about evolution and intelligent design. I know it's hardly sound sport to fisk these things, but someone's gotta do it. Like most religious right types, he freely combines old fashioned creationist tactics with ID. In particular, he goes for some quote mining that was debunked literally decades ago. The jumping off point is the situation at Kansas University, where a professor was planning a class on ID as mythology until some emails revealed his harshly anti-…
stcynic | December 2, 2005In the last couple days I've encountered two brilliant arguments concerning ID that I'd never thought of before. One was offered by Steve Reuland, a fellow Panda's Thumb contributor, in a comment following my post about Dembski's duplicity on whether the "intelligent designer" has to be supernatural or not. He says:
What sense does it make to have a movement whose stated purpose is to overthrow "naturalism" and "materialism" if your designer is natural and made of matter?
Excellent point. The ID crowd, as usual, wants to have it both ways. On the one hand, they pretend that the designer could…
stcynic | December 2, 2005One of the standard arguments we hear from ID proponents is the analogy between SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) and ID. Their argument is that SETI researchers use the same basic premises and inferences that ID does in the search for radio signals from alien civilizations. It's an argument with a superficial appeal to it. After all, SETI researchers have to have some means of distinguishing between signals that are a result of natural processes (pulsars, for example) and signals that are the result of intelligence. The reality, though, is that the means of searching for…
stcynic | December 1, 2005I wrote the other day that when Genie Scott was speaking here at MSU, she mentioned that she had once been referred to as "Darth Vader". While talking with Wes Elsberry earlier, he told me the source of the Darth Vader comment - none other than our old friend Casey Luskin. Casey is the founder of the IDEA Club (like the one now at Cornell that I recently wrote about) and is now an employee of the Discovery Institute. Here is the link to Casey's statement in this regard, from 5 years ago today, posted to a Usenet newsgroup. Casey said:
have
Scott definitely speaks "scientese". She presents…
stcynic | November 30, 2005On his blog, William Dembski is trying once again to argue that the intelligent designer need not be God: Everyone knows he doesn't mean it, of course, but this is the pretense that they must maintain for purposes of their legal strategy. Unfortunately, their own words keep tripping them up in the attempt. He writes:
In those programs, Stewart & Co. had some lines that were not only funny but also memorable. The one that sticks out poked fun at ID: "We're not saying that the designer is God, just someone with the same skill-set." That line is now being reused on the debate circuit, with…
stcynic | November 30, 2005Nick Matzke has an excellent post at the Panda's Thumb about cooption as an evolutionary mechanism for building up complex biochemical systems. Cooption is when a given feature - a protein, perhaps, or in some cases an entire organ - that developed for one purpose is adapted for a different purpose. The Panda's Thumb itself is named after an example of such cooption. At the biochemical level, this mechanism is very well known and very well documented.
Cooption can be observed in the lab through knockout experiments, where you cut out the gene that encodes for a certain protein in a system…
stcynic | November 29, 2005The Chicago Tribune has an article up about a new IDEA (Intelligent Design and Evolution Awareness) club at Cornell University, where the president recently delivered a scathing critique of intelligent design in his annual address to the school. The article includes many misconceptions and falsehoods, beginning with the first premise uttered by the new chapter's founder:
The national spotlight recently has focused on school boards in Kansas, Pennsylvania and elsewhere that are grappling with calls for including intelligent design, a concept critical of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution,…
stcynic | November 25, 2005In the event of a future lawsuit over ID here in MIchigan, this little item might come in handy. Try as they might, the ID crowd just can't distance themselves from old-fashioned creationism. Here in Michigan, we have a state representative named Fulton Sheen (yes, the famous Bishop from television is his great uncle) and he is a big supporter of ID. The Okemos Christian Center, an openly reconstructionist church, recently sponsored and paid for an "educational luncheon" for which Sheen was the legislative sponsor. The event was held at the state capital building and featured Dr. Grady…
stcynic | November 20, 2005Ambient Irony has an excellent post on the subject of why methodological naturalism is important to science. The argument, which is dead on the money, is essentially that invocation of supernatural causes eliminates the ability to test a hypothesis because it relies upon the willful decisions of entities unconstrained by the boundaries of natural law. Long quote after the fold comparing a natural hypothesis from a supernatural one and why one is amenable to testing and one is not:
Science sets itself apart from other such attempts in that it constructs a system, a rigorous framework, in which…
stcynic | November 19, 2005The last few months have brought an almost dizzying series of statements from various vatican officials about intelligent design and evolution. One cardinal says ID is valid, another says it's not. The Pope himself makes a statement about intelligence being behind the universe, IDers think that is an endorsement of ID, and so on. But here's an unambiguous statement from the Vatican's chief astronomer:
The Rev. George Coyne, the Jesuit director of the Vatican Observatory, said placing intelligent design theory alongside that of evolution in school programs was "wrong" and was akin to mixing…
stcynic | November 18, 2005Wow, if you thought George Will was a conservative who is annoyed by ID and its attendant anti-evolution nonsense, wait till you see Charles Krauthammer's column today. In his typical fashion, Krauthammer gets right down to brass tacks:
Dover distinguished itself this Election Day by throwing out all eight members of its school board who tried to impose "intelligent design" -- today's tarted-up version of creationism -- on the biology curriculum. Pat Robertson then called the wrath of God down upon the good people of Dover for voting "God out of your city." Meanwhile, in Kansas, the school…
stcynic | November 17, 2005My thanks to flatlander for keeping me up to date on happenings in Utah. Our favorite state legislator west of the Mississippi, Chris Buttars, is back and this time he has secret legislation to pursue in his crusade against evolution:
A Utah senator says he has opened a confidential bill file challenging the State Board of Education's position on teaching evolution in public schools -- a measure he'll unveil at the conservative Utah Eagle Forum's annual convention just days before the 2006 Legislature begins.
"I have it 'confidential' " -- or shielded from public view -- "and it's '…
stcynic | November 16, 2005Phillip Johnson, the chief architect of the intelligent design movement, famously said that the primary strategy of that movement is "to convince people that Darwinism is inherently atheistic, thus shifting the debate from creationism vs. evolution to the existence of God vs. the non-existence of God." In a nation where upwards of 90% of the population believes in God, this is good public relations strategy; it is also, however, a rather dishonest way to frame the dispute. Ken Miller described the reason why quite well in an interview with Christianity Today last year:
It is always the case,…