Just watched this Friday night, and it’s a very good discussion that starts with the 5 basic questions you need to understand before you can understand intelligent design.
Here are the first 5 questions:
What is intelligent design?
What are the three meanings of the word evolution?
Is Darwinian evolution compatible with intelligent design?
Is intelligent design science?
What is biological information and where is it found?
There are many more questions covered, and Eric Metaxas is a very witty interviewer. I laughed out loud many times. There is a period of question and answer at the end. Those were some of the most intelligent questions I have ever seen from a lay audience.
Stephen C. Meyer is director of the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture (CSC) and a founder both of the intelligent design movement and of the CSC, intelligent design’s primary intellectual and scientific headquarters. Dr. Meyer is a Cambridge University-trained philosopher of science, the author of peer-reviewed publications in technical, scientific, philosophical and other books and journals. His signal contribution to ID theory is given most fully in Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design, published by HarperOne in June 2009.
Graduating from Whitworth College in Spokane, Washington, in 1981 with a degree in physics and earth science, he later became a geophysicist with Atlantic Richfield Company (ARCO) in Dallas, Texas. From 1981 to 1985, he worked for ARCO in digital signal processing and seismic survey interpretation. As a Rotary International Scholar, he received his training in the history and philosophy of science at Cambridge University, earning a PhD in 1991. His thesis offered a methodological interpretation of origin-of-life research.
Peter D. Ward, Ph.D., is a paleontologist and professor in the Departments of Geology and Biology at the University of Washington in Seattle. He also serves as an adjunct professor of zoology and astronomy. His research specialties include the Cretaceous–Tertiary extinction event and mass extinctions generally. His books include the best-selling “Rare Earth: Why Complex Life Is Uncommon in the Universe” (co-author Donald Brownlee, 2000), “Under a Green Sky: Global Warming, the Mass Extinctions of the Past, and What They Can Tell Us About Our Future” (2007), and “The Medea Hypothesis: Is Life on Earth Ultimately Self-Destructive?” (2009).
The debate
Here’s the video of the debate:
The debate itself starts at around 8:19, after all the moderators have spoken.
The debate is focused on disagreements about scientific evidence.
Here is an article on Evolution News which summarizes how opponents of intelligent design behave when confronted with intelligent design.
Here’s the executive summary:
The outline of the story is now, sadly, a familiar one. Professor wants to discuss intelligent design (ID). Intolerant atheists throw a fit. College quickly capitulates to the demands of the atheists. Professor is censored.
The scenario played out again this past semester in Amarillo, Texas. I’ll give the identities of the parties involved in just a moment, but for now, let’s note some twists unique to the situation. According to internal communications, campus administrators feared that disgruntled atheists would stage a “disruption” if the ID class went forward. The atheist leader got so “intense” in arguing for Darwinian evolution over intelligent design that college staff called the police on him, apparently potentially concerned over their own safety. And get this: the intolerant atheists call themselves the “Freethought Oasis.” You can’t make this stuff up.
And the punchline:
All told, in various e-mails [Freethought Oasis leader] Farren and his group were described as:
“VERY intense”
“obsessive”
“fanatical”
“aggressive,” “verbally aggressive,” and showing “aggressiveness”
“I don’t know where the free thought comes in though, seems more like the lack of”
looking for a “fight”
showing a “desire to kill the class”
“representing a group of people, was disturbed by the class and indicated his intent to enroll students who might potentially create a disruptive environment in the classroom. — a ‘protest’ if you will”
“disruptives”
That’s a pretty telling list of words that came from multiple people in the [Amarillo College] administration.
The article documents all the things that anti-intelligent design people do. They celebrate successful bullying, and they don’t want to engage different ideas with reasons and evidence. Even if you are not a scientist, it’s very easy to get an idea of whether intelligent design is true or not by watching how opponents of intelligent design conduct themselves. How far do you think atheists would go to silence people who disagreed with them? In an atheistic universe, there is no design for how humans ought to behave. There are no human rights that need to be respected. Anything is permitted in an accidental universe.
WINTERY KNIGHT 