The Center for Science and Culture
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 ›
Baylor University in Waco, Texas, is deeply committed to retaining its Baptist identity — so a student solemnly assured me when I visited the campus recently. Many parents pay dearly to send their children to a university that will pass on their Baptist heritage. Those same parents might be surprised to learn that the Baylor faculty wants to shut down Read More ›
In criticizing Phillip Johnson’s “intelligent design creationism,” Robert Pennock raises a particularly worrisome legal consequence of Johnson’s view. According to Pennock, Johnson insists “that science admit the reality of supernatural influences in the daily workings of the world.” But what if the same reasoning that Johnson is trying to import into science were adopted in Johnson’s own area of specialization Read More ›
This week Baylor University hosted a major conference on a profound subject. Organized by the new Michael Polanyi Center at Baylor and entitled The Nature of Nature, the conference will entertain weighty questions: Is nature all there is, or does it point beyond itself? Does the world exhibit signs of purpose, and if so, might we be able to detect Read More ›
For two millennia, the design argument provided an intellectual foundation for much of Western thought. From classical antiquity through the rise of modern science, leading philosophers, theologians, and scientists — from Plato to Aquinas to Newton — maintained that nature manifests the design of a preexistent mind or intelligence. Moreover, for many Western thinkers, the idea that the physical universe Read More ›