Discovery Institute's Blog, page 122

The Martian Is a Tribute to Human Exceptionalism

I took our kids to see The Martian the other day and while I was buying tickets in the theater lobby, my 12-year-old daughter said, "Hey, Dad, turn around. It's Steffin Meyers or Casey Luskin or someone else from your work." She has met both Casey and Stephen Meyer -- whose name for some reason she can't quite keep straight -- on multiple occasions. When I turned around, neither Steve nor Casey was there. Instead, it was Steve Buri, Discovery Institute's president, who was there for a differ...

Sam Harris Gets Morality Wrong

My colleague David Klinghoffer has a superb post on a TED talk given in 2010 by atheist neuroscientist Sam Harris. Harris insists that moral law can be derived from science:

[T]he separation between science and human values is an illusion -- and actually quite a dangerous one at this point in human history. Now, it's often said that science cannot give us a foundation for morality and human values, because science deals with facts, and facts and values seem to belong to different spheres. It...

Chemistry Nobel Prize Based on Design Inference

This month's announcement of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry should cause design advocates to celebrate. We have just seen the biggest prize for science go to three biologists who made a design inference about genetic information. Tomas Lindahl, Paul Modrich, and Aziz Sancar shared the prestigious honor for their work on DNA repair mechanisms.

Of course, intelligent design was never mentioned in the Nobel Committee's announcement, either the popular version or the scientific version. We know a...

On Evolution and Intelligent Design, What Are Ben Carson's Sources?

Donald Trump and Ben Carson continue to lead the field of Republican presidential hopefuls, a message to their party that voters are fed up with having to choose from a menu limited to "approved" candidates. Whatever his merits as a hypothetical future President, Dr. Carson has set himself apart from the rest by doing his own thinking on scientific questions -- especially relating to biological origins.

I detailed some of his views on intelligent design v. evolution here last week. Now our f...

Blood Flow Requires a Complex, Well-Designed System

Editor's note : Physicians have a special place among the thinkers who have elaborated the argument for intelligent design. Perhaps that's because, more than evolutionary biologists, they are familiar with the challenges of maintaining a functioning complex system, the human body. With that in mind, Evolution News & Views is delighted to present this series, "The Designed Body." For the complete series, see here. Dr. Glicksman practices palliative medicine for a hospice organization.

The cell...

Was Darwin a Scholar or a Pitchman?

You read a great deal about Darwin's scientific method and meticulousness as a student of nature, but that's not exactly scholarship. Good scholarship demonstrates the ability to put all aspects of one's research into a broader context. This usually involves a familiarity with the discipline, its literature, and its historiography, as well as its implications in other areas.

While Darwin was certainly a master rhetorician (see John Angus Campbell's "Theism, Naturalism, and Persuasive Design...

Conclusions: What the Fossils Told Us in Their Own Words

Over the past couple of months, we have talked to the fossils and their surviving descendants. We were guided by a simple question offered by Michael Behe in Darwin's Black Box: "How, exactly?" We asked them what exact mechanisms they used.

We are suspicious of a theory in search of evidence, which is pretty much what Darwinian natural and sexual selection are. We are constantly hearing about a piece of evidence that proves the theory, yet end up in more conundrums than ever.

How much eviden...

Assisted Suicide Coercion Happens Behind Closed Doors

Assisted suicide propagandists insist that doctors will never assist suicides if they think a person is being coerced to die. How in the hell would they know? Family pressure isn't exerted with a gun to the head that can be seen on an X-ray. It occurs in daily nudges and winks -- subtle pushes -- that drive the vulnerable person toward the abyss.

An illustration of how this works appears in the New York Times Magazine, in a first person account of Colombian poet and novelist Carlos Framb, wh...

Ideas Have Consequences: A Report from the National Conference on Christian Apologetics

This past weekend, more than 1,500 people attended the National Conference on Christian Apologetics in Charlotte, NC. The theme was "Ideas Have Consequences." Among the speakers was Discovery Institute Fellow Paul Nelson, who gave three separate presentations to highly engaged and enthusiastic attendees. His first session was a premier screening of Living Waters: Intelligent Design in the Oceans of the Earth, in partnership with Illustra Media. This beautifully filmed and wonderfully narrate...

Can Science Define Morality? Sam Harris Thinks So

A reader sends along a TED talk by atheist and neuroscientist Sam Harris, offering the case that science can tell us right from wrong, implicitly making religious traditions superfluous at best. The reader asks for a reaction -- given the caveat, as he puts it, that "there is nothing new under the sun." True. Harris is far from the first to articulately argue for this scientistic view.

The talk was recorded in 2010 but I'm not aware that he has reversed his position. My reaction? Harris is e...