Author: Casey Luskin
Ken Miller Twists William Dembski’s Methods for Inferring Intelligent Design
A reporter recently sent me an anti-intelligent design BBC documentary with the outlandish title “A War on Science.” In it, Darwinian biologist Ken Miller is shown purporting to refute irreducible complexity in the bacterial flagellum by citing the type 3 secretory apparatus, giving his usual misrepresentation of irreducible complexity. But it gets incredibly worse. Miller egregiously twists the basic arguments of leading ID theorist, mathematician William Dembski. To paraphrase Miller’s argument (Miller’s exact words are given ***below), when cards are dealt out in a game of poker, the hand you get is unlikely. But obviously that hand wasn’t intelligently designed. Therefore, unlikely and non-designed things happen all the time, so evolution can happen even if it’s unlikely, and we should Read More ›
Censoring Science in the Name of the “Consensus”: Will the History of Science Repeat Itself?
Darwinists often tell us that scientific views which challenge Darwin should be banned from classrooms or scientific discussion because they are outside the “consensus” of the scientific community. Darwinists love to make this appeal to authority because it is a very effective form of peer pressure which appeals to our respect for science and the conformist tendencies in society. Yet they rarely define the meaning of “consensus,” and they also ignore the fact that true respect for science implies that we should never accept something merely because it’s the “consensus.” Simply put, that’s because the consensus can be wrong, and we should accept something only because of the evidence. As Stephen Jay Gould and other scientists warned the U.S. Supreme Read More ›
What is Wrong with Sober’s Attack on ID? (Part I): Defining ID and its Historical Origins
University of Wisconsin philosopher Elliott Sober has published an article in Quarterly Review of Biology entitled, “What is Wrong With Intelligent Design?” It seems that mainstream biology journals are more than willing to publish articles attacking intelligent design (ID) while choosing not to include any companion piece supporting ID. Regardless, from Sober’s article it would appear that very little is wrong with ID because he ultimately fails to disclose the predictions of the theory. He starts by defining ID fairly well in a vague sense, stating “mini-ID is that … complex adaptations that organisms display (e.g., the vertebrate eye) were crafted by an intelligent designer.” He even acknowledges that those who state the designer is supernatural “go beyond mini-ID’s single Read More ›
The Evolutionary Gospel According to Sean B. Carroll: Review of The Making of the Fittest
Over at the International Society for Complexity, Information, and Design (ISCID) archives, I’ve posted a review of Sean B. Carroll’s book entitled, “The Evolutionary Gospel According to Sean B. Carroll: A Review of Sean B. Carroll’s The Making of the Fittest: DNA and the Ultimate Forensic Record of Evolution” (W.W. Norton, 2006). Below are a few excerpts of the review: To ensure the reader adopts his own view of evolution, Carroll resorts to scare tactics. After a bleak discussion of the potentially disastrous consequences of global warming, Carroll explains that “acceptance of [evolutionary biology’s] facts” is not “a matter that should be open to political or philosophical debate.” Carroll, who interestingly always capitalizes the term “Nature,” quotes Peter Medawar, saying Read More ›
Peter Williams Dissects Richard Fortey’s “Rant” against Intelligent Design
Over at ID Plus, Peter Williams has an excellent analysis of Richard Fortey’s article against ID. Fortey’s article was subtitled “Why I hate this intelligent design story. It’s simply IDiotic” and it concludes, “Darwinists are readily labelled. There should be an equivalent term for the proponents of Intelligent Design. May I suggest IDiots.” In “Richard Fortey rants at straw man of ID,” Peter Williams writes in response, “While Darwinists provided their own name, this childishly rude title does not allow the proponents of the ID theory to choose their own name for their theory. Descending to name-calling is not going to help the Darwinist cause shift the appearance of ‘a threatened Establishment’! Rather, it confirms it.” Williams is correct: the Read More ›