Free Republic

Dawkins the New Cultural ChristianRichard Dawkins has an endearing habit of rewriting history. For almost four decades, from the mid 1970s onward, he wrote of the human genome as mainly junk. It suited his Darwinism to do so, underscoring how evolution cobbles living forms together opportunistically, and that waste and inefficiencies in the genome are simply part of the messy process that is Darwinian evolution, focused as it is on natural selection acting on random variations. And then in the early 2010s the results of the ENCODE project were announced, showing that hardly any human DNA, and perhaps none of...

Intelligent Design Passes Peer Review Life Is Fine-Tuned In his book The Blind Watchmaker, Richard Dawkins defined biology as “the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.” Though our generation’s arch-atheist recognizes the tendency of human intuition to attribute things wonderful and complex to the work of a designer, he goes on to argue that life is not designed at all. His prior commitment to a worldview that understands the universe to be the product of eons of accidents and natural selection only imitates design is reflected in the book’s title:...

William Dembski, who was recently elected as the new Vice President of the EPS, released his latest book earlier this month from Broadman & Holman Academic, titled, The End of Christianity: Finding a Good God in an Evil World (2009). We interviewed Dembski about his book and its implications for Christian work on the "problem of evil." -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- What’s the main point that you are trying to communicate in this book? What is the “end of Christianity” that you speak of in your title? My book attempts to resolve how the Fall of Adam could be responsible for all evil...

DEBATE THREADThis INFORMAL debate will focus on Part 1 and 2 of Alex Williams' paper "Life's irreducible structure." Williams' paper will serve as the affirmative, namely: (A) All aspects of life (not just bacterial flagellums and blood clotting cascades) lie beyond the reach of naturalistic explanations, and (B) only intelligent design meets the criterion of an acceptable historical inference according to the Law of Cause and Effect. Part 1 of Alex Williams' paper follows. A link to Part 2 can be found in reply #1. It is strongly suggested that both papers be read before participating in the discussion/debate. One...

Charles Darwin, the 19th century geologist who wrote the treatise 'The Origin of Species, by means of Natural Selection' defined evolution as "descent with modification". Darwin hypothesized that all forms of life descended from a common ancestor, branching out over time into various unique life forms, due primarily to a process called natural selection. However, the fossil record shows that all of the major animal groups (phyla) appeared fully formed about 540 million years ago, and virtually no transitional life forms have been discovered which suggest that they evolved from earlier forms. This sudden eruption of multiple, complex organisms is...