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Intelligent Design

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.

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Intelligent Design

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  1. Intelligent Design

  2. 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.

  3. Leading Scientists • Michael Behe, Darwin’s Black Box, The Edge of Evolution • William Dembski, The Design Inference, Intelligent Design, No Free Lunch

  4. Behe’s Mousetrap

  5. Mathematism

  6. 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.

  7. Step #1 • If the event has a high probability of being due to law, reject it.

  8. 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.

  9. 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.

  10. 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.”

  11. 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.”

  12. The Battle of Gettysburg? Kitzmiller v. Dover, December 14, 2004

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