Intelligent Design and Its Critics

 In the case of computer simulations, following the information trail and finding the place where complex specified information was smuggled in is usually not difficult. I predict it will become more difficult in the future as this shell game becomes more sophisticated, involving more shells and quicker movements of the shells. But just as accounts where profits and losses cannot

 In 1994, I participated at a C. S. Lewis summer conference at Queens’ College, Cambridge. The event was sponsored by the C. S. Lewis Foundation (Redlands, California) and hosted by John Polkinghorne. A portion of the conference was devoted to design, and proponents of design who spoke at the conference including Phillip Johnson, Stephen Meyer, and Walter Bradley. After Walter

There are good and bad reasons to be skeptical of intelligent design. Perhaps the best reason is that intelligent design has yet to establish itself as a thriving scientific research program. Thus far philosophical, theoretical, and foundational concerns have tended to predominate. From the vantage of design advocates, this simply reflects the earliness of the hour and the need to

Design theorists argue that intelligent design constitutes a valid scientific research program aimed at understanding the effects of intelligence in the natural world. There is currently considerable debate whether this program is indeed valid, and in particular whether concepts like specified complexity or irreducible complexity, are coherently defined and can usefully be applied to actual systems in nature. In her

“The Big Tent and the Camel’s Nose.”  William Dembski has responded to my January 18 Tom Jukes Memorial Lecture at UC Berkeley.  Others are responding on META and elsewhere to the focus of his essay, whether natural selection is testable, and I shall not do so here.  I should, however comment on views attributed to me. I wasn’t really dealing