Darwin’s Doubt by Stephen Meyer Releases Today (Video)

A must read book releases today – Darwin’s Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design

When Charles Darwin finished The Origin of Species, he thought that he had explained every clue, but one. Though his theory could explain many facts, Darwin knew that there was a significant event in the history of life that his theory did not explain. During this event, the “Cambrian explosion,” many animals suddenly appeared in the fossil record without apparent ancestors in earlier layers of rock.

In Darwin’s Doubt, Stephen C. Meyer tells the story of the mystery surrounding this explosion of animal life—a mystery that has intensified, not only because the expected ancestors of these animals have not been found, but because scientists have learned more about what it takes to construct an animal. During the last half century, biologists have come to appreciate the central importance of biological information—stored in DNA and elsewhere in cells—to building animal forms.

Expanding on the compelling case he presented in his last book, Signature in the Cell, Meyer argues that the origin of this information, as well as other mysterious features of the Cambrian event, are best explained by intelligent design, rather than purely undirected evolutionary processes.

Stephen Meyer unpacks the thesis of the book.

Learn more at Darwin’s Doubt Website

Order here

Summary of Alvin Plantinga’s Updated Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism

“The basic idea of my argument could be put (a bit crudely) as follows. First, the probability of our cognitive faculties being reliable, given naturalism and evolution, is low. (To put it a bit inaccurately but suggestively, if naturalism and evolution were both true, our cognitive faculties would very likely not be reliable.) But then according to the second premise of my argument, if I believe both naturalism and evolution, I have a defeater for my intuitive assumption that my cognitive faculties are reliable. If I have a defeater for that belief, however, then I have a defeater for any belief I take to be produced by my cognitive faculties. That means that I have a defeater for my belief that naturalism and evolution are true. So my belief that naturalism and evolution are true gives me a defeater for that very belief; that belief shoots itself in the foot and is self-referentially incoherent; therefore I cannot rationally accept it. And if one can’t accept both naturalism and evolution, that pillar of current science, then there is serious conflict between naturalism and science.” – Alvin Plantinga

*Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism (p. 314). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.

Why Are We Still Debating Darwin?

“In his “Socrates in the City” talk in Washington last week, Steve Meyer asked: “Is there a scientific controversy about the theory of evolution?” After quoting many spokesmen for official science who deny the existence of any such controversy, or any reason to doubt evolutionary theory whatsoever, Meyer showed that there are significant reasons to doubt both biological and chemical evolutionary theory.

He first addressed the problems associated with chemical evolutionary theory, which “attempts to explain the origin of the first life from simpler pre-existing chemicals.” Here he explained the critical question of the origin of genetic information. This is the problem he addressed in his bookSignature in the Cell, a problem that has beset all attempts to explain the origin of life by reference to undirected chemical evolutionary processes.

The most important idea for laymen to grasp is that of biological information. It’s difficult to understand “exactly what information is,” Meyer has written. It’s not a physical thing. He quotes the evolutionary biologist George Williams as saying that information “doesn’t have mass or charge or length,” and matter “doesn’t have bytes.” It follows that matter and information belong to “two separate domains.”
Information in biology is best understood as analogous to software code. Recall Bill Gates’s comment: “DNA is like a computer program but far, far more advanced than any software ever created.”
Software is a set of instructions for a new program in a computer. Likewise, DNA contains a set of instructions for the assembly of parts, namely proteins, within a cell. In the 19th century the cell was thought to be simple. Darwin and his contemporaries had no way of knowing just how complex it was. The cell today is sometimes compared to a high-tech factory. (Except it’s much more complex than that — factories can’t replicate themselves.)
Here is the key question: How did the requisite information get into the DNA in the first place? Without it, the first cell would never have been…” (read the rest

Think Christianly with Jonathan Morrow

Should Christians Embrace Theistic Evolution?

There’s a lot of discussion right now about this question. Is theistic evolution a good ‘middle way’ for the scientific minded Christian? I offer some thoughts on where to begin answering this question in this short video:

Fore more on theistic evolution, see the helpful website Faith and Evolution.

I go into more detail on how this discussion plays out in the public square and how to equip the next generation here.

Dr. Stephen Meyer was recently on Stand to Reason talking about theistic evolution. You can access that here.

Think Christianly with Jonathan Morrow