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