A keynote lecture by John Haught at the 2006 “Beyond Intelligent Design” symposium. The lecture is followed by a panel response including Ian Barbour, George Ellis, and Nancey Murphy, moderated by William Grassie. Evolutionary biology contributes much to our present understanding of life, and its promises also to deepen our understanding of human intelligence, ethics and…
In this lecture, William Grassie proposes that we focus science education more on what happened when than on how and why evolution occurs.
Introduction When it comes to debating the idea of design in nature I think it is important to note that the situation is very different in the USA and Europe. In the USA the idea has been compromised by creationism. The idea is being identified with creationism and as such it is seen as a…
The author wishes to clarify the confusions that exist on both sides of the creation-evolution debate.
Holmes Rolston, III is a well-known philosopher who has written extensively on both the philosophy of religion and on philosophical issues to do with the environment. The book under review, Genes, Genesis and God: Values and Their Origins in Natural and Human History, started life as the Gifford Lectures given at the University of Edinburgh…
The Intelligent Design theory is based on a valid form of reasoning and is essential to the proper understanding of nature, but it is not a theory in natural science. 1. Is there a limit to knowledge attainable by natural science? The Intelligent Design theory makes two assertions: 1. The Darwinian mechanism is unable to…
Branden Fitelson, Christopher Stephens, and Elliott Sober review William Dembski’s 1998 book __Design Inference: Eliminating Chance Through Small Probabilities__(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1998. xvii + 243 pg. ISBN 0-521-62387-1). How Not to Detect Design*As every philosopher knows, “the design argument” concludes that God exists from premises that cite the adaptive complexity of organisms or the…
In his article “Who’s Got the Magic?” (Dembski, Metaviews 042, 2000), William Dembski discusses my book Tower of Babel: The Evidence Against the New Creationism, and defends Phillip Johnson’s intelligent-design creationism (IDC(1)). I had expected that Dembski would also respond to criticisms I had made of his own specific arguments, and was disappointed that he…
When claiming to having scientific evidence of Intelligent Design (ID), one of the arguments most often cited by ID proponents is that of Dr. William Dembski, based on a method that he calls the Design Inference. Not only is this method in itself claimed to provide support for the ID position, but it is also…
When you gotta go, you gotta go. In the men’s room after Michael Behe’s opening talk at a recent intelligent design symposium a fellow lad-in-waiting mocked, “There’s an evolutionary explanation for this,” referring to the dozen of us on a line that stretched to the exit. “As long as they don’t have to explain anything…