Tom Gilson authored More sloppy thinking on origins at his blog Thinking Christian. Although written in 2004 Gilson's points are applicable today. He discusses Editorial: Stick to science in school which appeared in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. The following quote is from that article:

Simply put, the argument behind intelligent design is that a divine hand caused and shaped life on Earth. In its raw early forms, creationism argued that the Bible myth of a seven-day creation was quite literally true and that humans had been on the planet not much more than a few thousand years. Intelligent design theory is far more sophisticated than that, arguing that perceived flaws in the theory of evolution point to some kind of plan or blueprint for life created by a master mind or spirit.

And that may well be the case. But if it is, it’s a matter of belief, not evidence. The evidence in support of evolution is silent about God. Evolution itself could well be a product of an intelligent design, and the theory may simply explain how God does things. There is certainly nothing in evolutionary theory that shuts out God, something the Catholic Church and other mainstream denominations freely acknowledge. But whether God is involved in evolution is a matter for churches or religion classes, not public school science classes.

Read the rest of this entry »

TT commenter chunkdz sparked this exchange about the genetic code, a subject which was recently cited at Telic Thoughts.

I have questions for those of you who believe that the genetic code evolved as a result of natural selection.

1. What was the biological context within which the evolution took place? Cellular? Extra-cellular? A combination of both? Explain what determined the answer you gave.

2. How does a code evolve incrementally?

Mike Gene authored The Universal Genetic Code Seen From an ID Perspective. In commenting on the fact that bacteria and eukaryotes share the same genetic code Mike quotes from a paper published in Science.

Read the rest of this entry »

Uncommon Descent has featured blog entries recently which highlight a disturbing trend, namely, the use of science to advance socio-political ends. That was essentially the complaint used against advocates of Intelligent Design. A mostly successful attempt was made to link ID to a socio-political movement based on a document of the Discovery Institute popularly known by the term wedge. Yet the Discovery Institute is a very minor player in the overall scheme of things with very little discernable impact on larger socio-political events. It does not even merit campaign talking points by either major U.S. political party during a busy election period. If the DI is intent on making its mark on the world it would do well to study from some masters at advancing socio-political agendas.

Read the rest of this entry »

Robert Deyes posted Post details: Darwinian Universes And Colliding Branes: Eschewing A Cosmic Singularity at The ID Report. Deyes makes this observation about fine tuning at the linked blog entry:

"Many of the most fundamental characteristics of our cosmos- the relative strengths of gravity, electromagnetism and the forces that operate inside atomic nuclei as well as masses and relative abundances of different particles- are so finely tuned that if just one of these were even slightly different, life as we know it couldn't exist. If the so-called weak nuclear interaction were a tiny bit stronger or weaker than it is, for example, stars wouldn't blow up in the mammoth supernovas that spread elements like carbon and oxygen out into space and without those elements, there would be no water and no organic molecules. If the strong nuclear force were just one-half of 1% stronger or weaker, stars could not make carbon or oxygen….Because there is no known law that requires those forces to have the values they do, scientists figure that there must be another explanation for how we got so lucky"

Read the rest of this entry »

From The uniqueness of biological self-organization: challenging the Darwinian paradigm by J. B. Edelmann and M. J. Denton.

Abstract: Here we discuss the challenge posed by self-organization to the Darwinian conception of evolution. As we point out, natural selection can only be the major creative agency in evolution if all or most of the adaptive complexity manifest in living organisms is built up over many generations by the cumulative selection of naturally occurring small, random mutations or variants, i.e., additive, incremental steps over an extended period of time. Biological self-organization—witnessed classically in the folding of a protein, or in the formation of the cell membrane—is a fundamentally different means of generating complexity. We agree that self-organizing systems may be fine-tuned by selection and that self-organization may be therefore considered a complementary mechanism to natural selection as a causal agency in the evolution of life. But we argue that if self-organization proves to be a common mechanism for the generation of adaptive order from the molecular to the organismic level, then this will greatly undermine the Darwinian claim that natural selection is the major creative agency in evolution. We also point out that although complex self-organizing systems are easy to create in the electronic realm of cellular automata, to date translating in silico simulations into real material structures that self-organize into complex forms from local interactions between their constituents has not proved easy. This suggests that self-organizing systems analogous to those utilized by biological systems are at least rare and may indeed represent, as pre-Darwinists believed, a unique ascending hierarchy of natural forms. Such a unique adaptive hierarchy would pose another major challenge to the current Darwinian view of evolution, as it would mean the basic forms of life are necessary features of the order of nature and that the major pathways of evolution are determined by physical law, or more specifically by the self-organizing properties of biomatter, rather than natural selection.

A Wall Street Journal article entitled Look Who's Irrational Now begins:

"You can't be a rational person six days of the week and put on a suit and make rational decisions and go to work and, on one day of the week, go to a building and think you're drinking the blood of a 2,000-year-old space god," comedian and atheist Bill Maher said earlier this year on "Late Night With Conan O'Brien."

On the "Saturday Night Live" season debut last week, homeschooling families were portrayed as fundamentalists with bad haircuts who fear biology. Actor Matt Damon recently disparaged Sarah Palin by referring to a transparently fake email that claimed she believed that dinosaurs were Satan's lizards. And according to prominent atheists like Richard Dawkins, traditional religious belief is "dangerously irrational." From Hollywood to the academy, nonbelievers are convinced that a decline in traditional religious belief would lead to a smarter, more scientifically literate and even more civilized populace.

Read the rest of this entry »

Mike Gene posted an entry entitled Gap-Centrism at The Design Matrix. Mike references a blog entry at An Evangelical Dialogue on Evolution called The Origins Debate through the Lens of Piagetian Theory. From Marlowe C. Embree's blog piece:

To a Piagetian theorist, intellectual growth and development come through the refinement of so-called schemata. A schema is a way of thinking about or understanding the world, a “lens” or “window” through which one views reality. Thus, schemata are like “mini-theories” or “mini-paradigms”, and can include so-called “metanarratives” or “superstories” that provide a comprehensive explanation of all of reality. As such, religious (and secular) views of the nature of ultimate, metaphysical reality are types of schemata.

Read the rest of this entry »

What I'm really interested in is whether God could have made the world in a different way; that is, whether the necessity of logical simplicity leaves any freedom at all.- Albert Einstein

Einstein seems to have had Nature's constants in mind when he mused about constraints imposed by logical simplicity. Small adjustments in constant values could have resulted in a very different universe and not one hospitable to life. The musing has an unmistakable telic aspect to it. Is it even reasonable for us to expect that an empirical approach would yield answers to questions about ranges of constant values if we don't discern the initial cause for our resulting universe?