PBS Offers Intelligent Design Documentary

CREATION - Evolution Headlines ^ | 04/28/2003 | Illustra Media/CREATION - Evolution Headlines

[Remedy]

According to Illustra Media, the Public Broadcasting System uploaded the film Unlocking the Mystery of Life to its satellite this past Sunday. For the next three years, it will be available for member stations to download and broadcast. In addition, PBS is offering the film on their Shop PBS website under Science/Biology videos (page 4).

The film, released a little over a year ago, has been called a definitive presentation of the Intelligent Design movement. With interviews and evidences from eight PhD scientists, it presents strictly scientific (not religious) arguments that challenge Darwinian evolution, and show instead that intelligent design is a superior explanation for the complexity of life, particularly of DNA and molecular machines. The film has been well received not only across America but in Russia and other countries. Many public school teachers are using the material in science classrooms without fear of controversies over creationism or religion in the science classroom, because the material is scientific, not religious, in all its arguments and evidences, and presents reputable scientists who are well qualified in their fields: Dean Kenyon, Michael Behe, Jonathan Wells, Steven Meyer, William Dembski, Scott Minnich, Jed Macosko, and Paul Nelson, with a couple of brief appearances by Phillip E. Johnson, the "founder" of the Intelligent Design movement.

Check with your local PBS Station to find out when they plan to air it. If it is not on their schedule, call or write and encourage them to show the film. Why should television partly supported by public tax funds present only a one-sided view on this subject, so foundational to all people believe and think? We applaud PBS's move, but it is only partial penance for the Evolution series and decades of biased reporting on evolution.

This is a wonderful film, beautifully edited and shot on many locations, including the Galápagos Islands, and scored to original music by Mark Lewis. People are not only buying it for themselves, but buying extra copies to show to friends and co-workers. Unlocking the Mystery of Life available here on our Products page in VHS and DVD formats. The film is about an hour long and includes vivid computer graphics of DNA in action. The DVD version includes an extra half-hour of bonus features, including answers to 14 frequently-asked questions about intelligent design, answered by the scientists who appear in the film.

This is a must-see video. Get it, and get it around.

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Intelligent Design Gets a Powerful New Media Boost 03/09/2002
Exclusive Over 600 guests gave a standing ovation Saturday March 9 at the premiere of a new film by Illustra Media, Unlocking the Mystery of Life. This 67-minute documentary is in many ways a definitive portrayal of the Intelligent Design movement that is sweeping the country. Intelligent Design is a non-religious, non-sectarian, strictly scientific view of origins with both negative and positive arguments: negative, that Darwinism is insufficient to explain the complexity of life, and positive, that intelligent design, or information, is a fundamental entity that must be taken into consideration in explanations of the origin of complex, specified structures like DNA. The film features interviews with a Who's Who of the Intelligent Design movement: Phillip Johnson, Michael Behe, Jonathan Wells, Paul Nelson, Stephen Meyer, Dean Kenyon, William Dembski, and others, who explain the issues and arguments for intelligent design as the key to unlocking the mystery of life. The film also features nearly 20 minutes of award-quality computer animation of molecular machines, manufacturing plants, and storage libraries of elaborate information - DNA and proteins at work in the cell, climaxing with a dazzling view of DNA transcription and translation.
In his keynote address, Dr. Paul Nelson (who appears in the film), gave reasons for optimism. He said that Time Magazine, usually solidly Darwinian, admitted just last week that these Intelligent Design scientists may be onto something. U.S. News and World Report is also coming out with a piece on I.D. And Stephen Meyer, who also appears in the film, could not be at the premiere because he was on his way to Ohio (see next headline), armed with copies of the film to give to the school board members. Nelson said that scientists should not arbitrarily rule design off the table. "Keeping science from discovering something that might be true is like having a pair of spectacles that distorts your vision," he said. "It does profound harm to science." He described how Ronald Numbers, evolutionist, once told him that design might be true, but science is a game, with the rule that scientists cannot even consider the possibility of design; "that's just the way it is," he said. (See this quote by Richard Lewontin for comparison.) Yet design is already commonly considered in archaeology, cryptography, forensics, and SETI, so why not in biology? Apparently this arbitrary rule has become a national controversy. Intelligent Design, says Nelson, is finally removing a "rule of the game" that is hindering science. If the reaction of the crowd at the premiere luncheon was any indication, Unlocking the Mystery of Life has launched a well-aimed smart weapon at the citadels of Darwinism.

We highly recommend this film. Copies are just now becoming available for $20. Visit IllustraMedia.com and order it. View it, and pass it around. Share it with your teachers, your co-workers, your church. You will have no embarrassment showing this high-quality, beautiful, amazing film to anyone, even the most ardent evolutionist.

 

 

[tortoise]

Since we assume a Creator, that Creator is not limited nor can be logically limited by the materialist world view.

That doesn't follow. The Creator may very well have a fundamentally materialist world view, but with such an unimaginable level of power and technology that we can't tell one way or another. It certainly isn't reasonable to assert that the Creator isn't a materialist, nor does it conflict with any reasonable view of the Creator existing in the first place.

Assuming a Creator exists is one thing, assuming you know the Creator's world view, state of existence, or his favorite flavor of ice cream is something else entirely and immensely arrogant. If the Creator exists in all His glory, He doesn't need to fit into any mold or box you can imagine. If He exists, the only thing you can know about him is that you know nothing.

[GSHastings]

Evolution has nothing to do with how the first life forms came into being. That you would equate such with evolution merely demonstrates your complete ignorance of the subject.

No it doesn't. If evolution is true, then if you rewind the sequences of evolution, ultimately must arrive at the beginning. And that reverse flow of sequences would transend right past any arbitrary point you might want to conveniently define as "life", and continue right on to some point that everyone would agree to be non-living.

Sorry, no free ride.

[VadeRetro]

"a void that has the function of knowledge but conveys none."

Sounds more like how ID works. "When you get to a mystery, stop! You're done."

[tortoise]

The Impersonal gives rise to the personal? How do you explain that one?

There is no impossiblity there, you just have a limited imagination. If you are going to take the figurative handcuffs off the ultimate being, they come all the way off, not just in ways you can imagine. I am only working on your assumption that the fellow has functionally unlimited power and capability within our universe. That allows for a lot, and isn't particularly descriptive of the true capabilities of a Creator.

To make a rough analogy, just because I only use WinAmp on my computer does not mean that the only thing my computer can do is play music. It may seem that way if that is the only aspect of it I show people, but apparent limitation is just a perspective, not a true limit. The Creator may have a vastly greater feature set than the one you feel the need to assign to Him, and the properties you do assign him implies this very thing.

[Dimensio]

If evolution is true, then if you rewind the sequences of evolution, ultimately must arrive at the beginning. And that reverse flow of sequences would transend right past any arbitrary point you might want to conveniently define as "life", and continue right on to some point that everyone would agree to be non-living.

If you run the process of evolution back to the "beginning" to the point of the first life forms, then you would be addressing how those life forms came into being, but once you did that you would not be addressing evolution anymore. If you're dealing with some process that creates imperfect self-replicators rather than the imperfect self-replicators themselves then you are not dealing with evolution. Evolution deals with existing life forms. A process that causes life to exist where it did not before involves, at one stage, a system with no life forms. As such, that process cannot be evolution. Once again, it does not matter how the first life forms came into being, they could have been a result of electricity in amino acids, aliens from another dimension, time-travelling humans who realised that humanity was responsible for its own existence or a divine agent zap-poofing it into existence -- EVOLUTION DOES NOT DEPEND UPON HOW LIFE ORIGINATED ON THIS PLANET

[Remedy]

My question is "why insist upon assuming a designer"?

Human Embryo Research After the Genome The genome is simply the sum of hereditary information for the species. Written in the molecular language of DNA and organized into genes, the genome encodes all the instructions the organism needs to synthesize cellular building blocks and develop from an embryo into a unique, mature individual with a beating heart, sensitive fingers, and a brain that even in toddlers vastly outclasses the most advanced computers. Although microscopic in size, the human genome is enormous in its information content. Its 3.1 billion nucleotide base pairs are arranged along a double helical strand of DNA that, if removed from a single cell and stretched out, would measure more than five feet long, but only 50 trillionths of an inch in thickness.ⁱⁱⁱ If written out as a book, the human genome would take up the equivalent of 200 volumes the size of a Manhattan telephone book at 1000 pages each. It would take 19 years to read aloud without stopping, at 5 bases per second, the entire sequence of the genome within the nucleus of the human embryo.^vv

…If the embryo were not so busy, he or she might take a moment to wink at the thousand scientists who labored for 15 years to sequence the complete human genome. Hailed as "a massive project on a scale unparalleled in the history of biology,"ⁱⁱ and at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars, the Human Genome Project has yielded a staggering volume of data. The only problem is that science knows how to read only a small portion of the genome. The underrated human embryo can read it all.

[Dimensio]

Wow. So DNA is complicated and hard for humans to understand. Why does this imply an intelligent designer, and if it does, does it imply any attributes of this designer?

[PatrickHenry]

... does it imply any attributes of this designer?

Certainly. The Designer -- don't forget to capitalize that word -- is obviously serpentine in configuration. When two of the Designers are engaged in copulation, they form a double helix. Our genetic material is nothing more than Designer pornography, and we are a cosmic joke.

[general_re]

I think now that I've fleshed out my creationist theory on the origin of the continents, I'm going to move on. I have an idea for a writing a movie-review column from a creationist perspective. The way it works is that I'll review movies by looking at them and reporting my impressions to my faithful creationist readers, but the trick is that I'll examine each frame of the movie in isolation, without inferring any relationship between a given frame and the ones that come before it or after it - each frame will be regarded as an independent construct, to be examined on its own merits. After all, there's no transition from one frame to the next, and so we can't reasonably conclude that two adjacent frames are actually related, even if they appear to have common elements, and we certainly can't conclude that all the frames together compose a coherent whole.

[PatrickHenry]

... we certainly can't conclude that all the frames together compose a coherent whole.

These all remind me of Zeno's Paradox.

[rwfromkansas]

bump

[rwfromkansas]

lol!

They are airing one token program because Congress is investigating them.

[rwfromkansas]

I have only met one evolutionist who actually was willing to listen instead of simply call us "idiots" or "people that do not really believe science."

Forgive me for thinking you are all arrogant pricks that consider yourselves superior.

[general_re]

"You can't get there from here." ;)

[<1/1,000,000th%]

PBS supporting fundamentalist Christians???

Was that a pig flying past my window????

[Dimensio]

have only met one evolutionist who actually was willing to listen instead of simply call us "idiots" or "people that do not really believe science."

Funny, I've gotten the impression that most creationists were more concerned with ignoring facts when they were presented and simply called evolution supporters zelaots who were looking for an excuse not to believe in Christianity.

[Doctor Stochastic]

Your hypothesis of an ultimate turtle still doesn't answer the question. How did such a being come into existence?

Nor have you demonstrated the existence of any being not subject to the laws of the universe. All so-far observed beings are subject the laws of the universe.

[Doctor Stochastic]

On the other hand, "change is specie" is rather heavy.

[Doctor Stochastic]

That should have read: «On the other hand, "change in specie" is rather heavy.».

[Doctor Stochastic]

Which assertion? That you are a drop in FR?