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For those of you who missed it, Dawkins made his second appearance with Stephen Colbert. It's a must see! As always, Colbert is hilarious, but also gets to the heart of the matter between naturalism and Christianity. This is a great teaching opportunity for teachers, youth workers, and even parents. Enjoy!
Sean |
If nature, or some aspect of it, is intelligently designed, how could we tell? Design inferences in the past were largely informal and intuitive. Usually people knew it when they saw it. Intelligent design, by introducing specified complexity, makes the detection of design rigorous. Something is complex if it is hard to reproduce by chance and specified if it matches an independently given pattern (an example is the faces on Mt. Rushmore). Specified complexity gives a precise criterion for reliably inferring intelligence. 2. Looking for Design in Biology Should biologists be encouraged to look for signs of intelligence in biological systems? Why or why not? Scientists today look for signs of intelligence coming in many places, including from distant space (consider SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence). Yet, many biologists regard it as illegitimate to look for signs of intelligence in biological systems. Why arbitrarily exclude design inferences from biology if we accept them for other scientific disciplines? It is an open question whether the apparent design in nature is real.
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Those of you interested in apologetics and Intelligent Design may want to know that William Dembski and I just released a new resource on ID. Check it out here: www.rose-publishing.com/productdetails.cfm?PC=1729.
As you can see, the graphics of the pamphlet are amazing. We've taken some of the information in our book UNDERSTANDING INTELLIGENT DESIGN as well as some more recent findings and written a short/concise pamphlet with Rose Publishing tackling the following issues: |
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Since the release of Understanding Intelligent Design last summer, I have had the chance to speak to thousands of Christians and non-Christians about the case for design in nature. Probably no challenge is raised more frequently than the seemingly “evil designs” in nature, such as the AIDS virus or the Great White Shark. How could a good God create such efficient killing machines? The apparent cruelty of nature was actually one of Darwin’s chief contentions with creation. He couldn’t see how the cruelty of nature could have been created by God.
For the sake of argument, let’s grant that AIDS and sharks were designed as killing machines. This raises an obvious question: How does such an admission count against intelligent design? After all, a torture chamber is clearly designed, even though it is used for an evil purpose. Evil designs are still designs.
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