GREAT BARRINGTON, Mass. — Perhaps people are just spooked by debt. Inspired by Warren Buffett’s memorable dismissal of spendthrift America as “Squanderville,” doomster pundits point portentously to the “twin towers” of debt: record trade deficits ($900 billion) and budget deficits (a projected $448 billion). The Squanderville chorus prophesies the same debt doom they predicted last year and the year before Read More ›
No Free Lunch, the sequel to mathematician and philosopher William Dembski's Cambridge University Press book The Design Inference, explores key questions about the origin of specified complexity. Dembski explains that the Darwinian search mechanism of random mutation coupled with natural selection is incapable of generating novel complex, specified information (CSI).
This observation translates into "No Free Lunch" (NFL) theorems, which Dembski explains are inherent constraints upon natural systems. Natural Darwinian mechanisms can shuffle this information around, but only intelligence can generate novel CSI. In other words, when it comes to generating truly novel biological complexity, Darwin can have no free lunch...
Now that it is May, have Seattleites recovered from the Seahawks’ Super Bowl loss? May is also “Asian Pacific American History Month.” What does the Super Bowl have anything to do with this ethnic tokenism? Hines Ward, the Super Bowl most valuable player, of course! Ward’s saga made headlines after the Pittsburgh Steelers’ victory in February. It had the makings Read More ›
SEATTLE — As crowds of illegal immigrants march through America’s streets, I peer down at the protesters from my office here and wonder, “Why don’t I march with them?” Well, because I’m not illegal. In the last six years, while visiting this country and starting my new job with the free-market Discovery Institute, I have paid the U.S. government nearly Read More ›
This extensive volume contains essays by numerous Discovery Fellows who presented at an early intelligent design conference at Biola University in 1996. As Henry F. Shaefer III explains in the forward, the conference was not a typical “creationist” event, as “virtually none of the conference participants were creationists of the sort one frequently reads about in the popular press” and Read More ›
In this book, Senior Discovery Institute Fellow Benjamin Wiker does a brilliant job of tracing the roots of hedonism. Insofar as traditional theists sense an underlying cause for the moral decline of Western culture, all roads lead to Epicurus and the train of thought he set in motion. For Epicurus, pleasure consisted in freedom from disturbance. For Epicurus, to allow Read More ›
This impressive volume contains critical essays on naturalism from the perspectives of theology, ethics, cosmology, ontology, and epistemology. Various Discovery Fellows make contributions including Robert C. Koons, J.P. Moreland, William Lane Craig, and William Dembski. Koons, a professor of philosophy at the University of Texas, begins by noting that there is a simple correlation between existence and the requirement of Read More ›
The Biblical patriarchs Abraham, Jacob, and Joseph were compelled to live, sometimes uncomfortably, as immigrants in Egypt, as their descendants, the Israelites, would also. Is the Bible telling us that welcoming immigrants is a moral priority? The question, obviously, is highly relevant with the Senate resuming debate on immigration in the wake of President Bush’s Monday-night address. While the Left typically resists Read More ›
As the current U.S. immigration policy clash—what to do about illegal aliens and insecure borders—heats up, many Americans have turned to scripture for guidance. Jewish scripture, for example, speaks repeatedly of the kindness due to the “stranger” and reminds us that the people of the Bible—the Hebrews—were once despised foreigners in an alien land, Egypt. Yet the Bible’s message isn’t Read More ›
Legal scholar and former Discovery Fellow Francis J. Beckwith recounts the legal history of court battles over the teaching of biological origins. Though many thought that the landmark Supreme Court case Edwards v. Aguillard would permanently settle these questions by ruling creationism unconstitutional, Beckwith observes that intelligent design poses a new challenge to legal scholars. Beckwith, who has published about Read More ›