Discovery InstitutePosted on 10/20/2005 1:50:35 PM PDT by dukeman
SEATTLE -- The theory of intelligent design will have its first major European showing at a international, scientific conference in Prague, Czech Republic next Saturday, October 21. Promoters of the conference -- Darwin and Design: A Challenge for 21st Century Science (http://www.darwinanddesign.org) -- say that attendance at the Congress Centrum in Prague could reach 1,000 attendees, including scientists from Europe and the United States, teachers, students and the general public.
"The conference will clearly demonstrate that the theory of intelligent design is based upon scientific evidence and discoveries in fields such as biochemistry, molecular biology, paleontology and astrophysics," said speaker Dr. Stephen C. Meyer, director of Discovery Institute's Center for Science & Culture, himself an Oxford educated philosopher of science. "Many in Europe know intelligent design and the case against Darwin's theory of evolution only through inaccurate accounts they have received from the media, and this conference will help educate them on what intelligent design is really about."
Discovery Institute is home to many of the leading scientists and scholars researching the theory of intelligent design. Intelligent design holds that an intelligent cause rather than an unguided process such as natural selection can best explain certain features of the universe and living things. Design scientists do not base their theory on religious authority, but instead on scientific evidences and well-established principles of scientific reasoning. They do not support the creationist view that the Earth is only 6,000 or so years old.
Charles Thaxton, a biochemist who has taught at Charles University in Prague, and a fellow of the Discovery Institute, is the chief organizer of the conference. Thaxton wrote a seminal book on the theory of intelligent design titled, "The Mystery of Life's Origins" in 1984. In addition to Meyer, Thaxton has arranged for notable European scientist Cees Dekker, a biophysics professor at the Technical University of Delft in the Netherlands, and John Lennox, an Oxford mathematician, to speak, along with Discovery Institute senior fellows David Berlinski (author of Infinite Ascent, Tour of the Calculus and Advent of the Algorithm), biochemist Michael Behe and biologist Jonathan Wells.
Representatives of Christoph Cardinal Schonborn of Vienna, Austria will attend the conference. Cardinal Schonborn, former lead editor of The Catechism of the Catholic Church, has recently challenged claims of Darwinists that the Catholic Church accepts the broad anti-design implications drawn by proponents of Darwin's theory.
For more information please visit the conference website at http://www.darwinanddesign.org.
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!! Why does it "not" surprise me that the conference was organized by the "Discovery Institute"/
Yeah, these crackpots can just dream on. Are they anything like all the people who believe in the virgin birth?
Dang, that's the same weekend as the astrology and tarot card convention...
Cat is out of the bag!
Discovery InstituteAnother.
You ought to debate Charles Thaxton sometime. In a rational exchange free of emotional diatribes and ad hominem attacks like yours, my guess is you'd be very embarrassed.
===> Placemarker (though I'm not sure why) <===
Oh, please. The "Discovery Institute" is a bad joke. I've read a lot their stuff, and it is perhaps not quite as bad as the stuff the comes from Duane Gish, but it's still creationist propaganda to the core.
side comment on entries on this thread - BRAIN-DEATH ALERT!
I told him "Nobody made it -- it just appeared."
If I ask you, "who made you?" I assume you might be inclined to say, as many do, "God made me." But we all know that in fact you were not made in the sense that a computer was made by some external agent. You grew from a fertilized cell in accordance with Natural Law, as did all the many billions of living organisms extant.
So your little quip backfires, I should think.
And who made the cell?
Which one?
Recall that your clever answer to your friend referred to a particular computer, so the fair implication would be that it's absurd to think that any particular cell sprang into being without "being made", yet this is what they do, as we all know.
So are you willing to admit that your clever answer was not clever at all? You put it on the table, will you take it back off ?
You ignored the premise. Nothing just springs into being without a code, so it is only natural to ask who authored the code. Just as a pile of electronic components couldn't have assembled themselves and then arranged themselves into my working computer, nature itself clearly has an author. There is an order to nature that randomness cannot explain.
I am criticising your comparison ( as implied by your answer to your friend ) of a computer with living organism.
Nothing just springs into being without a code, so it is only natural to ask who authored the code.
A computer isn't made from a code. It is manufactured just like a televison, a lawn mower, or even a thimble.
Living organisms are in no way manufactured and do indeed "spring into being" by all appearances. As you may know, people for many centuries believed that flies and mice were in fact spontaneously generated from nonliving matter.
Now we discover in detail the material basis for the generation of life, and you would think this would be a huge triumph for materialist philosophy. We can give a materialistic account, not only of the on going generation of life, but of the history of many millions of previous generations, constituting the evolution of life on earth, as known to us from the fossil record.
Isn't this plenty? Can't we teach that?
Just as a pile of electronic components couldn't have assembled themselves and then arranged themselves into my working computer, nature itself clearly has an author.
You are all over the map. The idea that Nature itself has an author is a philosophical or religious sentiment and science is not concerned with it, since it is only concerned with the workings of nature, which includes the course of natural history, as it presents itself to us.
There is an order to nature that randomness cannot explain.
The primary order of nature is its constitution from space, time, energy, and matter - truly a fascinating arrangement. If you want to say that all of this cannot be explained by randomness, that's fine.
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