Tag Archives: William Dembski

Podcasts

William Dembski discusses new peer-reviewed paper on intelligent design

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The paper talks about how to measure the amount of information required by evolutionary algorithms in order for them to work. The paper describes accounting processes for measuring where information is put into evolutionary algorithms, so that it becomes clear how much information is needed up front. The paper shows that the information present in evolutionary algorithms does not emerge as a result of evolutionary algorithms – the “active information” has to be put into the process at different points for the process to work.

The paper:

“Conservation of Information in Search: Measuring the Cost of Success,” published in IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics A, Systems & Humans.

The MP3 file for Part 1 is here.

Part 1 Topics:

  • about the IEEE, the publisher of the paper Dembski and Marks
  • the search problem and evolutionary algorithms
  • the concept of “active information”
  • blind search versus targeted searches
  • No Free Lunch theorems
  • Conservation of information
  • Responding to an objection: is Darwinism analogous to the search problem?
  • does evolution have mathematical underpinnings?

The MP3 file for Part 2 is here.

Part 2 Topics:

  • fitness functions and fitness landscape
  • constraints as information
  • does the paper support intelligent design?
  • how have critics responded to this paper?

You can read the entire paper for free here.

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)

Podcasts

New podcasts on academic freedom and intelligent design

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I found a couple of new podcasts on intelligent design on Post-Darwinist!

Here is the skinny:

Academic Freedom Update: Where Are We in 2009?

On this episode of ID the Future, CSC’s Casey Luskin gives listeners an update on what’s going on with academic freedom legislation around America. Academic freedom bills submitted in five states already this year, including Oklahoma, Iowa, New Mexico, Missouri and Alabama. Listen in to today’s podcast as Luskin explains how Darwinist opposition to the bills is showing why academic freedom legislation is necessary to protect teachers from a climate of intimidation.

Why Specified Complexity Cannot Be Purchased Without Intelligence

On this episode of ID the Future, CSC’s Robert Crowther highlights one of the foundational books of the theory of intelligent design. “No Free Lunch“, the sequel to mathematician and CSC senior fellow William Dembski’s Cambridge University Press book “The Design Inference”, explores key questions about the origin of specified complexity. No Free Lunch demonstrates that design theory shows great promise of providing insight in the field of evolutionary computation.

Do you know what intelligent design is? The definitive statement of the what intelligent design is was first published in 1998 by Cambridge University Press. The name of that book is “The Design Inference: Eliminating Chance Through Small Probabilities”.

Here’s a little bio of the author, William Dembski. And here are some of his earned degrees:

  • Ph.D. philosophy University of Illinois at Chicago 1996
  • M.A. philosophy University of Illinois at Chicago 1993
  • Ph.D. mathematics  University of Chicago 1988
  • M.S. statistics  University of Illinois at Chicago 1983

If you put together the IQs of all the journalists who have ever written against intelligent design, the total number is actually lower than the IQ of William Dembski’s pinky finger nail clipping. An introduction to intelligent design is here. A chapter explaining intelligent design from a book published by Michigan State University Press is here.

Or, you can just read this sentence: intelligent design is what happens when you select letters and form sequences that have function. Like writing blog posts or software code. That’s intelligent design, and that’s all it is. Surprise! I do it all day at work. I’m doing it right now while I write this post. And it’s in your DNA, too. Sequences of amino acids and proteins arranged to have biological function.

My Dad, who reads everything I tell him to read because he’s such a great Dad, just finished Dembski’s new book “Understanding Intelligent Design: Everything You Need to Know in Plain Language”. He assures me it is extremely easy to understand, even for you helpless squishyheads who dropped math in grade 10.

Here is a good debate on whether the biological information in the simplest organism requires an intelligent designer.