Category: Intelligent Design
Ken Miller’s Only a Theory Misquotes Michael Behe on Irreducible Complexity of the Blood Clotting Cascade
Recently, I posted responses to some errors in Kenneth Miller’s book Only a Theory and promised to end the series with a look at Dr. Miller’s treatment of the irreducible complexity of the blood clotting cascade. (For those prior posts, see here and here.) Discussing Ken Miller’s treatment of the blood clotting cascade in Only a Theory first requires a little backstory. Last December 2008 and early January 2009, I published a series of 3 posts that responded to Ken Miller’s arguments, during the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial, about irreducible complexity and the blood clotting cascade (BCC). (For the posts, see Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.) Those posts showed that in his Dover trial testimony, Dr. Miller misrepresented Read More ›
Tom Gilson Reviews Bradley Monton’s New Book: “Seeking God in Science: An Atheist Defends Intelligent Design”
Last year ID the Future featured a series of podcasts (see Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5) with Bradley Monton, a philosophy professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder, which discussed Monton’s support for intelligent design. Monton is notable as he’s one of the atheist intellectuals who feels that many intelligent design arguments hold merit. He has recently published a book, Seeking God in Science: An Atheist Defends Intelligent Design, which was reviewed by Tom Gilson at Breakpoint. Gilson’s excellent review is titled, “ID’s Unlikely Defender,” and he writes: Monton is willing to evaluate ID according to what its proponents actually affirm about it. He devotes most of a chapter to working through what the Discovery Read More ›
Ken Miller’s Only a Theory Attacks Straw Man Version of Intelligent Design on Common Descent
A friend recently wrote me an e-mail asking if I had any critiques of Ken Miller’s 2009 book Only a Theory. Writing back to him, I observed that the book has many problems, but that I would offer a few quick responses to two or three of its most egregious errors. This serious of three posts (or three topics, really) will look at three errors and mischaracterizations of intelligent design (ID) in Only a Theory, starting with Miller’s mischaracterization of ID and common descent. On page 51, Miller states: What does design theory tell us about the details of the horse family over the past 55 million years? First, it would not consider it a family at all. From the Read More ›
Scientists Say Intelligent Designer Needed for Origin of Life Chemistry
In a recent ENV post, Stephen Meyer critiqued a May 2009 Nature paper co-authored by John D. Sutherland titled, “Synthesis of activated pyrimidine ribonucleotides in prebiotically plausible conditions.” The paper claimed to have produced RNA nucleobases under prebiotic conditions, but Meyer observed that it utterly failed to address the most crucial question in the origin of life (OOL): the origin of information, a topic Meyer addresses extensively in his new book Signature in the Cell. Other scientists agree with Meyer. Organic chemist Dr. Charles Garner recently noted in private correspondence that “while this work helps one imagine how RNA might form, it does nothing to address the information content of RNA. So, yes, there was a lot of guidance by Read More ›
“Expelled Exposed” Is Wrong: Materialists Allowed to Challenge Neo-Darwinian Orthodoxy, Intelligent Design Proponents Are Not
[Note: For a more comprehensive rebuttal to “Expelled Exposed,” please see: NCSE Exposed at NCSEExposed.org] We’re often told that the evidence for neo-Darwinian evolution — where unguided natural selection acting on random mutations is the driving force generating the complexity and diversity of life — is “overwhelming.” But hints of dissent from this position can be found throughout the mainstream scientific literature. One article in Trends in Ecology and Evolution last year acknowledged that there exists a “healthy debate concerning the sufficiency of neo-Darwinian theory to explain macroevolution”.[1] Likewise, Günter Theißen of the Department of Genetics at Friedrich Schiller University in Jena, Germany recently wrote earlier this year in the journal Theory in Biosciences: while we already have a quite Read More ›