July 2007

Pro-intelligent design astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez is appealing his denial of tenure at Iowa State University to the Iowa State Board of Regents. Dr. Gonzalez’s first appeal was rejected by ISU President Gregory Geoffroy on May 31. On June 19, Gonzalez filed notice with the ISU President’s office that he would make a further appeal to the Board of Regents. Gonzalez’s current appeal will play out over the next couple of months as the record in the case is forwarded by the university to the Board of Regents and both Gonzalez and the university file their written arguments in the case. If Gonzalez’s denial of tenure is not overturned, he will be out of a job at the end of the 2007-08 academic year.

Something just doesn’t smell right about this story.The Denver Post reports: University of Colorado police are investigating a series of threatening messages and documents e-mailed to and slipped under the door of evolutionary biology labs on the Boulder campus. If true, it is of course reprehensible. But where’s the evidence that the perps are actually creationists, or religious at all?According to Boulder Police: “It basically said anybody who doesn’t believe in our religious belief is wrong and should be taken care of.” As one colleague pointed out, that is hardly the way religious believers refer to their own belief system. Rarely do Christian groups refer to their own “religious beliefs” — it is mainly secularists who refer to beliefs with Read More ›

When I go to the dog park, my 4 year old lab retriever Kali shows some obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) tendencies. No matter how tired she is, how thirsty she might be, or how out of breath, when I throw the tennis ball she races off after it at top speed. She can’t not chase the ball.
Darwinists can’t not claim that that intelligent design is an argument from ignorance. In fact, not only are they fond of insisting this, they show OCD-like tendencies about it. No matter how much information you provide showing that ID is not an argument from ignorance, like Kali with her tennis ball, they switch into high gear.

Last week on ID The Future, we featured a short video clip of Dr. Jay Richards discussing the Darwinist’s favorite question for ID theorists, so who designed the designer? Inevitably in any lengthy discussion of ID with a Darwinist, they resort to asking that question as if it makes some ultimate point that will settle the issue once and for all. The video of Richards’ answer to this is short and definitive.

Still it raised hackles over at The Panda’s Thumb.

Darwinian logic often contends that because a given proportion of ID proponents are creationists, ID must therefore be creationism. It’s a twist on the genetic fallacy, one I like to call the Darwinist “Genesis Genetic Argument.” As noted, it implies that each and every argument made by a creationist must be equivalent to arguing for full-blooded creationism. This fallacious argument is easy to defeat on logical grounds by pointing out that some ID proponents are not creationists, and in fact have been persuaded to support ID in the absence of religion. Thus something other than creationism or religion must be fundamental to the set of views underlying ID (big hint: it’s the scientific data indicating real design in nature)! Michael Read More ›

A colleague intimately familiar with the debate over evolution offered the following insight, which I thought would be of interest to a number of our readers.

Understanding why someone holds to a particular position — understanding how holding that position supports the person’s goals in life — is important to figuring out what will be necessary to cause that person to change position. I came across an observation in a different context that I feel also applies to the evolution/origins debate.

Now that Michael Behe has started addressing his critics over at his Amazon blog, some of them are beginning to take notice. Jerry Coyne, University of Chicago evolutionary biologist, has posted a reply to Behe at TalkReason.org. Now Behe is including a few of his salient points and his responses to them on his Amazon blog so we can all keep track of the conversation. So far he has posted part 1 here — hopefully part 2 isn’t far behind.

On June 26 the New York Times ran an article by Douglas H. Erwin, senior scientist at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, in which he stated as demonstrated fact the power of natural selection to create the eye. We now can see (forgive the pun) that natural selection “is the primary agent in shaping new adaptations.”

His example? “Computer simulations,” he declares, “have shown how selection can produce a complex eye from a simple eyespot in just a few hundred thousand years.”

Really, Dr. Erwin? Where is your proof of this important fact? What computer simulations, published where and when and by whom? Just a citation or two will do.

On June 18th, blogger Pat Sullivan posted his thoughts on the difficulties that Darwinists are having with the public acceptance of their theory. Pat is an entrepreneur and a marketing expert who is the creator of ACT! and SalesLogix, software programs that help businesses with marketing and customer relations. When it comes to marketing, he knows what he’s talking about. He observes:

What interests me as a marketing observer is this; after tens of thousands of exposures to the Darwin marketing “message” only some 34% of people buy the message. And with almost NO exposures to the contrary message except in Sunday school and mom and dad, 66% of people believe we were created by a designer. Personally, I believe the main reason this is the case is the ease with which people look at the world and readily conclude it looks designed. The arguments to the contrary just are really hard to follow.

Pat notes that I.D. makes a lot more sense to people:

When my copy of Alister and Joanna Collicut McGrath’s The Dawkins Delusion: Atheist Fundamentalism and the Denial of the Divine recently arrived, I was struck by its short length. I immediately wondered if it was short because Richard Dawkins himself provided scant substance in his The God Delusion to which to respond. According to the McGraths, my suspicions were correct: It is, in fact, actually rather difficult to write a response to this book [The God Delusion]–but not because it is well-argued or because it marshals such overwhelming evidence in its favor. The book is often little more than an aggregation of convenient factoids suitably overstated to achieve maximum impact and loosely arranged to suggest that they constitute an argument. Read More ›

Next Fall ISI Books will release CSC associate director Dr. John West’s important book, Darwin Day in America: How Our Politics and Culture Have Been Dehumanized in the Name of Science.

Darwin Day in America tells the disturbing story of scientific expertise run amuck, exposing how an ideological interpretation of Darwinian biology and reductionist science have been used to degrade American culture over the past century through their impact on criminal justice, welfare, business, education, and bioethics.