Bill Pratt | November 4, 2011
Post Author: Bill Pratt I recently wrote a series of three blog posts discussing the argument to design from analogy. I concluded that this approach to arguing that life is designed is a live option, but that it falls short of the kind of certainty we would like the argument to have. Philosopher of science [...]
Bill Pratt | October 31, 2011
Post Author: Bill Pratt In the first two parts of this series, I presented Mark Isaak’s arguments from his 2003 article. In this article, his central contention was that human design and life are not analogous; there are at least six important differences that make the analogy break down. Analogies imply that there are similarities [...]
Bill Pratt | October 21, 2011
Post Author: Bill Pratt In part 1 of this series, I introduced Mark Isaak’s 2003 article which argued that human designs are not analogous to life, and that an argument to design using the analogical method fails. Mark Isaak listed six attributes of human design that are not found in life, and now we take up attribute number [...]
Bill Pratt | October 19, 2011
Post Author: Bill Pratt In an article written in 2003, Mark Isaak explored “What Design Looks Like.” The central argument of the article was simple. According to Isaak, creationists who claim that life is designed are using an argument from analogy - the analogy is between human design and biological life. In his article, Isaak [...]
Bill Pratt | October 10, 2011
Post Author: Bill Pratt The intelligent design movement claims that when we look at certain features of the natural world, we are justified in inferring that these features were designed by an intelligent agent or designer. The exact arguments are hashed out elsewhere on this blog and in numerous books and websites. One of the [...]
Bill Pratt | April 27, 2011
Post Author: Bill Pratt This post is a few months belated, but better late than never. Every year, Access Research Network does a phenomenal job collecting science news that bears on the intelligent design and evolution debate. For 2010, they have again assembled a great list. If you are at all interested in this debate, [...]
Bill Pratt | April 25, 2011
Post Author: Bill Pratt I have followed the intelligent design (ID) movement for several years now and there is an error that I’ve seen opponents of ID make over and over. The error is confusing the idea of common descent with the idea of random mutation and natural selection. Common descent refers to the idea [...]
Bill Pratt | February 28, 2011
Post Author: Bill Pratt I have long suspected that it is not. I was listening to another Unbelievable? podcast the other day which featured a debate between ID proponent Michael Behe and ID opponent Keith Fox – both are biochemists. During the discussion Behe talked about the longest running lab experiment to test the effects [...]
Bill Pratt | December 23, 2010
Post Author: Bill Pratt Many journalists confuse the Intelligent Design (ID) movement with young earth creationism. Some of this confusion is nothing more than intellectual laziness, but some of it is caused by ID opponents repeating the assertion over and over again as a rhetorical strategy. Here is an interview excerpt from Thomas Lessl, a [...]
Bill Pratt | November 19, 2010
Post Author: Bill Pratt One of the most common arguments you will hear that Darwinian evolution must be true is the “Junk DNA” argument. It goes like this: There are significant stretches of the human genome that appear not to code for any biological function. This is what you would expect if millions of years [...]
