Science and Culture Today | Page 1391 | Discovering Design in Nature

New Mexico State Senator Steve Komadina has introduced a bill into the New Mexico Senate which would protect the academic freedom of teachers to discuss scientific strengths and weaknesses of evolution. The bill requires that the New Mexico Department of Education adopt rules to “give teachers the right and freedom, when a theory of biological origins is taught, to objectively inform students of scientific information relevant to the strengths and weaknesses of that theory and protect teachers from reassignment, termination, discipline or other discrimination for doing so.” The bill would not only protect teachers, but also students: it requires the adoption of rules to “encourage students to critically analyze scientific information, give them the right and freedom to reach their Read More ›

Dr. Jonathan Wells today has a short opinion piece in his alma mater’s newspaper, the Yale Daily News, that encouarges churches not to honor Darwinism on Evolution Sunday because Darwinism as a theory is simply bad science. But experiments have consistently failed to support the hypothesis that variations (including those produced by genetic mutation) and selection (natural or artificial) can produce new species, organs and body plans. And what may have once looked like solid evidence for universal common ancestry (fossils, embryos and molecular comparisons) is now plagued by growing inconsistencies. It is actually the Darwinists who brush aside these awkward facts who “embrace scientific ignorance.” You can read the entire piece here.

In Part I of this short response, I explained some false information about intelligent design promoted by George Kampis at East Tennessee State University. This second and final post will discuss the false information about both intelligent design arguments and Phillip Johnson that Kampis spread. Dr. Kampis’s view was summarized as: “Dr. Phillip Johnson, ID founder and longtime critic of Charles Darwin, rejects the concept of natural selection” There are many problems here. “Intelligent design” was founded by scientists, and the term was coined in its modern form by chemist Charles Thaxton in the mid-1980s, before Johnson got involved with the subject. Jonathan Witt’s The Origin of Intelligent Design: A brief history of the scientific theory of intelligent design gives Read More ›

Access Research Network has noted a Darwinist’s lecture at East Tennessee State University entitled “Intelligent Design Theory and the Poverty of Anti-Science Thought,” by historian, philosopher, and cognitive scientist George Kampis. ARN aptly observes, “Dr. Kampis hit every ‘talking point’ of Darwinists.” Dr. Kampis’ lecture spread much misinformation about intelligent design. For example, a premed female student said: “he raised a good point when he said Intelligent Design wasn’t science.” Would her view have been the same if she had heard the facts about ID and not a false caricature? A few of Kampis’ errors will be highlighted over a series of two posts: Dr. Kampis says: “The Intelligent Design movement holds that living organisms are too complex to have Read More ›

Discovery Institute’s study, which found that 90.9 % of Judge Jones’ section on whether ID is science was copied essentially verbatim from the ACLU’s Proposed Findings of Fact and Conclusions of Law, provoked much discussion. As expected, most Darwinist defenders of Judge Jones swept some of the criticisms of judicial copying aside while engaging in harsh ad hominem attacks against us. I have already responded to some Darwinist defenses of Judge Jones. A few other Darwinists have continued to respond, and still they fail to rebut my legal arguments and misunderstand the type of normal analogical and policy legal reasoning I employed. I close this debate with a new response to such Darwinist critics available at: “Analogical Legal Reasoning and Read More ›

Eminent philosopher of science Elliott Sober is always worth reading. He takes ID seriously and tries to offer principled critiques–and he’s even willing, if need be, to let his critiques slice both ways.

The County Press Online newspaper has an insightful editorial pointing out that the debate over evolution has hardly been laid to rest. The 2005 Kitzmiller vs Dover Area School District decision in our fair state was thought to resolve the debate that Intelligent Design is a religious movement, just a new wrinkle on Creationism. That hasn’t happened largely because Intelligent Design, or I.D., is not.

Robert Naeye at Sky & Telescope recently posted a simplistic rant against intelligent design. His logic is astoundingly bad, and his “attacks” on ID are the most elementary sort that have been rebutted too many times to mention. (But I will anyhow — go here, here, and here just to start.)

Here’s his big complaint:

Over at ARN’s ID Update David Tyler is considering the sad situation in science where ID is ruled out a priori and Darwinian explanations are ruled in. More importantly, it is good practice in science to consider multiple hypotheses and to find ways of evaluating them. One often notes arguments by Darwinians making the claim: “an intelligent designer would not do it this way”, always leading to rejection of the intelligent design hypothesis. Here is a case where there are good reasons, supported by a mathematical model, why an intelligent designer would do it that way. When any potential challenge to the Darwinian argument is excluded, are scientists hindered by limiting the scope of their research?

In 1970, Nobel laureate Jacques Monod called DNA the “secret of life” and said that the discovery of its structure and function — especially “the understanding of the random physical basis of mutation” — means that “the mechanism of Darwinism is at last securely founded” and that humans are “a mere accident.”[¹]