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Materialists predict they will create “artificial life” in a test tube in the next 3 to 10 years. I have a counter-prediction: They will succeed only by re-defining “artificial” and “life.” For example, “artificial” will cover any human manipulation of an existing organism — so replacing a few genes or enzymes in an already-living cell will count as creating “artificial life.” And “life” will be anything that can undergo “Darwinian evolution” — such as an artificially engineered system of molecules — even though it can be sustained only in a carefully controlled laboratory environment. But a free-living cell? I don’t think so. We are still many years and many discoveries away from understanding the nature of life even in prokaryotes. Read More ›

Have you ever spent time pondering the intellectual pedigree of scientism–say, of the Dawkins variety? It would be nice if folly really were an orphan, but unfortunately he is not. And Herbert Spencer was only one link, though an important one, in a long chain of Western scientism.

Consider this Spencerian quote from Steven Shapin’s recent New Yorker article “Man with a Plan: Herbert Spencer’s Theory of Everything“:

The voices in Mike Dunford’s head have been awfully worried lately. Dunford, a zoology graduate student from Hawaii who ‘”studies evolution,” put up a bizarre post on Panda’s Thumb recently. Dunford is convinced that there are conspiracies going on.

He began his post with lucidity, sensibly acknowledging the truth of Denyse O’Leary’s observation that intelligent design theory is not creationism. Intelligent design is the theory that some aspects of living things are more reasonably explained as the product of intelligent design rather than as the product of random variation. It’s a scientific inference, open to evidence, and it might be right or wrong. Creationism is the belief in the literal truth of the Bible, particularly in the Book of Genesis. It’s a religious inference, and creationists believe it cannot be wrong. Dunford acknowledges the honesty of creationists (as if that were in dispute), but then denies the honesty of those of us who support intelligent design theory. Dunford writes:

Dear Chicago Sun-Times Editor:

Thank you for running Steven Pinker’s “In defense of dangerous ideas” (July 15) which recognized the need for the scientific community to embrace its scientific taboos–such as whether the state of the environment has actually improved in the last 50 years or whether men and women may have different innate aptitudes.

Would that Pinker truly supported academic freedom for all scientists. While he is even willing to ask if men have an innate tendency to rape, apparently asking if nature exhibits deliberate design is beyond the pale.

[Editor’s Note: This post was written by a Discovery Institute legal intern, Guillermo Dekat. Mr. Dekat is a law student at St. Mary’s University in San Antonio, Texas. He holds a bachelor’s degree in biology from the Air Force Academy.]

A review of Science’s Blind Spot: The Unseen Religion of Scientific Naturalism
By: Cornelius G. Hunter (Brazos Press, 2007)

In law, one who sells a product in a defective condition unreasonably dangerous to the user is held strictly liable for the physical harm to the injured party. One way for the injured party to win a case is to successfully argue that there is a design defect in the product. Put another way, the plaintiff is entitled to damages because there is something wrong with the blueprints for the product. At this point, expert witnesses are found to testify to the design’s integrity or its defectiveness.

One of the key expert witnesses for the ACLU in the Dover trial was Barbara Forrest, a Professor of Philosophy at Southeastern Louisiana University. She recently authored a paper entitled “Understanding the Intelligent Design Creationist Movement: Its True Nature and Goals,” (May 2007) in which a major theme is that, since nearly all of the leading intelligent design proponents are Christians who have expressed a preference for a Christian influenced culture, their scientific efforts cannot be trusted as bona fide science. Forrest’s claim, echoing a common theme of Darwinists, is that since the vast majority of intelligent design promoters are Christians, their scientific work must necessarily be so biased by their religious beliefs as to be compromised. On this basis, Forrest essentially argues that anything Christian proponents of intelligent design say about science must be rejected as real science.

Forrest focuses exclusively on the alleged religious biases and motives of Christian proponents of intelligent design. This isn’t surprising, given Forrest’s role as one of the ACLU’s hired guns in the Dover trial. It is Forrest’s status as an ACLU hired gun that should cause us to question the objectivety of her own academic work.

Perhaps the most striking feature of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion is its lack of science. I had thought that this was an anomaly, but Dawkins’ New York Times review (out Sunday) of Michael Behe’s The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism is the same patchwork of fallacies devoid of science as The God Delusion.

Let me count the ways…

Over at the First Things blog On the Square, Francis Beckwith carefully shows how even Professor Dawkins cannot escape the common sense perception that the world is filled with agency, and those agents have a proper function. To get at all this, Beckwith describes Dawkins’ lambasting of Kurt Wise, the young-earth creationist who did doctoral work under Stephen Jay Gould at Harvard.

Dawkins writes:

Most people — including most professional biologists — think that one either accepts the neo-Darwinian theory of the universal common ancestry of life via undirected natural causes, or else one is a “creationist,” meaning someone who advocates multiple independent starting points for life, all of them specially created.

The American Enterprise Institute will hold a conference on Thursday, May 3 (9:00–11:30 a.m.) titled “Darwinism and Conservatism: Friends or Foes?” (go here to register)

Speakers include Discovery Institute Senior Fellows Dr. John West and George Gilder. And opposing them with the thesis that Darwinism and Conservatism are compatible will be National Review’s John Derbyshire and Larry Arnhart, political theorist of Northern Illinois University.

Shortly after the event occurs, a video webcast will be available on the AEI site here.

From the Event Description: