If you’re getting tired of holiday TV, try this TVW video of the debate between Stephen Meyer and Peter Ward. Meyer is Director of Discovery Institute and Ward is a paleontologist and professor at the University of Washington. In attempting to argue against ID, Ward resorts to politics (i.e. Bush likes ID therefore ID is false), religion (Meyer is a Christian therefore he is biased), emotional assumptions about God (God should have designed the world differently), constant appeals to consensus (more scientists reject ID than support it), asking for his friends for help, histrionics and calling it “crap”. Meyer, IMHO, simply states reality in a logical, coherent and easy to understand way, and leaves Ward looking defeated.
A great introduction to the controversy that apparently doesn’t exist.
December 31st, 2006 at 10:32 pm
In case you were wondering, encounters like this are the real reason that naturalistic evolutionists (I’ve stopped using the term ‘Darwinist’ due to protestations from certain naturalists.) don’t like to debate IDists–they come off looking less like authoritative professionals and more like an inebriated Philip Seymour Hoffman.
December 31st, 2006 at 11:13 pm
Yeah. It was interesting to hear Ward repeatedly concede that Meyer’s arguments “sounded so reasonable”. Common sense tends to sound reasonable!
Happy New Year!
January 1st, 2007 at 6:17 pm
If it can be fit into a materialistic paradigm, common sense is acceptable; if it can’t, it simply must be incorrect. Sad (and sometimes downright nonsensical) though it is, such is the state of science these days.
Happy New Year to you!
Best of luck on your PhD, BTW. What is it in, if you don’t mind me asking?
January 1st, 2007 at 9:05 pm
Audio-visual speech and speaker recognition, which involves using video streams of people talking as well the audio stream, and combining both those modalities in an optimal way.
I really can’t wait to be done with it!