Literature

A discussion of ID-related Reading

Post details: The enigma of Paul Davies

11/24/06

by David Tyler 11:17:39 am, Categories: Literature - Articles, 391 words

The enigma of Paul Davies

This review of Paul Davies’ latest book will raise a few eyebrows. Some will think that Davies has abandoned science. Others will express their puzzlement why Davies cannot make a Design Inference. Earlier this week, I was reading Alvin Plantinga on the twin pillars of Christian Scholarship. He identifies three main contestants in the contemporary intellectual world: Christianity, Perennial Naturalism and Creative Anti-realism. The latter finds expression in Kant, Wittgenstein, existentialism, relativism and post-modernism. The reviewer's description of Davies' "more interesting" idea fits neatly into this approach. How curious to find Davies avoiding ID only to end up in the Creative Anti-realist camp!

Books and Arts: Life in the universal porridge
What were the chances that the conditions in the Universe would be just right for life?
Jim Al-Khalili reviews The Goldilocks Enigma: Why Is the Universe Just Right for Life? by Paul Davies
Nature 444, 423 (23 November 2006) | doi:10.1038/444423a

Selected excerpts:
"Davies’ first suggestion is that the ‘biofriendliness' of the Universe may be due to some as yet undiscovered 'life principle: built into the laws of physics from the very beginning, that has steered and constrained the Universe towards producing life. I find this idea hard to swallow and I don't think Davies dwells on it long enough to really make a convincing case.
"He then invites us to consider a more interesting - I hesitate to endorse it with the term 'appealing' - idea originally expounded by physicist John Wheeler. It takes one of the weirdest features of quantum mechanics and pushes it to its logical conclusion: that conscious observers bring about the universe they find themselves in by the very act of observing it, thereby dragging it out of the quantum superposition of all possible paths it could have followed. Actually, I think this is related to what supporters of the Multiverse version of quantum mechanics would argue -with the difference that, for Davies, our universe is the only one.
"The main options, then, are: first, that the Universe is a fluke; second, that it is one of many and happens to be, much like Goldilocks' porridge, just right for us; and third, that conscious observers bring the universe they inhabit into existence simply by observing it, although their teleological actions would have to reach back into the past, forcing the right conditions to be selected at the Big Bang."

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Access Research Network
Discovery Institute
Evolution News Blog
Evolution has become a favorite topic of the news media recently, but for some reason, they never seem to get the story straight. The staff at Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture started this Blog to set the record straight and make sure you knew "the rest of the story".
Intelligent Design Network (IDNet)
Intelligent Design Undergraduate Research Center
Intelligent Reasoning
A blogger from New England offers his intelligent reasoning.
International Society for Complexity, Information, and Design (ISCID)
Telic Thoughts
We are a group of individuals, coming from diverse backgrounds and not speaking for any organization, who have found common ground around teleological concepts, including intelligent design. We think these concepts have real potential to generate insights about our reality that are being drowned out by political advocacy from both sides. We hope this blog will provide a small voice that helps rectify this situation.
The Design Inference - The Writings of William A. Dembski
The Intelligent Design and Evolution Awareness Center (IDEA)
www.themonkeytrial.com
Website dedicated to comparing scenes from the "Inherit the Wind" movie with factual information from actual Scopes Trial. View 37 clips from the movie and decide for yourself if this movie is more fact or fiction.

Links - Of General Interest

A Brief View of Time and Those That Live There
Don Cicchetti blogs on: Culture, Music, Faith, Intelligent Design, Guitar, Audio
A Quick Guide to Sequenced Genomes
ARN Related Web Links
Creation/Evolution Quotes
Australian biologist Stephen E. Jones maintains one of the best origins "quote" databases around. He is meticulous about accuracy and working from original sources.
CreationEvolutionDesign
Most guys going through midlife crisis buy a convertible. Austrialian Stephen E. Jones went back to college to get a biology degree and is now a proponent of ID and common ancestry.
Darwinian Fairytales by David Stove
Complete zipped downloadable pdf copy of David Stove's devastating, and yet hard-to-find, critique of neo-Darwinism entitled "Darwinian Fairytales"
ID The Future
Intelligent Design The Future is a multiple contributor weblog whose participants include the nation's leading design scientists and theorists: biochemist Michael Behe, mathematician William Dembski, astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez, philosophers of science Stephen Meyer, and Jay Richards, philosopher of biology Paul Nelson, molecular biologist Jonathan Wells, and science writer Jonathan Witt. Posts will focus primarily on the intellectual issues at stake in the debate over intelligent design, rather than its implications for education or public policy.
John Mark Reynolds Blog
A Philosopher's Journey: Political and cultural reflections of John Mark N. Reynolds. Dr. Reynolds is Director of the Torrey Honors Institute at
Biola University.
NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day