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 [...]
Bill Pratt | October 29, 2010
Post Author: Bill Pratt A recurring misunderstanding I have seen in the intelligent design (ID) debate is the ignorance that many on the anti-ID side have of historical science. So, what is historical science and how is it different from the sciences which study currently operating phenomena? Philosopher of science Stephen Meyer lists four criteria [...]
Bill Pratt | October 21, 2010
Post Author: Bill Pratt One of the most common charges that intelligent design (ID) opponents hurl at ID theorists is that ID is not real science. They will say that a real scientific theory must be testable against the empirical world, must make predictions, must be falsifiable, must be explanatory by reference to natural law, [...]
Bill Pratt | July 17, 2010
Post Author: Bill Pratt I’ve been reading Donald Prothero’s book Evolution, which is a book meant to show how powerful the evidence for evolution is. Prothero, a professor of geology, certainly seems to know a lot about fossils, but he seems to know remarkably little about intelligent design (ID), a theory he maligns early in [...]
Bill Pratt | July 1, 2010
Post Author: Bill Pratt You may recall that in January of this year, we posted about the California Science Center, a public institution, reneging on the screening of a pro-intelligent design (ID) movie. The Discovery Institute, a pro-ID organization, filed a lawsuit when the Science Center refused to turn over all documents related to the [...]
Bill Pratt | June 24, 2010
Post Author: Bill Pratt Christians believe that a supernatural being can be reasoned to by working backward from effect to cause. We observe ourselves and we observe the world around us (those are the effects) and we reason that a supernatural cause is the best explanation for the things we observe. This is how almost [...]
Bill Pratt | April 19, 2010
Post Author: Bill Pratt Continuing from part 1, below are 5 more reasons you should doubt a scientific consensus, taken from Jay Richards’ article on the topic. 8. When the subject matter seems, by its nature, to resist consensus. An an engineer, this point has always bothered me about both evolution and climate change. Richards [...]
Bill Pratt | April 18, 2010
Post Author: Bill Pratt Lately on the blog I’ve had some people question why I side with the majority of experts on some issues and not with others. I had never really thought about this before, but then I ran across an article written by Jay Richards, entitled, “When to Doubt a Scientific ‘Consensus’“. Richards [...]
Bill Pratt | January 7, 2010
Post Author: Bill Pratt The pattern of censorship of the intelligent design movement continues with more disappointing news from California. Check out this summary of what’s going on with the California Science Center. It would be so much easier to allow a real debate to go on and defeat the ID movement with scientific data [...]
