Metanexus VIEWS 2001.08.15 3354 words Arches National Park <http://www.americanparknetwork.com/parkinfo/ar/> nearMoab, Utah, is the setting for today’s somewhat Platonic dialogue about thevagaries of Intelligent Design. Our two interlocutors, Sid and Nat, findthemselves at odds over the design or non-design of the natural arch. Does anatural bridge (have to) have a meta-natural origin? Or is such an…
1. Nature and Art In Book II of the Physics Aristotle remarks, “If the ship-building art were in the wood, it would produce the same results by nature.” Aristotle is here contrasting nature and art. Nature provides the raw materials (here wood); art provides the means for fashioning those materials (here into a ship). For…
1. Professor Huston Smith has elegantly summarized the essence of the Science-Religion dialogue in the following terms: “My favorite analogy is to imagine the physical universe as a giant balloon. Within it we can shine our flashlights (the scientific method) on anything inside the balloon, but we can’t get the flashlights outside the balloon to…
It has been an exciting five days. Metanexus, CTNS, and the AAAS have made a large tent Chattauqua meeting here at Haverford, where theologians, philosophers, and scientists could meet, exchange ideas, and have time to speak personally with representatives from differing groups. We have been able to put faces to the articles and books that…
It has been more than three months since (in Metaviews 007.2001.02.09) Varadaraja V. Raman came to my defense against the critical reactions my Why Religion Matters was drawing from participants in Metaviews, but the delay was unavoidable. I have struggled all spring with a physical trauma which reduced me to simply coping with each day….
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…
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,…
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…
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…
“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…