Tag Archives: Intelligent Design

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Is Intelligent Design Science?

In this helpful video, Dr. Stephen Meyer explains the nature of science and then unpacks the definition of intelligent design. There is a lot of confusion about this point and I hope you find this video helpful. You can find out more about Dr. Meyer’s excellent book here.

If you are new to this whole discussion about Science, Evolution, and Intelligent Design and would like an accesible introduction, this is one of the best places to start:

I’ve found the empirical evidence for ID to be impressive and I think it poses a legitimate challenge to Darwinian Evolution. What questions do you have about intelligent design and evolution? Ask them here and we will discuss them in future posts. Have you found this blog helpful? You can have it delivered right to your inbox by signing up here.

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Why Are We Still Debating Darwin?

“In his “Socrates in the City” talk in Washington last week, Steve Meyer asked: “Is there a scientific controversy about the theory of evolution?” After quoting many spokesmen for official science who deny the existence of any such controversy, or any reason to doubt evolutionary theory whatsoever, Meyer showed that there are significant reasons to doubt both biological and chemical evolutionary theory.

He first addressed the problems associated with chemical evolutionary theory, which “attempts to explain the origin of the first life from simpler pre-existing chemicals.” Here he explained the critical question of the origin of genetic information. This is the problem he addressed in his bookSignature in the Cell, a problem that has beset all attempts to explain the origin of life by reference to undirected chemical evolutionary processes.

The most important idea for laymen to grasp is that of biological information. It’s difficult to understand “exactly what information is,” Meyer has written. It’s not a physical thing. He quotes the evolutionary biologist George Williams as saying that information “doesn’t have mass or charge or length,” and matter “doesn’t have bytes.” It follows that matter and information belong to “two separate domains.”
Information in biology is best understood as analogous to software code. Recall Bill Gates’s comment: “DNA is like a computer program but far, far more advanced than any software ever created.”
Software is a set of instructions for a new program in a computer. Likewise, DNA contains a set of instructions for the assembly of parts, namely proteins, within a cell. In the 19th century the cell was thought to be simple. Darwin and his contemporaries had no way of knowing just how complex it was. The cell today is sometimes compared to a high-tech factory. (Except it’s much more complex than that — factories can’t replicate themselves.)
Here is the key question: How did the requisite information get into the DNA in the first place? Without it, the first cell would never have been…” (read the rest) 

Think Christianly with Jonathan Morrow

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Should Christians Embrace Theistic Evolution?

There’s a lot of discussion right now about this question. Is theistic evolution a good ‘middle way’ for the scientific minded Christian? I offer some thoughts on where to begin answering this question in this short video:

Fore more on theistic evolution, see the helpful website Faith and Evolution.

I go into more detail on how this discussion plays out in the public square and how to equip the next generation here.

Dr. Stephen Meyer was recently on Stand to Reason talking about theistic evolution. You can access that here.

Think Christianly with Jonathan Morrow