Category: Education
Responding to the Youtube Challenge to Discovery Institute: Does Any Critic Out There Understand Intelligent Design? Anyone? …Anyone?
Any critic making the inaccurate claim that Stephen C. Meyer is the “President of the Discovery Institute” is bound to be fairly uninformed about both intelligent design (ID) and the Discovery Institute.1 Thus, when I recently viewed a YouTube video making this very mistake while allegedly “Challenging the Discovery Institute to Discover,” I first thought: Why should I accept a challenge from someone who can’t even correctly “discover” the identity of our organization’s president? Regardless, this video was enlightening, but not in the way that its creators intended. Rather than posing any difficult challenge for ID, the video unwittingly exposes the unfortunate ignorance that apparently abounds regarding the nature of the theory of intelligent design and how we detect and Read More ›
Helping Students Answer a Professor’s Challenge to “Find a Fact” That Supports Intelligent Design (Part 2)
As I mentioned in Part 1 of this series, some students from a university biology class have e-mailed us trying to answer a challenge from their professor to “Find a fact (observation, data) that supports” intelligent design or evolution. These students wanted to find facts supporting intelligent design, and as I mentioned in my previous post, I told them that ID meets their professor’s definition of a theory: something that is “supported by a large amount of data (observations in the physical world)” and has a “broad application to explain a wide range of phenomena” and “a framework that allows the development of novel hypotheses (questions about nature).” In this second installment I’ll provide the rest of my response to Read More ›
Helping Students Answer a Professor’s Challenge to “Find a Fact” That Supports Intelligent Design (Part 1)
We’ve recently received a number of e-mails from students asking for help. A university biology professor has apparently challenged his class to “[f]ind a fact (observation, data) that supports” evolution or intelligent design. The students e-mailed us asking for help answering his challenge with regards to intelligent design. My response, which I’ve now sent to a few of the students in the course, has been, “Where to begin?” Below I post Part 1 or my reply to one student, with names and quotes removed to protect the innocent: Dear [Snip], Greetings and thanks for your email. I think that someone else from your class already emailed me with the same question. According to the document you sent me, your professor Read More ›
Deadline Nears for Summer Seminars on Intelligent Design
Discovery Institute’s third annual Summer Seminars on Intelligent Design are still accepting applications, and the deadline has been extended to April 30. The seminars have been a great experience for all involved (click here to listen to a report about the program from some former participants), and we expect this year to be no different. The program is an incredible opportunity for students to spend 9 days learning about intelligent design from top ID thinkers such as Stephen Meyer, Jonathan Wells, Richard Sternberg, Jay Richards, Doug Axe, John West, and many others. The program’s website, including the online application, can be found here: discovery.org/summerseminar To briefly give some details, the program runs from July 10-18 and it is free for Read More ›
NPR Interview on Texas Evolution Decision Reveals Media Bias
Last week I did an interview with an NPR reporter, Bob Garfield, for his NPR show “On the Media” about the recent decision of the Texas State Board of Education to require critical analysis of evolution. I am used to hostile and skeptical questions from the media–and in fact I generally welcome good, hard discussions from reporters. But this reporter was particularly hostile and seemed to have an agenda to paint Darwin-skeptics like crazy religious fanatics. The final story lived up to its expectations. The Interview: A string of False Accusations and “How Dare You?” Type Questions The interview started with benign questions about the recent decision of the Texas State Board of Education to welcome scientific critique of evolution Read More ›