The Center for Science and Culture
Science is the supreme authority in our culture. If there is a dispute, science arbitrates it. If a law is to be passed, science must ratify it. If truth is to be taught, science must approve it. And when science is ignored, storms of protest are heard in the media, in the university — even in local coffee shops. Yet Read More ›
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 ›
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 ›