Intelligent Design

From STR:

Stunning news from the scientific world:

One of life's greatest mysteries is how it began. Scientists have pinned it down to roughly this:Some chemical reactions occurred about 4 billion years ago — perhaps in a primordial tidal soup or maybe with help of volcanoes or possibly at the bottom of the sea or between the mica sheets — to create biology.Now scientists have created something in the lab that is tantalizingly close to what might have happened.It's not life, they stress, but it certainly gives the science community a whole new data set to chew on.

And all it took was a team of intelligent beings who knew the right conditions for this almost-life to thrive. Does that sound familiar?

When Science Points To God

From Townhall:
If you want to know why atheists seem to have given up the scientific card, the current issue of Discover magazine provides part of the answer. The magazine has an interesting story by Tim Folger which is titled “Science’s Alternative to an Intelligent Creator.” The article begins by noting “an extraordinary fact about the universe: its basic properties are uncannily suited for life.” As physicist Andrei Linde puts it, “We have a lot of really, really strange coincidences, and all of these coincidences are such that they make life possible.”
Too many “coincidences,” however, imply a plot. Folger’s article shows that if the numerical values of the universe, from the speed of light to the strength of gravity, were even slightly different, there would be no universe and no life. Recently scientists have discovered that most of the matter and energy in the universe is made up of so-called “dark” matter and “dark” energy. It turns out that the quantity of dark energy seems precisely calibrated to make possible not only our universe but observers like us who can comprehend that universe.
Even Steven Weinberg, the Nobel laureate in physics and an outspoken atheist, remarks that “this is fine-tuning that seems to be extreme, far beyond what you could imagine just having to accept as a mere accident.” And physicist Freeman Dyson draws the appropriate conclusion from the scientific evidence to date: “The universe in some sense knew we were coming.” ...

Completing Adam’s Task

Good stuff as always over at FirstThings. I was taken by this line: If knowledge is power and humans are one animal among many, then what will keep us from using this knowledge to lord our power over all other animals? Exactly. Contrary to popular myth, it is the Christian/biblical view of stewardship that offers the best protection of the environement.

...Animals, Genesis teaches, are a good part of a divinely sanctioned order, but we are not one of them. We can name them because we know that we have a destiny that transcends the animal world.
The current frenzy for naming has a different basis. Post-Darwinians can name the animals because we know that we are the same as them, not different. We share the same biological structure, and, more importantly, we share the same precarious existence on the environmentally troubled planet Earth.
Indeed, much of the hype for the Encyclopedia of Life concerns the claim that only by naming every species can we hope to preserve them from extinction. Yet there is no reason to think that this quest for absolute knowledge will lead to the protection of animals rather than their exploitation. Wilson is a champion of biodiversity and the love of nature for its own sake, yet even he admits that the Encyclopedia of Life will accelerate “the discovery of wild plant species adaptable for agriculture, new genes for the enhancement of crop productivity, and new class of pharmaceuticals.” If knowledge is power and humans are one animal among many, then what will keep us from using this knowledge to lord our power over all other animals?...(more)

INTELLIGENT DESIGN: A PRIMER

The Last Days of Darwin (follow the link for the full text)
A Brief History of the Revolution
by James M. Kushiner
In 1959, Sir Julian Huxley, grandson of “Darwin’s Bulldog” T. H. Huxley, was in Chicago to celebrate the centennial of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. Taking the pulpit of Rockefeller Chapel at the University of Chicago on Thanksgiving Day, he declared that man no longer needed to “take refuge in the arms of a divinized father-figure.” Evolution was the key to reality. The university’s “cavernous, Baroque Mandel Hall was packed for performances of an original showboat-style Darwinian musical, Time Will Tell.”
Here begins Larry Witham’s By Design, a history of “science and the search for God” in the twentieth century. Little did Huxley and the other celebrants know what time really would tell, least of all that 1959 would likely prove to be the high-water mark of Darwinism. But after the festivities ended, continuing developments in science itself, from many quarters, would begin to threaten Darwin’s monopoly and, eventually, his theory.
Witham, an award-winning journalist on religion and society, points out the cracks in scientific orthodoxy that developed well before the intelligent design (ID) movement began in the 1990s.
As early as 1951, biophysicist Harold Morowitz was trying to find the cell’s “information content.” He eventually concluded that it was impossible for life to have arisen without some large infusion of information. Not a theist, he nonetheless created space for an Intelligent Designer.
At the Darwin centennial, naturalist Ernst Mayr and geneticist Sewall Wright could not agree on the mechanism of Darwinism (genetic change or natural selection), yet everyone swore fealty to “gradualism,” even though no one really knew what the gradual steps were. Gradualism was the crucial feature of Darwin’s theory, as it claimed that minute random steps, accumulated over time, eventually produced a wide variety of species.