review of Robert Pennock’s book “The Tower of Babel.” In criticizing Phillip Johnson’s “intelligent design creationism,” Robert Pennock raises a particularly worrisome legal consequence of Johnson’s view. According to Pennock, Johnson insists “that science admit the reality of supernatural influences in the daily workings of the world.” But what if the same reasoning that Johnson…
I am always torn when it comes to criticism of my thinking. On the one hand, my inclination is to let it pass in silence. I have had my say, and now it is the turn of others. I am never quite sure that anyone gains if one spends time with charge and counter charge. …
Science, we are told, is tentative. And given the history of science, there is every reason for science to be tentative. No scientific theory withstands revision for long, and many are eventually superseded by theories that flat contradict their predecessors. Scientific revolutions are common, painful, and real. New theories regularly overturn old ones, and no…
I was recently on an NPR program with skeptic Michael Shermer and paleontologist Donald Prothero to discuss intelligent design. As the discussion unfolded, it became clear that they were using the phrase “intelligent design” in a way quite different from how the emerging intelligent design community is using it. The confusion centered on what the…
On August 11, 1999, the Kansas State Board of Education voted six-to-four to remove references to cosmology and evolution from the State’s education standards and assessments. The Board’s decision does grave disservice to the students and teachers of the State of Kansas, as well as to science and religion everywhere. Students need to study…
In The Design Inference (Cambridge, 1998) I argue that specified complexity is a reliable empirical marker of intelligent design. A long sequence of random letters is complex without being specified. A short sequence of letters like “the,” “so,” or “a” is specified without being complex. A Shakespearean sonnet is both complex and specified. Thus in…
Review ofJohn F. Haught, God After Darwin: A Theology of Evolution, Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1999, 221 pp., $25.00, ISBN 0-8133-6723-9. I suppose it’s the residual effect of original sin, but I enjoy reviewing books I disagree with more than ones I agree with. After all, who wants to spend 1500 words inventing new ways…
INTRODUCTION Alchemy has gone the way of the dodo, or has it? On any word analogies test, pairing alchemy with chemistry is like pairing astrology with astronomy. To be sure, alchemy and astrology each had their uses. In the history of ideas they helped focus interest in areas that eventually would submit to rigorous analysis–the…
In my last piece for Metanexus, I asserted that evolutionary algorithms cannot generate specified complexity and motivated this assertion by pointing to the failure of Richard Dawkins’s well-known METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL example to generate specified complexity. My point was that Dawkins’s evolutionary algorithm converged on METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL with…
I have only met Ken Miller, a professor of biology at Brown University, the once. This was when we together appeared on one of William Buckley’s Firing Line television debates, part of the side arguing for evolution against a group of critics, those whom I label the “New Creationists.” I should say that on those…