Where Science and Faith Meet: Westminster Conference, April 3-4, in Philadelphia

betrayal, biology, cosmic fine-tuning, cynicism, Daniel Reeves, design detection, Early Church, faith, Faith & Science, foresight, Intelligent Design, John West, Marcos Eberlin, Melissa Cain Travis, nanomachines, Parents, Philadelphia, reproduction, science, scientific evidence, scientists, Secularism, Stephen Meyer, students, teachers, Vern Poythress, Westminster Conference on Science and Faith, youth track
It’s possible to simplistically sweep aside challenges to a materialist picture of reality. Proponents of atheism do this all the time. And it’s possible to sweep aside challenges, or what seem to be challenges, to a theistic understanding. People do this, too, all the time. Neither is intellectually satisfying. And the latter sets a trap for young people. Parents and educators might feel it’s the safest way to take shelter from claims by scientists and other academics that are thought to engender cynicism and undermine faith. But what happens when young people grow up, are immersed in a university or secular culture, and realize how little they were prepared for or exposed to counterarguments against their family’s religious tradition? The resulting sense of betrayal has been reported many times. Youth…
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Michael Aeschliman in National Review — Berlinski Detonates “Fatuous, Flattering” Optimism

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Ben Shapiro, biology, climate change, coronavirus, Culture & Ethics, ethics, First World War, future, Herbert Butterfield, Homo Deus, Human Nature (book), Incarnation, intellectuals, Ivy League, Jonathan Swift, Law of the Jungle, linguistics, Malcolm Muggeridge, Martin Luther King, mathematics, Michael Aeschliman, Middle East, National Review, philosophy, Reinhold Niebuhr, Steven Pinker, Sunday Special, T.S. Eliot, The Better Angels of Our Nature
From climate change to the coronavirus, one tendency among writers and commentators is to an urgent, insatiable, almost sexual desire to cast unwarranted terror over other people. This tendency is matched by an equal appetite, among a large part of the public, for being terrified. The market is well matched with its suppliers. But this dynamic is mirrored by its opposite: a wish, proceeding from different personal imperatives but no less urgent, to assure us that the future looks better and better, all progress with little pain. There’s a market for this, too, and the relationship with the suppliers is just as tight. It’s to this second pairing that David Berlinski turns his attention in his recent essay collection, Human Nature. Two Celebrity Intellectuals Dr. Berlinski gets a fabulous review…
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“Safe to Question” — Another Graduate of Summer Seminars on Intelligent Design Shares Her Story

Ann Gauger, application, biological complexity, biology, Bruce Gordon, Daniel Reeves, deadline, engineers, graduate students, Guillermo Gonzalez, Intelligent Design, Iron Curtain, John West, mathematicians, Michael Behe, origins of life, Paul Nelson, philosophers, physicians, physicists, professors, Research, Soviet Union, Stephen Meyer, Summer Seminars on Intelligent Design, tipping point, undergraduates, William Dembski
Behind every Iron Curtain is a private network of dissenters, who come out into the light when the curtain falls. That was the case with the old Soviet Union. And so it is in the tightly policed world of evolutionary biology with its “great evolutionary firewall,” guarding against expressions of fundamental doubt about neo-Darwinian theory. Discovery Institute is populating a community of dissenters in academia with the annual all-expenses-paid Summer Seminars on Intelligent Design, to be held this year from July 10 to 18 in Seattle. The application deadline is March 4. Intended for current undergraduate and graduate students plus a few teachers and professors, the Seminars run on two parallel tracks:  The C.S. Lewis Fellows Program on Science and Society; and  The CSC Seminar on Intelligent Design in the…
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Join Us: Conference on Engineering in Living Systems, April 23-25, in Southern California

"poor design", adaptation, anti-fragility, biological origins, biology, Center for Science & Culture, Conference on Engineering in Living Systems, design principles, Engineering, Engineering Research Group, engineers, evolutionists, failure prevention, human body, Intelligent Design, La Mirada, resilience, Steve Laufmann
Engineers, unlike evolutionary biologists, understand at a deep level how things work, why they work, and when they fail, why they don’t work. So the intelligent design movement has long welcomed engineering insights as a corrective to assurances from evolutionists that they’ve got everything about the mystery of biological origins all figured out. With this in mind, it’s satisfying to invite you to the 2020 Conference on Engineering in Living Systems, April 23 to 25, at Biola University.  See You in Southern California Our esteemed Evolution News contributor Steve Laufmann is the organizer and he welcomes you to join him on the Biola campus in La Mirada, CA. From the event description page, here are some subjects to be covered: Intersection of Biology and Engineering — the impacts of engineering thinking…
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“We Are Not of Our Own Devising” — Wells, Nelson Pay Tribute to Phil Johnson

berkeley, biology, California, Charles Darwin, common descent, Evolution, ID The Future, John Mark Reynolds, Jonathan Wells, Pajaro Dunes, Paul Nelson, Phillip E. Johnson
A new episode of ID the Future comes from a Berkeley, California, symposium honoring the recently deceased Phillip Johnson. Download the podcast or listen to it here. Biologist Jonathan Wells recalls how he met Johnson and the huge influence the latter had on Wells’s own research and writing. Then philosopher of biology Paul Nelson reminisces on Johnson’s keen intellect, his eye for hidden assumptions, his awareness that “we are not of our own devising,” and on the mountain range of new knowledge opening up to us in biology, one that scientists knew little about even thirty years ago and that Nelson says points strongly away from Darwin’s idea of common descent. Photo: John Mark Reynolds, Phil Johnson, and Paul Nelson, Pajaro Dunes, California, June 1998, by Suzanne Nelson. The post…
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Westminster Conference on Science and Faith, April 3-4 in Philadelphia: Design and the Designer

biology, Burke Museum, Center for Science & Culture, Chemistry, cosmology, Dallas, Daniel Reeves, Early Church, East Coast, Evolution, Faith & Science, foresight, Intelligent Design, John West, Marcos Eberlin, Melissa Cain Travis, orphan genes, Paul Nelson, Philadelphia, Stephen Meyer, Westminster Conference on Science and Faith
Here in Seattle, the University of Washington recently opened a spectacular and expensive ($106 million) new building for its natural history museum, the Burke Museum. A friend visited there yesterday — I have not yet had a chance to do so — and sent along photos. We were both struck by how the exhibits lay it on thick with regard to evolution as an unguided process. Large signs seem aggressive in advertising the curators’ position: “EVOLUTION ISN’T PLANNED,” declares one display. Another insists that life is “SHAPED BY NATURE,” and, by implication, by nothing else. The culture invests great energy and wealth to bombard us with messages like these. That’s the case even as, at deeper and deeper levels, science reveals evidence of a plan, foresight, a deliberately shaping force working…
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In Just Eight Minutes, New Video Punctures Evolution’s Circular “Homology” Argument

biogeography, biologists, biology, circular reasoning, Darwin's Doubt, Darwinism, David Gelernter, Discovery Institute, DNA, embryology, Evolution, evolutionists, free speech, high school, homology, Jerry Coyne, Long Story Short, Miller and Levine’s Biology, Pearson Education, Stephen Meyer, strengths and weaknesses, textbook, vestigial organs, video, Why Evolution Is True, Yale University
The biology textbook my daughter uses in high school, Miller and Levine’s Biology, is in wide use. It’s the one from Pearson with the parrot on the cover. On page 468, it employs a circular argument beloved by evolutionists: the argument from homology. The same argument features in many different textbooks. And it is regularly cited by biologists in scolding the public about their Darwin doubts. “Long Story Short” Here is a really brief, cute, and effective new video from Discovery Institute that addresses and deftly punctures this argument. Just eight minutes long! It’s part of a freshly launched occasional series, “Long Story Short,” that compresses key points in the debate between Darwinism and intelligent design into a very welcome format: concise, accessible, and funny. As the narrator explains, “One of…
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Dallas Conference Youth Track — Intelligent Design for Kids

"survival of the fittest", biology, Center for Science & Culture, Charles Darwin, Charles Thaxton, Dallas Conference on Science & Faith, Daniel Reeves, Darwin Devolves, Discovery Institute Press, Douglas Axe, fitness, high school, Intelligent Design, intermediate school, John West, Michael Behe, middle school, molecular machines, nanotechnology, purpose, Roger Olsen, Stephen Meyer, teleology, The Borg, The Mystery of Life’s Origin, Undeniable, Walter Bradley, Westminster Conference
I know that my own children, who are of middle and high school ages, have a rather, shall we say, incomplete understanding of the theory of intelligent design. Why would that be, considering that their dad is immersed in the subject? Well, in part because the science is challenging and the books for the most part are not written with kids, even smart kids, in mind. Nor are many of the lectures and videos you can listen to or watch.  Parents have brought this fact to our attention. So at last year’s Westminster Conference, in Philadelphia, we experimented with a separate youth track. It was such a wonderful success that we are doing the same thing at this month’s Dallas Conference on Science & Faith, January 25 in Denton, TX.…
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#9 of Our Top Stories of 2019: Ben Shapiro May Have Done the Best Interview with Stephen Meyer

academia, Ben Shapiro, Big Bang, biology, cosmic fine-tuning, cosmology, Education, education policy, Evolution, Intelligent Design, interview, journalists, materialism, media, multiverse, quantum cosmology, scientists, Stephen Meyer, strengths and weaknesses, The Daily Wire, The Return of the God Hypothesis, young people
Editor’s note: The staff of Evolution News wish you a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! We are counting down our top ten stories of 2019. If you haven’t done so yet, please take a moment now to contribute to our work in bringing you news and analysis about evolution, intelligent design, and more every day of the year. There is no other voice, no other source of information, like ours. Thank you for your friendship and your support! The following article was originally published here on March 25, 2019. Ben Shapiro’s Sunday Special interview with Stephen Meyer is up and viewable now at YouTube. This might be the best interview with Meyer that I’ve ever seen. Check it out: Why might it be the best? Partly because of the…
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Q&A with Michael Behe: New Examples of Irreducible Complexity

bacterial flagellum, biochemistry, biology, DiscoveryU, Evolution, icons of ID, Intelligent Design, Irreducible Complexity, Michael Behe, video course
“What have you done for me lately?” So jokes biochemist Michael Behe, paraphrasing a question he often gets. In other words, Professor Behe, we know about the iconic bacterial flagellum. But are there other, newer examples of irreducible complexity? Yes, there are. In a Q&A session to highlight his 41-part DiscoveryU video course on ID, “Michael Behe Investigates Evolution and Intelligent Design,” Dr. Behe explains that in fact research in biology brings to light previously unknown irreducibly complex wonders — the most sophisticated showing “design building upon design,” as he puts it — by the month or even the week. His details a few. Find more information about the video course here! The post Q&A with Michael Behe: New Examples of Irreducible Complexity appeared first on Evolution News.
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