__k-review

Fifteen years ago debating intelligent design at SMU was done with “no intimidation” and “no censorship.” So, a decade and a half ago, intelligent design was discussed on campus allegedly without threat of censorship. How many times has that happened since then? Not so many. The truth of this may be hard for some at SMU to grasp because, frankly, truth is something a bit more elusive, according to SMU professor Ronald Wetherington in a piece published in the SMU Daily Campus. Truth, according to Wetherington, “grows and changes.” Perhaps it is subjective to the consensus of the era? Regardless of what professor Wetherington thinks about science, truth, or intelligent design, at the end of the day there is still Read More ›

In an over-the-top op-ed in today’s Dallas Morning News, journalist Lee Cullum attacks the upcoming “Darwin v. Design” conference at Southern Methodist University (SMU) as “intellectually confused,” complains that ID proponents “refuse to understand who and what they are,” and asserts that Southern Methodist University “needs to rethink its policy regarded future use of its facilities” in order to prevent intelligent design proponents from expressing their views on the SMU campus in the future.

However, if anyone is “intellectually confused,” it is poor Ms. Cullum, whose article displays her own breathtaking ignorance of both intelligent design and the principles of a free society.

Newsmedia are covering Discovery Institute’s invitation to SMU faculty to debate intelligent design. One Darwinist who urged against debating reportedly said: “ID and evolution are not two scientific theories to be weighed against one another, as if on a balance scale. One is a scientific theory, supported so massively and consistently by empirical evidence as to be virtually unassailable.” If that’s true, then the SMU faculty should have no trouble winning the debate, right? Since a recent Newsweek poll shows that at least half of Americans reject evolution, it would seem that Darwinists need to convince the public of the truth of their theory. Given that Darwinists (a) plainly have a need to convince people that evolution is true, and Read More ›

My observation that “Natural Selection” is a tautology, and therefore useless to modern medicine, seems to have set off quite a few Darwinists. Prominent Darwinist blogger Mark Chu-Carroll took me to task here, and comes up with an approach that he believes gets “Natural Selection” off the tautological hook: he asserts that all scientific theories are reducible to tautologies! Mark writes:

Orac, a prominent Darwinist blogger who is also a surgical oncologist, recently challenged me:

Dr. Egnor… can put his money where his mouth is and present… some actual evidence to support his claims. Inquiring minds want to know: Will Dr. Egnor show us some of these wonderful insights into human biology and disease provided or facilitated by the design inference or will he simply keep repeating the same misinformation? You never know. Maybe he’ll surprise us all.

It took me a while to answer, because there are so many examples of it that I was in the position of Buridan’s ass — I couldn’t decide what to pick first!

Late last week, Discovery Institute sent the letter below from Bruce Chapman to the chairs of the three departments at SMU which were calling for the Darwin vs. Design conference to be removed from campus, inviting them to a debate about intelligent design. It seems that The Dallas Morning News agrees with us that open discussion belongs at a university. On Saturday the DMN ran a brief editorial short on the SMU controversy:

But if there’s any place where an idea like this can be examined and debated, you’d think that a university . . . would be it. But a group of SMU professors got the vapors and demanded that the university bar the Discovery Institute from campus. SMU’s administration correctly told the prissy profs that the group had every right to be on campus.

On March 19 I lectured at Boise State University (BSU) to about 50 mostly-friendly students and community members on “The Positive Case for Intelligent Design.” (The lecture was largely based upon a document I produced by the same title, available here.) BSU is the notorious home of their beloved undefeated-but-yet-#5-ranked Bronco football team, but my lecture was only sponsored by the IDEA Club at Boise State. The club’s leader reports that he’s recently received unfriendly e-mails from a hostile Darwinist. The club’s leader responded nicely, saying, “I hope that you would be willing to come [to Casey Luskin’s lecture],” and also defended himself saying “I am quite content for someone to disagree with my view, but I do not respect Read More ›

I’m a faithful Catholic. I’ve often thought: what if Darwinism were true? I don’t mean all of the philosophical materialism that Darwinists drag along with the science. Materialism is nonsense, because if matter and energy are all that exist, then truth doesn’t exist (it’s neither matter nor energy). If truth doesn’t exist, then materialism can’t be true.

But what about Darwin’s central scientific assertion: that all biological complexity is the result of chance and necessity, at least as well as we humans can discern chance and design. What if experimental evidence demonstrated that we could account for biological information (or whatever we call the astonishing complexity of living things) without inferring design? Would I lose my faith?

CSC senior fellow and Acton Institute Research Fellow Jay Richards was interviewed by The Christian Post about the current controversy over the Darwin vs. Design conference coming up at SMU next month. As if often the case, the question of how evolution should be taught is more pressing for reporters than the scientific evidence at the foundation of either Darwinism or intelligent design. So, how does Richard’s weigh in on the what should be taught question?

This fourth and final installment of a critique of Elliott Sober’s recent article entitled “What is Wrong With Intelligent Design?” will show some final problems Sober’s claim that ID is not testable because, he alleges, ID can always regress to a higher level of design. In Part I, I explained some problems with Sober’s history of ID, and in Part II, I explained how Sober eschews ad hoc explanations while ignoring how modern neo-Darwinism commonly invokes them. In Part III, I explained that Sober ignores the testable predictions of ID. In this final installment I will show that Sober is wrong to claim that ID is not testable because he bases his argument on the false claim that ID permits Read More ›