Robert Pennock’s misquote of me in Books & Culture (Sep/Oct 99, p. 31) is mischief in the making. He quotes me as writing that design theorists “are no friends of theistic evolutionists.” What I in fact wrote is: “Design theorists are no friends of theistic evolution.” (He got the quote right in his book Tower of Babel, but not in Read More ›
A review of The Design Inference by Massimo Pigliucci initially appeared on the Internet at www.infidels.org and elsewhere and later appeared in BioScience. Rather than rebut it myself, I leave it to one of Pigliucci’s fellow skeptics to rebut it. Mark Vuletic does a nice job of this. His rebuttal of Pigliucci can be found at https://infidels.org/library/modern/mark-vuletic-dembski/.
Ken Miller’s Finding Darwin’s God is currently the best critique of intelligent design in book form, but still comes up short. I won’t respond to Miller’s critiques of Phillip Johnson and Michael Behe, since they can speak for themselves. Suffice it to say that Miller’s critique of their work hardly constitutes a knock-out blow, and the debate will continue, with Read More ›
In Design Inference (Cambridge, 1998) I argue that specified complexity is a reliable empirical marker of intelligent design. A long sequence of random letters is complex without being specified. A short sequence of letters like “the,” “so,” or “a” is specified without being complex. A Shakespearean sonnet is both complex and specified. Thus in general, given an event, object, or Read More ›
It’s official. Behe’s concept of irreducible complexity (IC) has found itself in the peer-reviewed scientific literature. Ironically, it was introduced by two critics of ID attempting to formulate non-teleological mechanisms for spawning IC. The article is: Thornhill, R.H., Ussery, D.W. 2000. “A classification of possible routes of Darwinian evolution.” J. Theor. Bio. 203: 111-116. First of all, this article shows Read More ›
Contrary to popular accusations by critics, intelligent design theory suggests a number of questions that can be pursued as part of a research program. The following are fourteen such questions. Notice that questions 1 – 13 can be pursued without considering question 14, Who is the designer? Thus it is clear that design can and does have a number of Read More ›
A startling inquiry appeared on the MERELEWIS listserve on 2 January 2000. Karen Welbourn reported that when C. S. Lewis was mentioned on another listserve, someone there responded with the following: I find C. S. Lewis a very interesting author. As you may know, he not only wrote for children, but he also wrote … [other genres] … and science Read More ›
The national symbol of Japan happened to be an important symbol to C. S. Lewis. In the last paragraph of The Great Divorce (1946) he wrote about the ultimate sunrise — “the rim of the sunrise that shoots Time dead with golden arrows and puts to flight all phantasmal shapes.” (See also the ending of Till We Have Faces.) On Read More ›
In April 2000 the first issue of the revamped Mythlore: A Journal of J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Charles Williams and Mythopoeic Literature was published. It is now an 81-page academic quarterly journal edited by Theodore James Sherman of Middle Tennessee State University. Two of the six essays in this issue are about C. S. Lewis: “Three Views Read More ›