Tag Archives: Intelligent Design

Podcasts

William Dembski answers the top 3 objections to intelligent design

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New podcast from the ID the Future podcast. (RSS feed)

The MP3 file is here.

Here are the objections he addressed:

  1. Just because something is unlikely doesn’t mean that it was designed because improbable things occur all the time.
  2. You can’t infer design if the object is sub-optimally designed, or exhibits evil
  3. But intelligent design is just re-packaged creationism

I worry about Dr. Dembski because he takes a lot of heat from these evolutionists, who are not fit to shine his shoes. But he sounds very happy and comfortable in this podcast, so I was very happy.

William Dembski’s new book

OK, everybody knows that I am an old-earth creationist and a strong supporter of intelligent design. Whenever some tries to tell me that the doctrine of the Fall explains all the evil in the world, I just roll my eyes and fold my arms. Because that’s just young-earth stuff, right? WRONG!

Check out the endorsements for Bill’s new book “The End of Christianity: Finding a Good God in an Evil World”. Bill accepts the standard dating, as do I, but he obviously does not accept evolution, and neither do I.

Well, I went straight to the endorsements. Everybody who is anybody is raving about this book, including some real heavy hitters like Don Page at the University of Alberta.

Here are a few of the endorsers:

  • Frank Turek
  • Hank Hanegraaff
  • Douglas Groothuis
  • Michael Licona
  • Gary R. Habermas
  • Peter S. Williams
  • Chuck Colson
  • Norman Geisler
  • John A. Bloom
  • Steve Fuller
  • Henry F. Schaefer III
  • Josh and Sean McDowell
  • Stephen T. Davis
  • Don Page
  • J. P. Moreland

I noticed he’s got TWO peer-reviewed papers on intelligent design that will be in print shortly. Here’s the first one and here’s the second one.

Ken Ham says that I am right about how to fix the church

Oh, I get a lot of flack from mean young-earth people who tell me that I am wrong to emphasize apologetics, and that I should really be focusing on praise songs and worship instead. (I am kidding!) But Ken Ham did some surveys of young people and he says that singing is dead last in the list of things that young people want in church. And he also says that apologetics is the answer for curing the the mass exodus of young people from the church.

The MP3 file is here. (35 minutes, 14 megs)

Listen to the last 10 minutes, especially.

Well, I agree with Ken Ham on that much, at least! Bet you’d never thought I would agree with him on anything!

(By the way, I know how kids think. I used to be a volunteer camp counselor, volunteer swimming instructor, volunteer athletic supervisor, volunteer apologetics instructor, paid math teacher, and paid math tutor)

News

New Illustra Media DVD on the Cambrian Explosion available to pre-order

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ARN reports on “Darwin’s Dilemma”, the final DVD in the magnificent intelligent design trilogy.

Excerpt:

The final film in Illustra Media’s long-planned Intelligent Design trilogy, Darwin’s Dilemma, is scheduled for release September 15, 2009 and is currently available for pre-order at ARN at a special introductory price.

This documentary will examine what many consider to be the most powerful refutation of Darwinian evolution-the Cambrian fossil evidence. Charles Darwin realized that the fossil evidence did not support his theory of gradual, step-by-step evolutionary development. He hoped that future generations of scientists would make the discoveries necessary to validate his ideas. Today, after more than 150 years of exploration fossil evidence of slow, incremental biological change has yet to be excavated. Instead, we find a picture of the rapid appearance of fully developed, complex organisms during the outset of the Cambrian geological era. Organisms that embody almost all of the major animal body plans that exist today. This remarkable explosion of life is best explained by the existence of a transcendent intelligence.

Filmed on four continents, this fascinating documentary examines some of the most important fossil discoveries ever made… and, with them, a mystery deeper than Darwin ever imagined. The Cambrian explosion was actually an explosion of biological information: assembly instructions in DNA and embryonic blueprints that directed the development of the first complex animals…information that points unmistakably to foresight, purpose and intelligent design.

Darwin’s Dilemma is a high-quality documentary that includes interviews with world-class paleontologists Simon Conway Morris and James Valentine, as well as leading intelligent design theorists and scientists Paul Nelson, Jonathan Wells, Stephen C. Meyer, Paul Chien, Doug Axe, and Richard Sternberg.

I would click through to ARN’s description if you’re interested, they have a feature list! They also link to the trailer, which you can view online.

Paul Chien and Simon Conway Morris are the top two paleontologists on Cambrian era fossils in the world, in my opinion. (One is an expert on the Burgess Shale in Canada, the other on the Chengjiang Valley in China – the two best locations in the world for Cambrian era fossils). James Valentine is also an expert on the Cambrian era fossils. This will be a HOOT!

Related DVDs

The first two DVDs “Unlocking the Mystery of Life” and “The Privileged Planet” are must-buys, but you can watch them on youtube if you want, for free.

Here are the 2 playlists:

I also recommend Coldwater Media’s “Icons of Evolution”. All three of these are on sale from Amazon.com.

Previous posts

I have to tell you a joke. I just bought an Expelled DVD for one of the guys in my office. But a different guy in my office watched it all by himself on the weekend, the same weekend I went to his church, which he has always been trying to get me to do. Well I offered to take the second guy out to lunch so we could talk about it, but he wants me to rake his lawn for him! He has a HUGE lawn in the country!

The things I do to make people learn things so God will have a stronger bench!

Polemics

What is the scientific evidence for intelligent design?

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This article summarizes three types of evidence for intelligent design.

They are:

  1. Fine-tuning of the laws of physics to allow for advanced life
  2. Information in life
  3. Irreducible complexity

(Not discussed in the article are three other mainstream scientific arguments against naturalism, from the origin of the universe, habitability-observability convergence and the sudden origin of body plans in the fossil record)

Recall that intelligent design is based on the notion of specified complexity. A sequence of symbols is complex if it is composed of a large number of symbols. It is specified if it conforms to an independent pattern. If it is large and conforms to a pattern, then it exhibits specified complexity. Sequences that exhibit specified complexity are designed.

Examples:

  • Neither complex, nor specified: “AB”
  • Complex, not specified: “AB KN IH KML NIFCS YDH HOEHS KFSA”
  • Specified, not complex: “The”
  • Complex and specified: “Obama is the worst president ever”

Now you know more about intelligent design than 99.9% of journalists who bash intelligent design.

Here’s a snap shot of each of three basic arguments for intelligent design:

Fine-tuning

The fine-tuning of the laws of physics and chemistry to allow for advanced life is an example of extremely high levels of CSI in nature. The laws of the universe are complex because they are highly unlikely. Cosmologists have calculated the odds of a life-friendly universe appearing by chance are less than one part in 1010^123. That’s ten raised to a power of 10 with 123 zeros after it! The laws of the universe are specified in that they match the narrow band of parameters required for the existence of advanced life.

The Origin of Life

Studies of the cell reveal vast quantities of biochemical information stored in our DNA in the sequence of nucleotides.  No physical or chemical law dictates the order of the nucleotide bases in our DNA, and the sequences are highly improbable and complex. Moreover, the coding regions of DNA exhibit sequential arrangements of bases that are necessary to produce functional proteins. In other words, they are highly specified with respect to the independent requirements of protein function and protein synthesis.

Irreducible complexity

One easily testable form of CSI is irreducible complexity, which can tested and discovered by experimentally reverse-engineering biological structures through genetic knockout experiments to determine if they require all of their parts to function.  When experimental work uncovers irreducible complexity in biology, they conclude that such structures were designed. This method has been used to detect irreducible complexity in a variety of biochemical systems such as the bacterial flagellum.

Now you know what the word “intelligent design” really refers to. Notice that it has absolutely nothing to do with religion, in much the same way as atheism nothing to do with science.