Debate With Michael Ruse on Ben Wattenberg’s Think Tank (PBS)
Ben Wattenberg moderates this matchup with Darwinist Michael Ruse, who was also featured in the movie Expelled. This debate gets into the philosophical implications of design and Darwinism and the distinctions between the scientific evidence and the implications for both theories.
Here’s a spot-on reply to UK geneticist Robert Saunders’s recent review of Dr. Meyer’s Signature in the Cell. Averick is particularly good at pointing out the faith, presuppositions and ideological blinders that constrain Saunders’s view, even if the scientist doesn’t seem to recognize it:
[Saunders] is, in effect, admitting that Science has no explanation for the origin of life and the huge amounts of information necessary for life to exist, but asks us to have faith that Science will yet discover a purely naturalistic answer to the question. Here Saunders makes it clear that he has shut off his mind from even considering the possibility of Intelligent Design, which is, of course, a theory that is proposed to explain the origin of life. In the nearly 600 pages of Signature in the Cell, Dr. Meyer rigorously, meticulously, and painstakingly explains why it is — by any reasonable standard — a valid scientific hypotheses.
Dr. Stephen Meyer debates with Keith Fox, professor of biochemistry at Southampton University and chair of the UK’s Christians in Science network. Topics in this lively but respectful exchange include origins of life and the design inference in science.
Signature in the Cell continues to stir up debate and attract attention as Thomas Nagel’s selection of SITC as one of the Books of the Year brought on an interesting series of letters, where Nagel was attacked (he responded, and he was attacked again) by a Darwinist who told people forgo reading SITC and instead just read Wikipedia.
This week, author Stephen Meyer himself responds in a letter, with a shortened version published yesterday. (Nagel himself responded with a letter that is published on the same page by TLS.)
Signature in the Cell author Stephen Meyer debates Oxford University chemist and “new atheist” Peter Atkins about origins of life, evolution and intelligent design.
https://www.discovery.org/v/stephen-meyer-debates-peter-atkins/
Advocates for intelligent design and Darwinian evolution squared off to debate the origins of life, the challenges to Darwin’s theory of evolution and the alternative theory of intelligent design.
https://www.discovery.org/v/debate-on-origins-of-life-stephen-meyer-richard-sternberg-michael-shermer-donald-prothero/
Stephen Meyer debates science writer Chris Mooney on the Michael Medved show about the scientific consensus and scientific literacy in America.
https://www.discovery.org/v/scientific-literacy-in-america-the-michael-medved-show/
Today’s New York Times has yet another example of overhyping science. Recently Nature, Science, Wired, and now the Times are all gaga over alleged breakthroughs in discovering how life came to be. It turns out they are no closer now than they ever have been. It’s as if they’ve figured out the chemical components of ink and paper and how ink adheres to paper, but still can’t explain the meaning and information communicated by the New York Times each day with that ink and paper. Never mind figuring out where the ink and paper itself came from before it got hitched together. Here we are celebrating the 200th anniversary of Darwin and modern evolutionists are no closer to figure out where life comes from than Darwin himself was.
Dr. Meyer responded to the Times today over at Evolution News & Views:
Today’s New York Times features an article by science writer Nicholas Wade highlighting what Wade calls “surprising advances [that] have renewed confidence that a terrestrial explanation for life’s origins will eventually emerge.”
Yet the scientists quoted in the article fail to address the fundamental issue that has generated the longstanding impasse in the field: the problem of the origin of biological information.
Wade describes the various developments in pre-biotic chemistry that are making some scientists more optimistic about solving the problem of the origin of life. Yet, the central problem facing them is not the synthesis of pre-biotic building blocks or even discovering an environment in which life might have plausibly arisen–difficult as these problems have proven to be. Instead, the fundamental problem is getting the chemical building blocks to arrange themselves into the large information-bearing molecules (such as DNA and RNA) that direct the show in living cells.
Even the experiments of Gerald Joyce that Wade describes do not address this problem. The “self-replicating” RNA molecules that Joyce constructs are not capable of copying a template of information from free standing chemical subunits as the polymerase machinery does in actual cells. Instead, in Joyce’s experiment, a pre-synthesized specifically-sequenced RNA molecule merely catalyzes a single chemical bond, thus fusing two other pre-synthesized partial RNA chains. More significantly, Joyce intelligently arranged the matching base sequences in these RNA chains. Thus, as my forthcoming book Signature in the Cell shows, Joyce’s experiments not only demonstrate that self-replication itself depends upon information-rich molecules, but they also confirm that intelligent design is the only known means by which information arises.
Dr. Stephen Meyer on Faith Under Fire
Dr. Meyer addresses Michael Shermer’s objections to intelligent design, including “Who designed the designer?” Also features their discussion on the existence of design in nature.
The rematch, a debate with Meyer and Ward addressing each other’s arguments for intelligent design and evolution (or not, respectively). Reporters and columnists especially should listen to this, as a real debate by scientists on the science of Darwinian evolution is almost as rare as life in the universe.