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Intelligent Design
Principles of evolutionEvolution: Species undergo genetic change
over time.Gradualism: This takes many generationsSpeciation: Ancestral lines can split into
different species.Common ancestry: We can always look
back in time and find descendents joining at their ancestors.
Natural selection: Well-suited individuals survive to produce more offspring.
Processes other than natural selection can produce evolutionary change.
Leading ScientistsMichael Behe, Darwin’s Black Box, The
Edge of EvolutionWilliam Dembski, The Design Inference,
Intelligent Design, No Free Lunch
Behe’s Mousetrap
Mathematism
The Explanatory FilterAn event can have only one of three
possible causes:Law (regularity)Chance (accident)Design
If we can eliminate the first two, we have unambiguously identified design.
Step #1If the event has a high probability of being
due to law, reject it.
Step #2If the probability of the event being due to
chance is intermediate, reject the event as being at least potentially due to chance.
Step #3There must be a small probability of the
event being due to chance.It must posses detachability.
Conditional independenceTractabilityDelimitation
If the event passes all tests it must be due to design.
ProblemsEvery event must have an objective
probability.Law, chance, and design are assumed to be
independent and disjoint.It’s easy to come up with “false positives.”
Politics – The Discovery InstituteRegarding the scientific world view –
“This materialistic conception of reality eventually infected virtually every area of our culture, from politics and economics to literature and art.”
“If we view the predominant materialistic science as a giant tree, out strategy is intended to function as a wedge that, while relatively small, can split the trunk when applied at its weakest points.”
The Battle of Gettysburg?Kitzmiller v. Dover, December 14, 2004