Specified Complexity Made Simple: The Historical Backdrop

Charles Thaxton, complex specified order, English, Evolution, Francis Crick, information theory, Intelligent Design, Jason Rosenhouse, Leslie Orgel, letters, On Protein Synthesis, Paul Davies, random order, repetitive order, Roger Olsen, specified complexity, Specified Complexity Made Simple (series), The Design Inference, The Mystery of Life’s Origin, Walter Bradley, Wikipedia, William Dembski
What happened to change the fortunes of specified complexity in the mainstream scientific community? The intelligent design movement happened. Source
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In His New Book, Denton Shows How Science Leads the Charge to Theism

astrophysicists, Atheism, bioengineering, biology, brain, Charles Darwin, Copernican Revolution, cosmology, cytology, demiurge, Democritus, Denis Diderot, earth, Erasmus Darwin, Faith & Science, fine-tuning, human eye, humankind, Judeo-Christian tradition, life, natural selection, nature, Paul Davies, philosophes, Physics, Earth & Space, physiology, Plato, purpose, teleology, The Miracle of Man, theism, William Paley
In his new book, Michael Denton is particularly strong on what he terms “the post-Copernican delusion of mankind’s cosmic irrelevance.” Source
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Unexplained — Maybe Unexplainable — Numbers Control the Universe

Carl Sagan, Contact (novel), Cosmos (magazine), electromagnetism, extraterrestrials, Fibonacci sequence, fine structure constant, Golden Ratio, Intelligent Design, Jordan Ellenberg, Laurence Eaves, Paul Davies, physics, Physics, Earth & Space, pi, Planck’s constant, quantum mechanics, relativity, Richard Feynman, University of Nottingham, Wolfgang Pauli
Richard Feynman called 1/137, the fine structure constant, “a magic number that comes to us with no understanding by man.” Source
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Nothing New Under the Sun

Anthony Flew, Argument from Complexity, Aristotle, Atheism, British Rationalist Association, Cicero, Cristian Bandea, DNA, electron microscope, Epicurus, Eric Metaxas, Faith & Science, First Cause, Galen, God of the Details, intellectual history, Intelligent Design, Irreducible Complexity, Is Atheism Dead?, Lucretius, Methodist revival, Paul Davies, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Plato, Return of the God Hypothesis, Stephen Meyer, The Mind of God, The Necessity of Atheism, The Return to the God Paradigm, Welsh revival
The inference to a First Cause has begun to percolate down to people who hold no prior allegiance to any of the world’s accredited religions. Source
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Fables of Evolutionary Psychology (aka Sociobiology)

Charles Darwin, Chemistry, Evolution, evolutionary psychology, How I Came to Take Leave of Darwin (series), Louis Pasteur, macromutations, Mars, micromutations, Niles Eldredge, paleontology, Paul Davies, sociobiologists, sociobiology, Stanley Miller, Stephen Jay Gould, Steve Stewart-Williams, Viking mission, Whack-a-Mole, William Harvey
Evolutionary psychologists are prone to make up just-so stories which are then passed off as being entirely veridical. Source
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Excerpt: An Obstacle to Darwinian Evolution

American Museum of Natural History, bacterial flagellum, Brown University, Cambridge University Press, Darwinian processes, Darwinism, Debating Design, Evolution, function, Intelligent Design, Irreducible Complexity, John McDonald, John Polkinghorne, Kenneth Miller, key chain, Michael Ruse, National Center for Science Education, paperweight, parts, Paul Davies, Richard Swinburne, rotary propulsion, Stuart Kauffman, toothpicks, type III secretion system, William Dembski
Rather than showing how their theory could handle the obstacle, some Darwinists are hoping to get around irreducible complexity by verbal tap dancing. Source
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Hey, Paul Davies — Your ID is Showing

Barbara McClintock, chaos, cosmology, Discovery Institute, engineers, Eva Jablonka, intelligence, Intelligent Design, James Clerk Maxwell, James Shapiro, John Cairns, Maxwell’s demon, molecular machines, motors, nanotechnology, natural genetic engineering, order, origin of information, origin of life, Paul Davies, Physics, Earth & Space, rotors, Second Law of Thermodynamics, Stephen Meyer, The Demon in the Machine
Editor’s note: Dr. Shedinger is a Professor of Religion at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa. He is the author of a recent book critiquing Darwinian triumphalism, The Mystery of Evolutionary Mechanisms. No better advertisements for intelligent design exist than works written by establishment scientists that unintentionally make design arguments. I can think of few better examples than well-known cosmologist Paul Davies’s recently published book The Demon in the Machine: How Hidden Webs of Information Are Solving the Mystery of Life (2019). With a nod toward James Clerk Maxwell’s entropy-defying demon, Davies argues that the gulf between physics and biology is completely unbridgeable without some fundamentally new concept. Since living organisms consistently resist the ravages of entropy that all forms of inanimate matter are subject to, there must be some non-physical principle allowing living…
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