Kirk Durston

Kirk grew up on a cattle and grain farm in central Manitoba, Canada, where he spent countless hours in the forest as a young boy, fascinated with the plants and animals that are native to that region. Throughout his teen years, he worked six days a week as a farmhand. He left his father’s farm at the age of 19 for university. Read the rest at KirkDurston.com.

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Kirk Durston on Fantasy Science and Scientism — Pt. 3 of 3

Kirk Durston
March 19, 2020
On this episode of ID the Future, Kirk Durston, a biophysicist focused on identifying high-information-density parts of proteins, completes a three-part series on three categories of science: experimental, inferential, and fantasy science. Fantasy science makes inferential leaps so huge that virtually none of it is testable, either by the standards of experimental science or by those of the historical sciences, which reason to the best explanation by process of elimination. One example of fantasy science, according to Durston, is the multiverse. As he insists, an imaginative story largely untethered from evidence and testing but told using math instead of literary devices is still an imaginative story untethered from evidence and testing. Scientism, “atheism dressed up in a …

Durston on Experimental, Inferential, and Fantasy Science — Pt. 2

Kirk Durston
March 11, 2020
On this episode of ID the Future, biophysicist and philosopher Kirk Durston continue his discussion of three types of science: (1) experimental science, (2) inferential science, and (3) fantasy science. In this second of three episodes, Durston recaps the three types but focuses on inferential science. He explains how it involves, in the historical sciences, abductive reasoning (inference to the best explanation), and he explains how such reasoning can be used as we consider the best explanation for the origin of biological information, and in such a way that it is rooted in observation. …

Durston on Experimental, Inferential, and Fantasy Science — Pt. 1

Kirk Durston
March 9, 2020
On this episode of ID the Future, biophysicist and philosopher Kirk Durston discusses his recent article series about three types of science — (1) experimental science, which is generally very trustworthy, with some exceptions; (2) inferential science, which can be trustworthy but often takes huge leaps into the doubtable and dodgy; and (3) fantasy science, which is essentially science fiction masquerading as actual science. In this first of three episodes, Durston focuses on experimental science. Such science is, at its best, reproducible and verifiable. Durston says he has yet to find a true conflict between experimental, reproducible scientific observations and his religious faith. The contradictions he encountered were all between his faith and the inferences that some …

On Fantasy in Modern Science

Kirk Durston
April 25, 2019
An attribute of a good sci-fi story is that it should open new vistas for the imagination while, at the same time, not requiring the reader to put up with the preposterous.