Transcript Should Science Make You Lose Faith in God?

Intelligent Design
Principles of evolution
 Evolution: Species undergo genetic change over time.
 Gradualism: This takes many generations
 Speciation: 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 Scientists
 Michael Behe, Darwin’s Black Box, The Edge of Evolution
 William Dembski, The Design Inference, Intelligent Design, No
Free Lunch
Behe’s Mousetrap
Mathematism
The Explanatory Filter
 An 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 #1
 If the event has a high probability of being due to law, reject
it.
Step #2
 If the probability of the event being due to chance is
intermediate, reject the event as being at least potentially due
to chance.
Step #3
 There must be a small probability of the event being due to
chance.
 It must posses detachability.
 Conditional independence
 Tractability
 Delimitation
 If the event passes all tests it must be due to design.
Problems
 Every 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 Institute
 Regarding 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