Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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56 of 67 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A good and detailed defense of the design inference, February 27, 2000
This is an excellent introduction to scientific evidence for a creative agent. Although I found some of the criticisms of Darwinism a wee bit ad-hoc, the book as a whole has some powerful arguments from the likes of some of the more noteworthy theists such as JP Moreland, Michael Dembski and Hugh Ross. Ross' essay was probably the best in the book as it dealt with clear, un-ambiguous evidence for a supreme mind. There is also an interesting article on the specificity of language being a sound analogy to the specificity & complexity of DNA. Now, many of the reviewers who gave it one star do not appear to have even read it. Two of them bragged as much. Regardless of the subject matter of a book, I often find it difficult to review a work w/out reading it. I can only cast my suspicion on other people's ability to do so. One of the most frequent criticisms of "Creationism" (for lack of a better term) is that it is unfalsifiable & therefore bad science. I concede the point that it is unfalsifiable, but I would caution an atheist against calling it bad science. Most physicists believe they have it all figured out up to 10^-43 power of one second after the Big Bang (known as the Planck Epoch). Beyond this instant (an incredibly small instant) the universe existed in the state of a singularity of infinite density and infinite temperature. The laws of physics as we know and love them came into being at 10^-43 of one second. Therefore, if the atheist is not to insert an arbitrary double-standard, ALL speculations and theories of "what happened before" MUST be labeled as bad science. I know of few atheists who are willing to demote Sagan's oscillating universe theory or the universe as a quantum-fluctuation-gone-awry paradigm as bad science. However, the atheist cannot have it both ways. Also, due to the enormous "specificity" in the laws of physics which were necessary for life (also known as the Anthropic Principle) the rival claim of the atheist to an intelligent designer is the multiple universe theorem. The idea is that since the odds are so incredible that a universe such as ours' could have emerged from a singularity "just so" (according to the British physicist Roger Penrose the odds are of the magnitude of 10^10^123), there must be many (perhaps an infinite number) of alternate universes. Why? To justify this one. Otherwise, it is mathematically unacceptable to believe that this could be the only universe and yet it turned out "just so." Now, I have no problem with atheists formulating hypotheses such as this. However, when they do so they are commiting the same "crime" that they are accusing the Creationists of. Again, you can't have it both ways. Ultimately, whatever one tries to "place" before the Planck epoch and "outside" this universe is going to be a bad Hypothesis. Period. No matter if it comes from the calibre of a scientist such as Feynman, Dyson or Hawking, it is STILL incapable of being proven or disproven. So, all we can do is take the data that is inside THIS universe & make our inference from there. This book is a good tool for those on both sides of the debate to do just that. If you are close minded (as most of the 1 star reviewers are), there is no need to bother reading any books in the realm of cosmology. For futher reading on the Anthropic Principle I would recommend "Universes" by the philospoher of science John Leslie. A great book.
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19 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Well-written critique of naturalistic evolution, April 28, 1997
By A Customer
In this book J.P. Moreland and a panel of scholars assert that there is actually substantial evidence pointing towards intelligent design. First, they consider philosophical arguments about whether it
is possible for us to know if an intelligent designer had a hand in creation. Then they look directly at four different areas of science: the origin of life, the origin of major groups of organisms, the origin of human language, and the origin and formation of the universe. This collection of original essays is perhaps the most significant formulation of the design argument yet written.
Jeffery Jay Lowder, Internet Infidels
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33 of 42 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Shows that IDT is scientific, but could even be stronger, November 21, 1999
I will make a few remarks about the question of the "scientific"status of the Intelligent Design Theory, which is the issue most discussed in the book (which is not about religion, contrary to what some reviewers claim, and of whom I doubt that they ever even had the book in their hands.) The first chapters of the books deal with the philosophy of the natural sciences. Among others, the authors review all the leading philosophers of the natural sciences and show that it is impossible to define what "science" is (and I would argue that this is due the current use of the word "science" in the Anglo-Saxon world, which is an inheritance of positivism.) Also using all the criteria that have been advanced to demarcate "science" from "non-science" they show that Intelligent Design Theory (IDT) has to be considered as science. BTW, also specially interesting is William Dembski's (a thinker who seems to have a very promising academic career) essay where he shows that it is possible to empirically detect intelligence in nature. Dembski's computational model does not consider quantum physics, but moving to the quantum scale would not change anything to the idea of his argument, given that there are mathematical computation that would exhaust the possible numbers of quantum states. The authors are successful in their argumentation for the scientific status of design. I have followed the angry books & articles that have since then attacked design, and I am still awaiting a succesful rebutal (and not a dishonest strawman attack or name-calling IDT theology or creationism) of their arguments. The absence of honest and valid rebuttals confirm the success of their arguments, and this is no wonder since they were in line with the leading philosophers of Science, such as Larrry Laudan, etc. However I have a critic: the authors could have been much stronger in their argumentation. They have accepted the current use of the word "science" in the Anglo-saxon world, not seeing that this use results from the influence of positivism and pragmatism. They could have been much stronger by refuting this positivist use, and even simply rejecting it. The word "science" comes from the Latin "scientia" which means knowledge, and was used to designate organized, systematized knowledge (that is academic disciplines uncovering knowledge.) In most European countries, in languages like French, German, Dutch, (I am a French who works in the Netherlands, and part of my academic education was in Germany), the word "science" ("science" also in French, "Wissenschaft" in German and "wetenschap" in Dutch) is applicable for all academic disciplines. For example we speak in French (and the same is true with Dutch and German) of the "sciences religieuses" (religious sciences", which include theological disciplines for example) and the "sciences humaines" ("human sciences", which include for example history, psychology, sociologie, etc.) The same used to be true of the English language before this was changed in English by the domination of positivism and pragmatism (at the beginning of the 20th century? ) (the meaning of the word "science"has been kept in a few words like "omniscience" which still means "knowledge of everything"). Positivism and pragmatism are now dead, and it would have been quite easy and powerful to challenge the current Anglo-Saxon positivist use of the word "science." And besides, the authors could have pointed out that most of those who nowadays pass for "scientists" have been educated to make some computations and some experiences, but have no training in philosophy so that they know nothing of the structure and justification of knowledge, many are in some respects more technicians who are not so able to really "think" like a true scientist (dealing with knowledge) should (look at collection of philosophical absurdities and naivety in the "scientific" popular books of Dawkins, Davies and Hawking, and even the metaphysical absurdity of Hawking's use of imaginary time in his famous no-boundary proposal), and in this way no real "scientists" (capable of truly dealing with knowledge). And I do not speak as an outsider, but I say this having myself had such a so-called "scientific" education, and now that I have been reading much philosophy I realize how much I missed. I will stop it here and will not discuss the other part of the book, where IDT is applied succesfully (and so far without valid rebuttal that I know of) to some specific fields (astrophysics, biochemistry, natural history and linguistics / anthropology.)
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