CONSIDER THIS: If You Aren’t Sure About This Intelligent Design Stuff

Odds are overwhelming that unless you’ve read one of the many fine books explaining Intelligent Design (ID) published by the Discovery Institute, or viewed a YouTube video of somebody like biologist Michael Denton, author of the “The Miracle of Man,” or Professor Stephen Meyer, author of the “Return of the God Hypothesis,” you almost certainly have never heard it explained in an intellectually honest and comprehensive manner.

That’s unfortunate because, regardless of how you ultimately decide to view ID — as a reasonable hypothesis based on significant evidence and logic or as without any validity whatsoever in any rational universe — it’s impossible to come to an educated conclusion about one of the core debates in the scientific community about the origins of the universe.

There’s a lot of ground to cover here, so beginning today, HillFaith will regularly feature with the CONSIDER THIS moniker links to the latest articles explaining, defending and applying ID, plus the top few graphs from those articles.

Regardless of your views on the issue, it is hoped that having these resources available will sharpen everybody’s understanding of the issues involved. So with that said, how about we hit the go button!

More Ways Human and Ape Brains Differ:

From Evolution News: “Yale University researchers have identified more specific ways the human brain differs from the brains of all other primates. Using ‘hundreds of thousands of cells collected from the dlPFC of adult humans, chimpanzees, macaque, and marmoset monkeys,’ they found:

“‘After grouping cells with similar expression profiles, they revealed 109 shared primate cell types but also five that were not common to all species. These included a type of microglia, or brain-specific immune cell, that was present only in humans and a second type shared by only humans and chimpanzees.

“‘The human-specific microglia type exists throughout development and adulthood, the researchers found, suggesting the cells play a role in maintenance of the brain upkeep rather than combatting disease … An analysis of gene expression in the microglia revealed another human-specific surprise — the presence of the gene FOXP2. This discovery raised great interest because variants of FOXP2 have been linked to verbal dyspraxia, a condition in which patients have difficulty producing language or speech.'”

Rosenhouse’s Whoppers: Probability Theory is Irrelevant:

“I am responding again to Jason Rosenhouse about his book The Failures of Mathematical Anti-Evolutionism. See my earlier posts here, here, here, and here.

“The other mega whopper in Rosenhouse’s reply is the claim that probabilities can never be used to assess (and thus potentially to question) how and whether Darwinian evolution can bring about novel biological forms or adaptations. He writes:

‘We have no probability estimates for the evolution of these systems [such as the eye or flagellum]. That is because probability theory is fundamentally the wrong tool for this particular job. That’s the whole point! Not only can you not rigorously calculate the probability of evolving a particular complex system, you cannot even estimate it in any reasonable way.’

“And how does Rosenhouse justify such a massive claim? By citing a single sentence from the Harvard biologist Michael Nowak: ‘You cannot calculate the probability that an eye came about. We don’t have the information to make this calculation.’ Now it’s certainly true that if we were at an early point in the history of life, when no eyes existed, we would be in no position to say how likely eyes would be to evolve by natural selection or, for that matter, how likely it would be for a designer capable of producing eyes in fact to produce them.”

The Design Genius of the Human Ankle and Wrist:

“When engineers educate evolutionists about where their theory falls short, the results can be enlightening and entertaining. Sometimes they are spectacular. That’s the case with distinguished mechanical engineer Stuart Burgess and his presentation at the recent Westminster Conference on Science and Faith. Burgess addresses some claims of forensic scientist Nathan Lents in the latter’s 2018 book, Human Errors: A Panorama of Our Glitches, from Pointless Bones to Broken Genes. As Burgess says, ‘It should be called Lents’s Errors.’

“Professor Lents is a proponent of the ‘unintelligent design’ hypothesis. He looks at engineering marvels like the human wrist and ankle and sees only ‘blunders,’ ‘pointless bones,’ ‘anatomical errors.’ Burgess has studied those wonders of biology more closely than Lents has and explains in detail why they are, in fact, ‘ingenious’ solutions to engineering problems that leave the genius of human engineers far behind. Burgess is simply on fire. You’ve got to watch this:

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