19Mar 2020 by Post

The Passing of Jon Buell

Alzheimer’s disease, Charles Thaxton, Christian Worldview, Country Inn & Suites, Dallas, Discovery Institute Dallas, Discovery Institute Press, Foundation for Thought and Ethics, Intelligent Design, Kitzmiller v. Dover, Linda Buell, Linda Montgomery, materialist biology, Never Before in History, Of Pandas and People, origin of life, Pam Bailey, Phillip E. Johnson, relativistic ethics, revisionist historicism, Roger Olsen, Sex and Character, The Design of Life, The Mystery of Life’s Origin, Walter Bradley
I learned with sadness this week that my good friend and colleague Jon Buell passed away on Saturday, March 14. I had been Jon’s academic editor for the Foundation for Thought and Ethics (FTE), a Dallas publisher of books aimed at un-indoctrinating high school and college students. He hired me in 1997 and I stayed on in that position until my family’s move from Texas to Iowa in 2012. We didn’t produce a lot of books at FTE, but it was quality work and it articulated without apology a broadly Christian worldview against a materialist biology, a relativist ethics, and a revisionist historicism. In short, FTE served as an antidote to the PC and progressivist culture. Given how this culture has unfolded and seemingly prospered since FTE’s founding by Jon…
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18Mar 2020 by Post

Unguided Origin of Life: “Completely Impossible but Must Have Happened”

Charles Thaxton, Dallas Conference on Science & Faith, Discovery Institute, Evolution News, Faith & Science, Intelligent Design, John West, Jon Buell, origin of life, Robert J. Marks, Robert Shapiro, Roger Olsen, Stephen Meyer, The Mystery of Life’s Origin, Walter Bradley, Walter Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence
“It’s completely impossible, but it must have happened.” That’s how philosopher of science Stephen Meyer summarizes most responses from proponents of unguided chemical evolution when challenged on the origin of life. In January, Meyer led a panel discussion with the authors of the foundational intelligent design text The Mystery of Life’s Origin at the Dallas Conference on Science & Faith. You can see the entire interaction now, as Discovery Institute begins launching videos of the presentations from the hugely successful event: The occasion for the panel was the release of a new and greatly expanded 35th-anniversary edition of the book, The Mystery of Life’s Origin: The Continuing Controversy. You’ll enjoy the discussion between Meyer and Walter Bradley, Charles Thaxton, and Roger Olsen. It’s introduced by materials scientist Walter Bradley, and…
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10Mar 2020 by Post

Cosmos 3.0 Revisits Themes of the Past, with Familiar Historical Mythmaking

Alvin Plantinga, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, augustine, Baruch Spinoza, Book of Nature, Brian Miller, Carl Sagan, Christiaan Huygens, Christianity, coevolution, coronavirus, DNA, Fox Broadcasting Company, James Tour, Jews, mind, National Geographic Channel, naturalism, Neil deGrasse Tyson, origin of life, Physics, Earth & Space, public schools, Signature in the Cell, Spinoza: A Life, Steven Nadler, synagogue
With its ode to the superior rationality of the modern secular mind, last night’s debut of the third season of Cosmos 3.0 came amid a full-scale national panic attack about a virus. As David Klinghoffer commented here yesterday, the timing could be better. The first two episodes, with Neil deGrasse Tyson returning as host, have now aired on Fox and National Geographic. In contrast to Cosmos 2.0, the President of the United States does not introduce this remake. The overall theme of these episodes is our eventual exploration and colonization of other planets. All Neil, All the Time Episode 1 is titled “Ladder to the Stars.” We learn that this ladder is the DNA molecule. Very poetic. Great visuals. The episode begins with Carl Sagan admonishing us to follow the…
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06Mar 2020 by Post

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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21Feb 2020 by Post

I Disagree with David Klinghoffer, But It’s My Fault for the Confusion

Against Method, arthropods, Brian Charlesworth, Cambrian Explosion, Charles Darwin, chordate, David Klinghoffer, Deborah Charlesworth, Douglas Futuyma, Evolution, Extended Evolutionary Synthesis, Galápagos Islands, history, Intelligent Design, Jerry Coyne, Macroevolution, molluscan, natural selection, neo-Darwinian synthesis, Nicholas Barton, organisms, origin of life, Paul Feyerabend, William Paley
In a post yesterday, David Klinghoffer cited my comments in a recent podcast and described his own view that intelligent design could be considered as a theory of evolution, making the point that intelligent design tries to explain the innovations that happened in the history of life (e.g., the origin of life itself, the burst of complexity during the Cambrian explosion, etc.). I’d describe the situation a little differently. Evolution is an implication — that is, an empirical consequence — of design. Design is the more general (i.e., comprehensive) idea, and the well-understood phenomena usually designated as “evolution” are in fact consequences of designed systems undergoing or responding to perturbation. If anything, then, it would be more accurate to say that “evolution is a sub-theory of design,” no matter how…
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07Feb 2020 by Post

Reader Seeks Intelligent Design in a Nutshell

animals, biological novelty, cosmic fine-tuning, Discovery Institute, DNA, Evolution, Evolution News, homology, Human Origins, humans, Intelligent Design, Long Story Short, molecular machines, natural selection, origin of life, origin of the universe, PragerU, Stephen Meyer, The Information Enigma, Videos
A reader writes to ask: I have always had a few nagging doubts about natural selection. I have watched a few videos and downloaded some books by key ID people but I have still not found **a brief summary** of the main evidence against natural selection and for ID. Most of the videos are WAY too long and meander all over the place. You really need to sharpen things up so we can see all the KEY points gathered in one place for everyone to access. “Meander all over the place”? Well, I hope not. And from my own experience I disagree. However, I appreciate the request for a really concise presentation of the evidence for ID and the evidence against the sufficiency of natural selection for explaining all biological…
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29Jan 2020 by Post

Information as Matter’s “Fifth State” — A Physicist’s Contortion

Big Think, biological information, category error, consciousness, contortionist, cosmos, Dallas Conference on Science & Faith, dark matter, Denyse O'Leary, Evolution News, gas, information, Intelligent Design, John Archibald Wheeler, liquid, Mass, mass-energy, materialism, Melvin Vopson, Mind Matters, natural world, origin of life, Philip Berry, physics, Physics, Earth & Space, plasma, Robert J. Marks, solid, The Mystery Life’s Origin, University of Portsmouth, Ur-text, William Dembski
Materialism drives its adherents into twists of logic, in line with remarks that Robert J. Marks made over the past weekend at the Dallas Conference on Science & Faith. Marks was introducing one of the authors of the newly expanded 1984 intelligent design “Ur-text,” The Mystery Life’s Origin. As Evolution News summarized, “His comments included the observation that as a theist, Dr. Marks is grateful to have all possible scientific explanations of the natural world, including intelligent design, available to him whereas atheists and materialists have that option arbitrarily foreclosed to them.” Whether on the origin of life, of biological information, or of the cosmos itself, how far these contortionists have been compelled to go is indicated in a fascinating post by Denyse O’Leary at Mind Matters. Dark matter is the unknown…
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27Jan 2020 by Post

Mystery of Life’s Origin — Intelligent Design’s Original Edition, Greatly Expanded, on Sale Now!

abiogenesis, Alfred Russel Wallace, Allan Bloom, Anaxagoras, Brian Miller, Charles Darwin, Charles Lyell, Charles Thaxton, chemical evolution, Claude Shannon, Dean Kenyon, DNA, Erasmus Darwin, Frankenstein, galvanism, Guillermo Gonzalez, Harvard University, Hubert Yockey, Intelligent Design, James Tour, Jonathan Wells, Joseph Hooker, Leslie Orgel, Lord Byron, Louis Pasteur, Luigi Galvani, Mary Shelley, Michael Polanyi, Miller-Urey experiment, origin of life, Percy Shelley, Plato, Reijer Hooykaas, RNA, Roger L. Olsen, San Francisco State University, Shannon information, Signature in the Cell, Socrates, spaghetti, specified complexity, Stephen Meyer, The Mystery of Life’s Origin, The Return of the God Hypothesis, uniformitarianism, Walter Bradley, William Dembski
Editor’s note: We are delighted today to offer a new book from Discovery Institute Press, The Mystery of Life’s Origin: The Continuing Controversy, a greatly expanded and updated version of the book that, in 1984, launched the intelligent design movement. The following is excerpted from Discovery Institute Senior Fellow David Klinghoffer’s historical introduction to the work. Other brand new chapters on the “continuing controversy” about the origin of life are by chemist James Tour, physicist Brian Miller, astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez, biologist Jonathan Wells, and philosopher of science Stephen C. Meyer. How does life emerge from that which is not alive? This mystery exercises a peculiar fascination, with the power to elicit remarkable feats of imagination. As the novelist Mary Shelley recalled, her invention of the story of Frankenstein traced back…
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08Jan 2020 by Post

Dallas Conference Will Unveil Intelligent Design’s Original Edition

Bradley Center for Natural & Artificial Intelligence, Brian Miller, Charles Thaxton, Dallas Conference on Science & Faith, Daniel Reeves, Darwin's Doubt, Discovery Institute Press, Douglas Axe, Faith & Science, Guillermo Gonzalez, Intelligent Design, James Tour, Jonathan Wells, Michael Behe, origin of life, original edition, Paul Nelson, Roger Olsen, Signature in the Cell, Stephen Meyer, The Mystery of Life’s Origin, Walter Bradley, William Dembski
We are just a couple of weeks out from the 2020 Dallas Conference on Science & Faith, Saturday, January 25 in Denton, TX. Until today, though, we have withheld one important piece of information about the event: it will be the launch of a wonderful new book from Discovery Institute Press. Actually, it’s an updated, expanded edition of a classic: The Mystery of Life’s Origin: The Continuing Controversy, the 1984 Ur-text or original edition of the modern theory of intelligent design, now with new supplementary essays by scholars extending the work. This is very exciting for us because the three co-authors, biochemist Charles Thaxton, materials scientist Walter Bradley, and geochemist Roger Olsen, will all be on hand for a panel discussion. To Spark a Debate The new edition includes the…
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18Dec 2019 by Post

Advance the Tipping Point: End-of-Year Video Message from Stephen Meyer

Bruce Chapman, bullies, censors, Center for Science & Culture, Darwinists, David Gelernter, ID Education Day, Intelligent Design, John West, origin of life, Scientific Dissent from Darwin, Stephen Meyer, Steve Buri, Summer Seminar on ID
The other day Steve Meyer and I sat down to review the year’s accomplishments by Discovery Institute’s Center for Science & Culture. It’s pretty amazing. As our Discovery colleague Rob Crowther pointed out, there were things Meyer talked about that neither Rob nor I had heard about before. Take a look at this: How Discovery’s scientists and scholars manage to do it all is a wonder. I’m not going to try to name any portion of them, lest I forget someone. But surely our leadership at DI should be singled out: Steve Buri, Bruce Chapman, Steve Meyer, and John West. We are going to be enjoying a staff appreciation lunch today, and at these events I always feel it’s our leaders who get shortchanged on the appreciation. So let me…
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