Discovery Institute's Blog, page 194

The Very Neutral Kenneth Miller

Brown University biologist Kenneth R. Miller has posted a reply to my challenge to him to give a quantitative account for the extreme rarity of the origin of chloroquine resistance in malaria. I'm grateful to him for doing so. Although I strongly disagree with nearly everything he wrote, his essay gives the public a chance to see directly how one informed Darwinist reacts to a basic empirical challenge to the theory. This is the second in a series of four responses to it. See yesterday's post...

Martin Pistorius and the Culture of Death

Count on the media to miss the obvious angle when it comes to the culture of death.

The story of Martin Pistorius -- believed falsely to have been unconscious for 12 years -- is all over the mainstream media. NPR is typical:

His parents, Rodney and Joan Pistorius, were told that he was as good as not there, a vegetable. The hospital told them to take him home and keep him comfortable until he died.

But he didn't die. "Martin just kept going, just kept going," his mother says. His father would g...

The Cosmic Fine-Tuning Argument for Intelligent Design, Now with "No More Tears" Formula

I think this will probably wrap up our coverage of the Eric Metaxas Wall Street Journal essay on fine-tuning -- for this afternoon! Eric's article was brief, as such things necessarily are, and couldn't give a detailed picture of the entire argument for intelligent design based on cosmic fine-tuning. For a fuller accounting, yet readily accessible and short! -- you should read Jay Richards's paper for Discovery Institute, a "List of Fine-Tuning Parameters."

Don't worry, it's easy to digest. I...

They've Got Eric Metaxas Under Their Skin: Now, the Religious Critics

If you publish an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal advocating for intelligent design as Eric Metaxas did, with that dreaded phrase right in the subheadline, you're asking for trouble. Writing at ENV, Casey Luskin (here) and Daniel Bakken (here and here) have already done a more than adequate job of addressing critics of Eric Metaxas on the science, including atheist Lawrence Krauss.

However, I can never quite get over how ID draws hostile responses not just from atheists but from some religio...

Kenneth Miller Resists Chloroquine Resistance

Brown University biologist Kenneth R. Miller has posted a reply to my challenge to him to give a quantitative account for the extreme rarity of the origin of chloroquine resistance in malaria. I'm grateful to him for doing so. Although I strongly disagree with nearly everything he wrote, his essay gives the public a chance to see directly how one informed Darwinist reacts to a basic empirical challenge to the theory.

Last April a paper by Summers et al. (see my summary here) appeared in the Pr...

You Go, Eric Metaxas! Measuring the Improbability of Intelligent Life Elsewhere in the Cosmos

As Casey Luskin has already noted here ("Still Taking Aim at Eric Metaxas, the Media Underestimate the Degree to which Physicists See Evidence for Intelligent Design"), Tobin Grant seems to have a chip on his shoulder when it comes to any scientific evidence that could point to God. Apparently the evidence can only point away from such a conclusion. As a matter of objective science, is that even possible? I think not, and of course you don't need a PhD to figure out why.

In his much talked ab...

Still Taking Aim at Eric Metaxas, the Media Underestimate the Degree to which Physicists See Evidence for Intelligent Design

Though it appeared on Christmas Day, Eric Metaxas's article in the Wall Street Journal continues to attract denunciations. What's the big deal? Metaxas proposed that "Science Increasingly Makes the Case for God." While people hold many different views on this topic, that's not an idea that ought to be highly controversial since there are highly credible scientists and scholars on both sides of the debate. However, the mainstream media typically erects a firewall to prevent views at odds with...

The Fundamental Equation of Chemistry Is Itself Fine-Tuned

It is well known that all of the fundamental constants of physics are finely tuned to make life possible in our universe; for example, see this nice video featured recently at ENV. It is also well known that many scientists, in order to avoid drawing the obvious conclusion from this fine-tuning, postulate the existence of a huge number of other unobservable universes, in which these constants have random values, so that one was bound to get lucky and produce numbers favorable to life.

What is...

Me and Jack Kevorkian

In his usual spot-on fashion, my colleague Wesley Smith has written on numerous occasions about the late euthanasia fanatic Dr. Jack Kevorkian -- see here, more recently. Wesley has given his own prophetic account of Kevorkian's profound influence on euthanasia policy in the United States and Europe. Please real the whole thing. It's right on target, and chilling.

My own experience with Kevorkian's work has haunted me for twenty years. It helped convince me of the vital importance of the ant...

Marcia Angell Is Enthusiastic for Euthanasia

Just as an illustration of where too many among the intelligentsia and technocratic classes are concerning euthanasia: I would like to briefly review a book review by former New England Journal of Medicineexecutive editor -- and assisted suicide booster -- Marcia Angell.

Angell reviewsBeing Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End,by Atul Gawande. I have read the book and written a review, not yet published, so I can’t expound on that here. But I would like to focus on Angell’s increasing...