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The Complete Idiot's Guide to Understanding Intelligent Design Paperback – December 5, 2006

3.6 out of 5 stars 26

An objective overview of the biggest controversy in American education.

Intelligent Design is one of the hottest issues facing parents and educators to day, but it can be hard to separate the facts from the heated rhetoric. This expert and objective guide gets to the bottom of the questions: What is Intelligent Design? Should it replace or complement traditional science? What’s all the fuss about?
• Explains the terms, the controversy, and the involvement of the American courts
• Indispensable guide for concerned educators and parents
• Written by an expert in the field

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About the Author

Christopher Carlisle, M. Div., is a professor and the Episcopal chaplain at the University of Massachusetts. He created the popular course BELIEF, which explores the interdisciplinary study of religion and science in the 21st century, and is the co-founder of The God and Science Project.

W. Thomas Smith, Jr., has written four books, as well as thousands of articles for a variety of publications, including USA Today, George, U.S. News & World Report, and BusinessWeek.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Alpha; 22660th edition (December 5, 2006)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 352 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1592575552
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1592575558
  • Reading age ‏ : ‎ 18 years and up
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.15 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 7.25 x 0.75 x 9 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    3.6 out of 5 stars 26

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Customer reviews

3.6 out of 5 stars
3.6 out of 5
26 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Reviewed in the United States on April 23, 2007
The Complete Idiot's Guide to Understanding Intelligent Design is an excellent well written balanced layman's guide to the whole ID debate that is now raging in America and the world. The Guide contains 21 short easy to read chapters and covers the commonly unknown background of the whole debate. It notes that the ID argument goes back to Aristotle and before, and has historically been one of the most important, if not the most important, argument for the existence of God. The authors are both clearly well informed about many aspects of the whole debate. I checked this book for the usual mistakes in books on ID, such as the case of Galileo and the Scopes trial, and found the discussions were very accurate, although brief. One handicap is footnotes were not used, as is the format of the Complete Idiot's book series. I am curious as to where the authors learned that the infamous eugenicist Charles Davenport wrote part of the biology text book at issue in the Scopes trial. I noted a few mistakes, such as in the discussion of water, but not more than the typical molecular biology textbooks that I have used in teaching my classes. In short, an excellent book.
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Reviewed in the United States on February 23, 2008
The irony of this debate is that the religious intolerance one might expect to see coming from those who believe in the devine, actually seems to come most stridently from those who worship at the altar of the secular god that is Darwin. The vast majority of people long ago accepted evolution within a species as probably correct, and in no way contradictory with God, faith, or even Sacred Scripture. Even the Pope urged further scientific exploration, since it mattered not what the results would be -- whatever the outcome, there was no problem incorporating scientific facts with God.

What intelligent design seeks to explain is all the things that Darwinian THEORY lacks. For example, genetic scientists have blown a huge hole in Darwin's evolutionary theory by proving that while a species can and does evolve over time, in no case can one species evolve into another species. DNA cannot work that way, which is why one does not see genetic mutation of say, a human baby, into a chimpanzee baby, even though the genetic makeup of the two species is 98% the same. We are only a few chromosomes apart.

Darwinians are silent on the matter, as it doesn't comport with their own sacred scripture, Darwin's own tome.

Astrophysicists have posited that the series of events and the complexity of those events, in the particular order they occurred during the first nanosecond after the Big Bang are so mathematically improbable as to be impossible. While not admitting to divine or intelligent design, and certainly their conclusion make no mention of such, readers are left with no other conclusion.

This is what intelligent design seeks to explain. And it makes no pretense at being "science" the way Darwin's increasingly discredited and scientifically unsustainable theories do.

For those of faith, and for those with no faith, intelligent design is objectively a more rational theory to explain a host of things that Darwin cannot. For those with open minds, this book is an excellent primer on the subject, though not without its biases. But whatever bias the authors might reveal, and it's far from being obvious, their approach, and the arguments they lay out are -- to open minded individuals truly trying to reconcile the vast inconsistencies and scientific holes that Darwinian theory leaves -- are by far some of the most convincing in this ongoing debate.

Leave your agenda behind. Be open. Be fair and let the facts speak for themselves. Darwinism will, in 50 years, be a thoroughly discredited theory because it is scientifically unsustainable. Genetics will probably be the science that strikes the final blow. But there is more, such as the astrophysiological evidence cited earlier. In the end, Darwin may have gotten only part of it right. We CAN evolve. But where we came from and how we got here is clearly wrong, DNA facts being such an inconvenient thing. The book is a good read, and highly recommended.
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Reviewed in the United States on September 7, 2007
The Parable of the Ichthropic Principle

Sixty meters underground, a river used to run through the limestone of the Mexican state of Oaxaca. Because the limestone was uneven in density and porosity, the river carved an irregular channel, widening and contracting. Eventually, over a very long period of time, the surface of the land above underwent changes resulting from diminished rainfall. As the volume of water draining through the underground river decreased, the channel it had carved became a cave. Nonetheless, a trickle of rain still flowed through cracks and crevices, enough to maintain stable pools of fresh water in the lightless depths.
In one such pool lived a small school of fish of the family Characidae. Characids are an adaptable group, occupying many ecological niches of the planet Earth. The characids of this geologically isolated pool had several distinctive adaptations, the most unusual being that they were eyeless. Thus we can identify them henceforth as blind cave fish. Lacking sight, the blind cave fish were well equipped to detect vibrations of any sort through the sensory cells of their lateral lines, which was how they foraged for food as well as how they located each other for mating purposes. Fortunately, water is a superb transmitter of vibrations. Greater self-awareness would not have been adaptive in the bleak conditions of their pool, but if they'd possessed it, they would have had no reason to suppose that any other characids inhabited any other pool in this or any other cave, or indeed that any other pool in any other cave was inhabitable.
The blind cave fish had two rigid requirements for survival--oxygen and food. The oxygen in the pool was maintained at roughly the level they required by the dependable trickle of rain which replenished the loss of water through the porous limestone bed of the pool. Also, the water was cold--a constant forty-one degrees Fahrenheit--which of course allowed maximal oxygenation. Although the fish had no "knowledge" of it, a grave danger to their survival existed in two kinds of pollution: nitrates from their own metabolic waste products, and gradual mineralization from the influx of acid rain water seeping through the soil. Periodically, however, drenching storms would flood the land, refilling the underground river channel and flushing the pool. Most of the blind cave fish would be swept away to an uncertain fate, but enough would survive to rebuild their population. Even the most catastrophic flushing would not decimate them, since their eggs, which were adhesive, were always laid in protected chinks and cracks. Had the floor of the pool been smooth, or had the flooding carried other menaces into their cave, no doubt the blind cave fish couldn't have thrived as they did. It should be noted that the thick layers of rock above, which shielded them from hot sunlight, also shielded them from ultra-violet and other forms of radiation that might have threatened their survival.
The blind cave fish were dependent for their nutrition on another intricate and improbable set of circumstances. Since no light whatsoever penetrated the cavern, no photosynthesizing plants or algae could flourish. Nonetheless, populations of microbes and nearly microscopic arthropods shared the pool. These were the food source upon which the blind cave fish depended, though they supplemented their diet by scavenging the corpses of their own dead. In turn the arthropods and microbes were dependent on bat droppings for 100% of their nutrients. The bats, in huge numbers, infested a large dry cavern of the same cave. The only above-water outlet from their cavern to the fresh air above passed through the grotto of the pool, the ceiling of which was too encrusted with stalactites to attract bats to nest. Thus the quantity of guano the bats dropped in flight was always enough to sustain the pool's organisms yet never enough to poison the water. The blind cave fish were by far the largest and most metabolically active of these aquatic creatures. Having neither predators nor competition, they had ample reason to be happy with their lives--that is, had they had enough self-awareness to exhibit happiness--since each and every condition of their environment seemed specifically suitable to their needs, while any variation of those conditions would have made their life impossible. Indeed, the conditions in which they subsisted were so random yet so improbably assembled that it must have seemed to the fish--again granting them the self-awareness to consider probabilities--that the pool had been designed to provide for their existence. Allowing them just a bit more rationality than they truly possessed, logic would surely have suggested to the blind cave fish that where there is design, there must be a designer. No matter how much intellect we attribute to our three-inch long albino eyeless characids, however, it's clear they had no means of fathoming the nature of the designer, unless it were itself an inscrutable but omnipotent blind cave fish.
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