Science and Culture Today | Page 1268 | Discovering Design in Nature

This Sunday, May 30, Wilberforce Forum will feature a special online radio program featuring Dr. Stephen C. Meyer, Director and Senior Fellow of the Center for Science and Culture. He’ll be discussing his new book, Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design, demonstrating that the digital code embedded in DNA points to a designing intelligence and brings into focus an issue that Darwin did not address. Go to http://www.blogtalkradio.com/wilberforceforum at 6 pm EST, 3 pm PST this Sunday to listen, and ask Dr. Meyer a question by calling in or by posting in the conference forum online.

Editor’s Note: This is crossposted at Professor Scot McKnight’s Beliefnet blog, Jesus Creed. In his article “Five Streams of the Emerging Church,” Scot McKnight identifies with Eddie Gibbs and Ryan Bolger’s description of emerging Christians. One of the nine hallmarks of such Christians, according to the authors, is that they “create as created beings.” And it is this theme I would like to explore with reference to Darwinian evolution and intelligent design (ID) in a series of three posts. First, we will consider how to consider ID. Second, we’ll assess conceptions of God in this debate. And third, we will reflect upon aesthetics and Darwinian theory. What to make of intelligent design? Years ago, before I had heard of Neil Read More ›

Editor’s Note: This is crossposted at David Klinghoffer’s Beliefnet blog, Kingdom of Priests.

A pair of dueling websites, one that just went live, are engaged in an important argument over whether religious believers should continue to be fed the “opium of the people.” That’s the famous phrase Marx Karl used to deride all of religion. One kind of faith actually deserves the description, however. It’s called theistic evolution, a convoluted justification for thinking that belief in God and belief in Darwin’s mechanism of blind, churning, unguided, and purposeless evolution can be meaningfully reconciled.

The new website is Faith and Evolution, from the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture. It features all kinds of resources — writing and video, debates, questions and answers, and much else, including a number of contributions from yours truly. Do check it out and let me know what you think.

Faith and Evolution presents a striking contrast with Dr. Francis Collins’s theistic evolution site BioLogos, courtesy of the Templeton Foundation. Dr. Collins and his associate Karl Giberson also blog here at Beliefnet. At F&E, you’ll find my analysis of Dr. Collins’s ideas on religion and evolution. One very useful thing about F&E is that it highlights debates both on the science of evolution and on the social impact of Darwinism, whereas BioLogos is more like a single-perspective sermon.

Collins and Giberson are sincere Evangelical Christians — as far as I, a Jew, can tell — and undoubtedly innocent of all guile, but they represent an insidious trend in religious and intellectual life. This genuine opiate of the masses works as a stupor-inducing fog, enveloping the debate about intelligent design versus Darwinism. The fog lulls you with the thought that between the idea of design in nature, and that of no design in nature, there is actually no need to make a choice.

A Wall Street Journal (WSJ) article from last month, “Education Board in Texas Faces Curbs,” revealed how the Texas evolution-lobby has been seeking to use both censorship and power grabs to promote their agenda.  First, they sought to censor from Texas students any instruction on scientific weaknesses in evolution. Having lost that fight before the Texas State Board of Education (TSBOE), they have tried to use other tactics to punish the board for adopting science standards that teach evolution objectively, or to grab power away from the democratically elected board. In a move that can only be attributed to political retribution, today Texas evolutionists successfully blocked the reappointment of Dr. Don McLeroy as chair of the TSBOE.  Practically speaking, this Read More ›

Since the beginning of 2008, we’ve seen the publication of some excellent popular books introducing the topic of intelligent design (ID), including Intelligent Design 101 (with contributions by Phillip Johnson, Michael Behe, J.P. Moreland, William Dembski, and Jay Wesley Richards) and William Dembski’s Understanding Intelligent Design. Another book just out is a small self-published book that is a gem, titled Probability’s Nature and Nature’s Probability, by Donald E. Johnson. Johnson holds two Ph.D.’s — one Ph.D. in Computer & Information Sciences from the University of Minnesota and another Ph.D. in Chemistry from Michigan State University. Given Johnson’s background, it was unsurprising that he has a good grasp of the issues. What was pleasantly surprising was Johnson’s ability to communicate some Read More ›

ID The Future podcast features a special interview worth highlighting to ENV readers: Click here to listen. This episode of ID the Future features CSC associate director John West interviewed by Anika Smith on the launch of the new website, FaithandEvolution.org, bringing clarity to the conversation between the new atheists such as Richard Dawkins and the new theistic evolutionists like Francis Collins. Is faith in God compatible with Darwinian evolution? Who is right, and why does it matter? Listen in, and learn more at FaithandEvolution.org.

It must be hard to be the Darwinist editor of a major science journal, to have to constantly maintain the party line that there is no scientific debate between intelligent design and evolution while publishing articles whose authors seem haunted by design arguments, often taking it upon themselves to stick up a straw man of ID to knock down with a puff of hot air. It must be especially hard when a scientist like Michael Behe bothers you, thinking it his duty to advance the debate by correcting the Darwinists’ mistaken views of irreducible complexity which you published, hoping that maybe he would go away. Alas, for the editors of Science and Trends in Microbiology, Michael Behe has not gone Read More ›

In recent years, debates over faith and evolution have continued to intensify. On the one hand, “new atheists” like Richard Dawkins have insisted that Darwinian evolution makes it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist. On the other hand, “new theistic evolutionists” like Francis Collins have assured people that Darwin’s theory is perfectly compatible with faith and need have no damaging cultural consequences.

Who is right? And why does it matter?

You can find out at FaithandEvolution.Org a new website being launched today by the Center for Science and Culture at Discovery Institute.

“FaithandEvolution.Org is for anyone who wants to dig deeper into the scientific, social, and spiritual issues raised by Darwin’s theory, but who is tired of the limited options they are currently being offered by the media,” says Dr. John West, Associate Director of the Center.

New Scientist, is calling The Universe: Order without design by Carlos Calle “excellent.” Why? There’s nothing new here, just the same old multiverse stuff that has been critiqued. The author combines a bunch of highly speculative, mostly metaphysical, controversial theories to reach his conclusions: eternal inflation, string theory and colliding branes. There will ALWAYS be speculative, untestable “cosmological” theories, so someone can always point to the latest ones and say, “See no need for a beginning or fine-tuning by a designer–the latest science says so!” These speculative theories have half-lives measured in years, unlike the now well-established Big Bang theory. In any case, multiverse speculations do not explain those aspects of our existence that are not necessary for our existence Read More ›