No. 5 Story for 2025: Richard Dawkins Says Intelligent Design Is a Scientific Hypothesis

Arno Penzias, Atheism, Atheists for Liberty, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Charles Townes, Colin Wright, cosmic designer, Darwinian paradigm, Darwinism, demarcation criteria, embryo, Evolution, Faith & Science, faith and science, historical sciences, immaterial genome, intelligence, Intelligent Design, Junk DNA, Manhattan Institute, material genome, New Atheists, Nobel Prize, Plato's Revenge, prejudice, question-begging, Richard Sternberg, scientific disciplines, scientific hypothesis, scientific reasoning, scientists, Stephen Meyer, suicide
"I think that the hypothesis of theism is the most exciting scientific hypothesis you could possibly hold." Source
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Destroyer or Nurturer? Darwin’s Divinized Conception of Nature

Alan of, Alfred Russel Wallace, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Bernard Silvestris, Charles Darwin, Charlotte Brontë, cosmology, Darwinism, Edward Pusey, Evolution, Faith & Science, Geoffrey Chaucer, George Levine, historical sciences, Jane Eyre, Jean de Meun, Lamarckism, maternal figure, Mother Nature, Natura, Natura creatrix, natural preservation, natural selection, natural theology, Ovid, Physis, Queens of the Wild, Robert J. Richards, Romance of the Rose, Ronald Hutton, teleology, world spirit
The powers of natural selection transcend human intelligence to such a degree that Darwin came close to imputing to it the capacity for intelligent design. Source
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Three Types of Science: Inferential Science

abductive reasoning, biological information, biophysicists, Evolution, experimental science, fantasy science, historical sciences, ID The Future, inference to the best explanation, inferential science, Intelligent Design, Kirk Durston, observation, philosophers, Reasoning, science
Kirk Durston explains how such reasoning can be used effectively as we consider the best explanation for the origin of biological information. Source
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Forbidden Question: Common Descent or Common Design?

Biological Reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society, Cadillac, cars, Casey Luskin, chimpanzees, chromosome 2, common ancestor, common features, Elon Musk, Evolution, evolutionary biology, evolutionary tree, Francis Collins, fusion event, Genome Research, Heretic: One Scientist’s Journey from Darwin to Design, historical sciences, Intelligent Design, Junk DNA, Matti Leisola, Science and Human Origins, Stephen Meyer, Tesla, University of Cambridge
Think of cars. A Tesla and a Cadillac share many features — but of course, none of that means that Teslas blindly evolved from Cadillacs, or vice versa. Source
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Answering an Objection: “You Can’t Measure Intelligent Design”

Charles Lyell, cosmology, Darwinian evolution, Douglas Axe, Eugenie Scott, evolutionary biology, geologists, Geology, historical sciences, intelligent agency, Intelligent Design, Intelligent Design Uncensored, Jonathan Witt, National Center for Science Education, Planck time, probability bound, specified complexity, specified information, Stephen Jay Gould, theo-meter, William Dembski
We test intelligent design in the same way that we test all historical scientific theories. Source
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Honoring Richard Lewontin, Famed Evolutionary Biologist and Sometime Critic of His Own Field

"God of the gaps", adaptationist, Billions and Billions of Demons, brachiopod shells, Carl Sagan, Charles Darwin, Darioconus auricomus, Darwinism, empirical science, Evolution, Harvard University, Herbert Spencer, historical sciences, intelligent causation, Intelligent Design, Jerry Coyne, Jerry Fodor, John A. Moore, just-so stories, Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, methodological naturalism, Origin of Species, Richard Lewontin, sea snail, spandrels, Stephen Jay Gould, The New York Review of Books, What Darwin Got Wrong, William Dembski, zoologists
The quote for which Lewontin has become best known appeared in his 1997 review of a book by Carl Sagan. Source
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Listen: Kirk Durston on Fantasy Science and Scientism

Atheism, biophysics, Evidence, experimental science, fantasy science, historical sciences, ID The Future, inferential science, Kirk Durston, materialism, mathematics, multiverse, philosophy, Physics, Earth & Space, Podcast, proteins, testing
On a new episode of ID the Future, Kirk Durston, a biophysicist focused on identifying high-information-density parts of proteins, completes a three-part series on three categories of science: experimental, inferential, and fantasy science. Download the podcast or listen to it here. Fantasy science makes inferential leaps so huge that virtually none of it is testable, either by the standards of experimental science or by those of the historical sciences, which reason to the best explanation by process of elimination. One example of fantasy science, according to Durston, is the multiverse. As he argues, that is an imaginative story largely untethered from evidence and testing, but told using math instead of literary devices. Scientism, “atheism dressed up in a lab coat,” can lead to fantasy science of this kind because it commits…
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Biophysicist and Philosopher Kirk Durston on Experimental, Inferential, and Fantasy Science

abductive reasoning, biological information, Evolution, experimental science, fantasy science, historical sciences, ID The Future, inference to the best explanation, Kirk Durston
On a new episode of ID the Future, biophysicist and philosopher Kirk Durston continues a discussion with host Andrew McDiarmid about three types of science — (1) experimental science, (2) inferential science, and (3) fantasy science. Download the podcast or listen to it here. In this second of three episodes, Durston recaps the three types but focuses on inferential science. He explains how it involves, in the historical sciences, abductive reasoning (inference to the best explanation). He also describes how such reasoning can be used as we consider the best explanation for the origin of biological information, in such a way that it is rooted in observation. Photo credit: Martin Adams via Unsplash. The post Biophysicist and Philosopher Kirk Durston on Experimental, Inferential, and Fantasy Science appeared first on Evolution News.
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