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I came across an interesting article from the Acton Institute on Wikipedia

“Ten years ago this month, Internet entrepreneur Jimmy Wales hired Larry Sanger to develop an online encyclopedia. You may have never heard of that project, titled “Nupedia,” but you’ve probably heard of the site that emerged from its ashes. Wikipedia is not only one of the most successful initiatives in the history of the Web but also a shining example of the potential of human cooperation.

Wikipedia sprouted in the fertile soil of freedom and possibility that characterized the early days of the Internet. Andrew Lih tells the story in The Wikipedia Revolution (2009). Wales, a principal of the technology company Bomis, perceived the potential demand for an online encyclopedia and launched his new venture to fill that need. Nupedia was soon abandoned because it was the result of conventional thinking—a traditional encyclopedia model applied to the Internet. When this dawned on Wales and Sanger, the resulting creative spark ignited the Wikipedia revolution. Putting an encyclopedia on the Web should mean not merely a change in the location of encyclopedia content, they realized: the new technology could instead transform the entire process of content production and publication. This was the insight that set Wikipedia apart and soon attracted millions of people across the world to its community.

The Wikipedia experiment was an exercise in entrepreneurship, and demonstrates that the impetus for life-enhancing innovation is not merely monetary success. Wales and Sanger were motivated by a desire to promote learning and empower people. In their view, the accumulation and dissemination of knowledge should be democratic: let anyone with access to a computer participate in the process.

Traditionally, the collection and presentation of the world’s accumulated knowledge in the encyclopedia format was a jealously guarded prerogative of the gatekeepers of established publishing and academic institutions. This method had its advantages: consistency, careful review processes, and adherence to accepted standards of scholarship.

It also had its drawbacks. The updating and release of new material necessarily occurred at a glacial pace. Originality and dissent were frowned upon and non-mainstream perspectives could only find their way to print slowly, if at all. There were intrinsic limitations of scale and scope, put in place by the economics of the editorial and print process: only major topics deemed to be of interest to large numbers of people could justify the resources put into covering any given entry.

The philosophy of its founders shaped Wikipedia and supplied its unique sensibility, overturning the conventional constraints of established encyclopedias. Most critically, Wales and Sanger possessed a fundamental faith in humanity. Wikipedia is not about technology, Wales wrote in the foreword to Lih’s book, “it’s about people… it’s about trusting people, it’s about encouraging people to do good.” Detractors believed that permitting open editing of web content, or “crowdsourcing,” would result in chaos. Bias, error, and distortion would be rife. How could the anonymous interaction of the Web, they wondered, result in reliably accurate information on a wide range of topics?

But Wikipedia’s bet on the potential of free human interaction in an online community paid off. By 2008, it boasted more than 2 million articles in English, and millions more in some 250 other languages. By almost any measure it was a spectacular success.

The model pioneered by Wikipedia is not flawless. One might…” For more…

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Brit Hume, Tiger Woods, and Turning to Jesus (a little context)

Well, Brit Hume has lit up the blogosphere and made headlines with (what seemed to be from the clip–just search You Tube) a genuine concern for Tiger’s well-being.

Now, from the huffington post, to fox news, to everywhere in between. People are talking about Brit Hume, Jesus, and Tiger. There are lots of things we could weigh in on (e.g., the validity and veracity of his claim? Should it be uttered on the news? If Islam or New Age were commended instead of Jesus, would there be the backlash? All interesting questions.

So….What did Brit Hume actually say?

“Tiger Woods will recover as a golfer. Whether he can recover as a person, I think, is a very open question. And it’s a tragic situation. . . . But the Tiger Woods that emerges once the news value dies out of this scandal, the extent to which he can recover, seems to me to depend on his faith.

“He’s said to be a Buddhist. I don’t think that faith offers the kind of forgiveness and redemption that is offered by the Christian faith. So my message to Tiger would be, ‘Tiger, turn to the Christian faith and you can make a total recovery and be a great example to the world.’ “

In our increasingly secular and pluralistic society the fact that this was greeted with outrage is unsurprising. But for all those hoping to vilify Brit Hume for sharing what he has found to be true, one should it a least understand some personal context (whether he should have said it or not on a News show, I’ll let you decide).

Brit lost a son to suicide in 1998. I can’t imagine the pain of that as a father. And in an interview in 2008 when he retired from as Washington Bureau Chief for Fox News, he said:

“I certainly want to pursue my faith more ardently than I have done. I’m not claiming it’s impossible to do when you work in this business. I was kind of a nominal Christian for the longest time. When my son died, I came to Christ in a way that was very meaningful to me. If a person is a Christian and tries to face up to the implications of what you say you believe, it’s a pretty big thing. If you do it part time, you’re not really living it.”

My point is this. Maybe in a moment of candor, Brit was being deeply honest with Tiger. Simply expressing what / who he has found that has changed his life?

….Here is an interesting article from Politics Daily

here is a post by Stand to Reason looking more at the specific claim.

Here is Brit talking later about what he said on Sunday:

Leap of Faith

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Is Intelligent Design identical to Creationism?

Confusion abounds concerning what ID (Intelligent Design) is and isn’t. So, we must be careful to clearly define it. The media, for the most part gets it wrong by calling ID a form of Creationism (we will discuss the difference below). And opponents of ID label it Creationism for rhetorical reasons so as to paint ID with the same ignorance brush as those who still believe the earth is flat. So instead of engaging with the scientific evidence marshaled by ID scientists and philosophers,[i] DE (proponents of Darwinian Evolution) resorts to name calling and institutional bullying. To get at the truth, here are some definitions straight from leading ID proponents.

William Dembski argues that the basic claim of ID is that “there exist natural systems that cannot be adequately explained in terms of undirected natural causes and that exhibit features which in any other circumstance we would attribute to design.” For example, imagine you are driving through the mountains and all of the sudden you come across a rock face that demands your attention—it is different than the others. Whereas wind and erosion can account for the random appearances of most of the mountains you have seen that day, it cannot account for the four shapes embedded in this rock face. Why not? Because there is a recognizable pattern of intelligence that went in to the formation of this mountain. This becomes obvious by the fact that there are four specific shapes / patterns matching the faces of four former presidents of the United States (Mt. Rushmore). The natural inference here is not to the blind and unguided natural processes of wind and erosion but rather to design.

Consider another example from the science of Archaeology.[ii] When archeologists excavate sites and sift through dirt, how do they distinguish between authentic artifacts and rocks? Answer: they look for marks of design or what Dembski calls Specified Complexity (highly improbable patterns). Now what happens when scientists apply this same principle to biology at a molecular level? Michael Behe did just that and observed that some systems (e.g., Bacterial Flagellum) cannot be accounted for by blind natural selection.[iii] In fact, he concluded from his research that the most probable inference for the origin of irreducibly complex systems is design. A system is irreducibly complex if “it consists of several interrelated parts for which removing even one part destroys the system’s function.” If this concept is still a little fuzzy think of a mouse trap. What is necessary for a mouse trap to work is its having all the parts (wood, spring, cheese, latch etc.) working together. But it is not as though a block of cheese catches some mice, so adding a spring would catch more, then adding a block of wood would catch even more. The point is that the individual components serve no function by themselves. It is only when they function together as a whole do you get a beneficial function. Charles Darwin in 1859 admitted that “If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not have possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.” That is quite a statement! Dembski pinpoints the crucial issue, “the point is whether nature (conceived as a closed system of blind, unbroken natural causes) can generate specified [or irreducible] complexity in the sense of originating it when previously there was none.” After one hundred and fifty years, it does not seem that it can. So by Darwin’s own admission, his theory is breaking down. It should also be noted that as we learn more and more about the complexity of the cell and DNA, the problem is only going to get worse for DE.

It is imperative to recognize that ID is not making a claim based on religious presuppositions. On the contrary, scientists have observed the relevant data and inferred design as the best explanation. Gaps exist in the understanding of molecular biology that DE has no way of bridging according to their theory. ID does have an explanation. As noted above, DE is stuck with the problem of where information comes from and how it is transferred (See Stephen Meyer’s Signature in the Cell). ID has an explanation for this, inferred from the data, as well. These systems and organisms appear designed because they are designed. Now to be sure, ID research has religious implications but it is not religious in nature. It does not claim to say who this designer is or what he is like—that is a question for Theology and Philosophy of Religion to debate. ID is not Creationism in sheep’s clothing adorned with fancy vocabulary.


[i] I include philosophers as well, because it is actually impossible to separate scientific inquiry from philosophical assumptions.

[ii] We could also talk about cryptology or the SETI project (Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence—regardless of what you think about this, these scientists are assuming that intelligence can be recognized—like a series of prime numbers 1,3,13 etc. [see the movie Contact]). So if Scientists know what does and doesn’t count as intelligence, then why the hesitance to apply that understanding to what they observe in biology?

[iii] Michael J. Behe, Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996).

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California Science Center is sued for canceling a film promoting intelligent design

Here is some of the LA Times article (and more about Intelligent Design “ID” below):

“A lawsuit alleges that the state-owned center improperly bowed to pressure from the Smithsonian Institution, as well as e-mailed complaints from USC professors and others. It contends that the center violated both the 1st Amendment and a contract to rent the museum’s Imax Theater when it canceled the screening of “Darwin’s Dilemma: The Mystery of the Cambrian Fossil Record.”

The suit was filed in Los Angeles Superior Court by the American Freedom Alliance, an L.A.-based group described by senior fellow Avi Davis as a nonprofit, nonpartisan “think tank and activist network promoting Western values and ideals.”

The AFA seeks punitive damages and compensation for financial losses, as well as a declaration from the court that the center violated the Constitution and cannot refuse the group the right to rent its facilities for future events.

The AFA had planned an Oct. 25 screening of two films at the Exposition Park museum — one a short Imax movie called “We are Born of Stars,” which favors Darwin’s theory; the other, “Darwin’s Dilemma: The Mystery of the Cambrian Fossil Record,” a feature-length documentary that criticizes Darwin and promotes intelligent design.

Intelligent design is the theory that an intelligent being, rather than impersonal forces such as Darwinian natural selection, is responsible for shaping life on Earth. An overwhelming majority of scientists and science and natural history museums consider the theory of evolution to have been proved beyond a doubt by genetic and fossil evidence. Critics of intelligent design have dismissed it as a superficially scientific cloak for the straightforwardly religious belief known as Creationism that’s anchored in a literal reading of the biblical Book of Genesis….” (More)

For more on this story click here.

Just for the record and the 1 millionth time. Intelligent Design is not Creationsim derived from a literal reading of Genesis…well, I now feel better. (they are separate issues)

If you would like to understand Intelligent Design in plain language, see this book by Sean McDowell and William Dembski:

For understanding how to navigate issues of Science and Faith (as well as interpreting Genesis 1-3 and how all that fits with the age of the earth and Darwinian evolution) look no further than Science and Faith: Friends or Foes by C. John “Jack” Collins. (Hebrew scholar and MIT graduate)