Famous philosopher Antony Flew created a major stir a couple years ago when he renounced atheism and accepted the existence of God due to the strength of intelligent design arguments. Flew was arguably the top proponent for atheism in the past century. On May 11, he will receive the Phillip E. Johnson Award for Liberty and Truth from Biola University. Here is what Flew has to say:

"In light of my work and publications in this area and the criticism I’ve received for changing my position, I appreciate receiving this award."

Paul Nelson has another interesting post about methodological naturalism and the rules of science:

Intelligent causation, I said to Ron, seemed to me to have been unjustifiably excluded from the roster of candidate hypotheses for the origin of life. Life could have been designed. That might have happened, as an empirical possibility, and whatever is possible ought not to be excluded from science a priori. (Some possible states of affairs might turn out not to be the case, of course, but that is a matter for empirical inquiry, not definitions.)

Of course design is possible and could have happened, Ron said to me, tucking into his meal. That's not the problem.

This answer stunned me, and today, almost 23 years later, I can still experience the sense of amazement and shock. One grows accustomed to positivism after a while, and the familiar "science" and "religion" categories had been well-buttressed by multiple lines of argument from very bright people indeed on the 10th floor (albeit with the glaring inconsistencies mentioned above, e.g., 'Wait until Duane Gish sees this new transitional fossil!' -- and with a long historical record of shifting definitions and practices of science shoved to one side). I fumbled out a reply to Ron: But that's not fair, I protested. Where was the justification?

Ron shrugged. You're right, he continued, it isn't fair.

I agree that the a priori exlusion of intelligent design as a cause for the complexity and elegance of life seems to be quite arbitrary. Jason Rosenhouse at Evolutionblog critiques Nelson's post. Here's an interesting tidbit:

The situation is actually very simple. If Nelson or any other ID advocate believes that science ought to introduce supernatural thinking into its standard repertoire than the test they have to pass is very simple: Go discover something. Stop with the abstract philosophizing, stop levelling bogus charges about the bigotry and closed-mindedness of mainstream scientists, and stop whining about just wanting to follow the evidence wherever it leads. Scientists have given all due consideration to such evidence as ID folks provide, and they have rightly found it worthless. If Nelson believes they have made an error, let him go into the lab and prove them wrong in the only currency scientists care about: progress towards taming the chaos of nature.

So Rosenhouse is arguing that scientists are rejecting intelligent design a posteriori (after considering all the evidence). While I would dispute his assertion that scientists have given "all due consideration" to the evidence for ID, I would agree with the sentiment that ID proponents should go into the labs and discover new evidence for design. I believe that one fruitful area of research is the area of biomimetics. In any case, it's a good sign when people actually start asking for evidence for design instead of dismissing it by definition.

Here are some links that are pretty interesting:

• Alvin Plantinga (a famous philosopher) critiques the Dover decision.
• Here is an instance of the "Lazarus Effect": an "extint" rodent is found to exist.
• Paul Nelson talks about the superiority of contingent methodological naturalism over axiomatic methodological naturalism.
• Students from various universites debate whether ID should be taught in public school science classes.
• 69% of Americans support teaching intelligent design along with evolution in public schools, according to a Zogby poll.
• Here is an [Warning: PDF] interesting abstract which recognizes the ability of cells to perform natural genetic engineering (HT: Design Watch).
• Here is what an interesting PNAS paper claims: We found that published statements, regardless of their verity, tend to interfere with interpretation of the subsequent experiments and, therefore, can act as scientific ‘‘microparadigms,’’ similar to dominant scientific theories (HT: CEH).
• Templeton Prize winner John Barrow (an advocate of the anthropic principle) has an interesting statement online: There are some who say that just because we use our minds to appreciate the order and complexity of the Universe around us that there is nothing more to that order than what is imposed by the human mind. That is a serious misjudgement.

In a previous post on butterflies, I reported that the same efficient LED structure that was developed by an MIT engineer was subsequently found to exist in butterflies. "Isomorphic instantiation" is the term that I will assign to this phenomenon. I was thinking of using the term "reverse biomimicry," but a Google search revealed that somebody had already used that phrase.

In general, isomorphic instantiation can be defined as the phenomenon in which a complex technology developed by intelligence is subsequently found to exist in nature. The canonical example of intelligent design -- the bacterial flagellum -- can perhaps be recast in this light, since the bacterial flagellum is similar to outboard motors developed by humans. The sonar system found in bats is another example of isomorphic instantiation.

Can anybody think of other good examples of isomorphic instantiation?

ID is often misrepresented as the claim "God did it", when in fact it is really making a much stronger claim: "Certain features of biological life as we understand it are best explained by the actions of an intelligent agent". The first claim is unfalsifiable, because intelligence can always mimic chance and necessity, so there is no conceivable scenario that would disprove it. The second claim is falsifiable because it appeals to features which can only (or best) be explained by intelligence.

It is true that it is impossible to rule out the possibility of someday discovering natural causes for these features of life, but that is not really the point. If this is your guiding principle, then there is no concievable scenario in which design might be a legitimate explanation for any feature of biological life, since it is impossible to prove a negative. But consider the following thought experiment: Suppose that in the future we discover a planet whose intelligent life forms became extinct thousands of years ago. Suppose we also know that before they died, they genetically modified some of the indigenous animals (which survived extinction).

Is it in principle possible that the biologists of the future might be able to identify those parts of the animal genomes that had been modified by the extinct aliens? In other words, might they be able to distinguish in the genome the effects of intelligent aliens from the effects of chance and necessity?

I think the answer is yes, and that in this case the impossibility of ruling out chance/necessity with cartesian certainty is obviously irrelevant. This is why the best arguments against Intelligent Design are of the form "It has already been falsified. Open your eyes, you nutjob!" (with accomodating scientific evidence, of course :-) or possibly "there are currently no reliable ways of measuring what ID is trying to measure". But I just don't see how the claim that ID is not falsifiable can stand.

Cornell's IDEA club has just created a new intelligent design blog. The blog is still experimental:

This is an experiment, so we’ll see how the next month goes and may go offline at any time without notice. If we do and you’re annoyed, email us (idea@cornell.edu) and tell us why it matters.

Send them an email if you would like their experimental blog to become permanent.

Is the concept of cosmological design independent from biological intelligent design, or does one phenomenon increase the probability of the other?

By the law of total probability, we can formulate the probability of biological intelligent design, P (BID), as a sum of conditional probabilities weighted by the probability of cosmological intelligent design, P (CID). Here is the equation:

P (BID) = P (BID | CID) * P (CID) + P (BID | not CID) * P (not CID)

From arguments invoking fine-tuning and other orderly aspects of the universe (and even the Privileged Planet Hypothesis), it is reasonable to think that P (CID) is not low. I get the feeling that the notion of cosmological intelligent design is generally more accepted than biological intelligent design.

The next probability to consider is P (BID | CID). How likely is biological intelligent design given that cosmological intelligent design is true? If the universe were designed in such a way to make life possible, would not the design extend to the biological realm? After all, it seems like the end goal of the cosmological design is life. In other words, if the universe's constants were designed for life, then it would also make sense for life itself to be designed, rather than letting life arise by abiogenesis through purely natural stochastic processes. Thus, P (BID | CID) is indeed quite high. It is quite probable for design at the cosmological scale to cascade down to design at the biological realm.

I will not analze the other term in the summation, for that term can only increase P (BID):

P (BID) > P (BID | CID) * P (CID)

The two probabilities on the right hand side are quite high, by the reasoning in the previous paragraphs:

P (BID) > "sufficiently high probability" * "sufficiently high probability"

The product of two sufficiently high probabilities is still a pretty reasonable probability (e.g. 0.6 * 0.6 = 0.36). Therefore, biological intelligent design has at least a reasonable probability:

P (BID) > "reasonable probability"

Wedge has posted a blog entry critical of Answers in Genesis, a young-earth creationist organization. While some in our club would probably not share that criticism, it is beneficial to critically analyze all viewpoints; after all, that is the essence of our mission statement.

While we are on the subject, I've stumbled upon some interesting links that possibly suggest that the age of the universe and earth may not be as old as conventionally estimated:

• Soft tissue in dinosaur fossils (HT: Design Watch)
• Active geology on Saturn's moons (HT: CEH)

In any case, iDesign @ UCI definitely welcomes everybody to the club, including young-earthers, old-earthers, Darwinians, and design proponents. The only people we don't accept are students from "Middle Earth" dorms. Just Kidding .

The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics has been used for quite some time to argue that order cannot come from disorder. Granville Sewell, a Texas A&M mathematician, brings the issue back on the table in this PDF article and slides (HT: Uncommon Descent). Some of the material in the article is also found in his "The Numerical Solution of Ordinary and Partial Differential Equations, Second Edition" textbook. Here's a clip from the article:

When you look at the individual steps in the development of life, Darwin’s explanation is difficult to disprove, because some selective advantage can be imagined in almost anything. Like every other scheme designed to violate the second law, it is only when you look at the net result that it becomes obvious it won’t work.

iMonk has an insightful article on the Ken-Ham style of Young Earch Creationism here:

My own experience with creationists indicates that maintaining a view of scripture that includes scientifically valid propositions about the age of the earth, the origin of species and the nature of geology/astronomy and physics is just as important as any Biblical statement about Jesus or the Gospel. Use of the Genesis account of creation and the fall anywhere in the Biblical narrative means that all the propositions, theories, explanations and extrapolations of the young earth creationists are assumed to be true, Biblical and the standard test for orthodoxy.

This is the sort of thing I grew up with. I can still remember attending an Answers in Genesis conference in grade school, where Ken Ham really did advise us to respond to our biology teachers by asking "were you there?" This kind of rhetoric does a disservice both to the Bible and to the children who are effectively being prepped to conlude that Christianity is intellectually vacuous when they encounter the real case for evolution.

There were two "Does God Exist?" events at UCI a couple years ago that were covered by the New University here and here. I got an email from a friend about a similar event this year:

Tom Frost, PhD Candidate in philosophy at the University of Wisconsin - Madison and Founder and President of the Foundation for Reasonable Christianity, a philosophy think tank that seeks to understand, and to help others to understand, Christianity's reasonable foundation, will be doing a "Debate Prelude" on the topic of "Does God Exist" at the Campus Crusade for Christ meeting at UCI in the Crystal Cove Auditorium of the student union building on March 16th between 7:30 and 9:00 PM.

Somewhere in that time span Tom will be given 45 minutes to debate the audience on the first stage of the argument for God's existence which he will present that night. There are four stages to his argument but there will only be time for him to cover the first of them that night and to interact with whomever desires to ask him questions or make comments on the argument. Anyone is welcome.

This "Debate Prelude" is to be a primer for that organization so that they can decide if they want to do a full blown debate on campus in the spring semester.

In case the bee flight episode wasn't damming enough, scientists have now discovered a huge virus (it has a genome bigger than that of some bacteria) that disproves ID, too.

The discovery itself is fascinating. This monster has 1,000 genes (simple viruses can get by with 10) which code for everything but the kitchen sink. The article is a little sensationalist: Mimi is still a virus and dependent on a host cell's machinery, so it couldn't bridge the gap between self-reproducing RNA and single-celled organisms. But it apparently contains genes conserved across all 3 kingdoms of life, so it was intimately involved (probably via lateral gene transfer, etc.) somewhere early on.

It is unclear to me, however, why design theorists (many of whom accept universal common descent) are supposed to pack up their bags and go home because a new virus is involved in some lateral gene transfer action. It just seems to be en vogue to explain how new scientific discoveries falsify some charicature of ID.