About Us
This website is maintained by Dr. Don Johnson, who has earned Ph.D.s in both Computer & Information Sciences from the University of Minnesota and in Chemistry from Michigan State University. He was a senior research scientist for 10 years in pharmaceutical and medical/scientific instrument fields, served as president and technical expert in an independent computer consulting firm for many years, and taught 20 years in universities in Wisconsin, Minnesota, California, and Europe. He has made Scence vs Pseudoscience presentations on most continents, including in Russia, China, Australia, New Zealand, England, and Germany.
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Several attempts have been made to expose unwarranted speculations purported to be science. A submission to UNCW’s Journal of Effective Teaching: Special Issue on Teaching Evolution was rejected as not fitting into the guidelies for promoting effective evolution teaching. You can evaluate whether that's true. A peer-reviewed book chapter in "The First Gene" can be viewed.
When intelligent design is portrayed as the most feasible explanation, it should be clearly understood that the designer's identity and source is scientifically unknowable, and is therefore not part of ID. If one is theologically or philosophically opposed to a designer, one could attempt to argue that a designer is infeasible based on those beliefs. However, if one looks at the scientific facts and considers the scenarios that could produce the features that are the strongest evidence for ID, an intelligent source stands out as the only feasible (causally adequate) scenario. The fine-tuning of nature's constants and properties and chemical evolution producing chemicals compatible with life are shown to have such low probabilities as to make them infeasible (operationally falsified) by natural processes. The complex functional and prescriptive information and interactive information processing systems are shown to have zero probability of arising by undirected natural processes (physicality is incapable of generating formal functional information), but intelligence has been clearly demonstrated (and scientifically verified) as capable of producing such features (and is the ONLY known source of such features). Until known science can demonstrate a feasible scenario for the informational features of life arising by undirected nature, science must recognize that intelligence is the only scientifically feasible source. Thus, based on the fact that is the ONLY feasible explanation, ID is a certainty based on known science. I point out that all science is tentative, so if information science is shown to be incorrect, this question may have to be revisited.
Some have argued that design would require that the identity of the designer also be known. Those are two separate issues. For example, the complexity of this Webpage makes it unmistakenly designed, as detected by empirical science. That conclusion would be true if the designer were born a normal human, transplanted by an alien civilization, or has eternally existed. We don't have to know the mechanism or purpose in order to acknowledge a truth. For example, not knowing how or why gravity works would not detract from its reality if one jumps off a cliff.
As an example of non-supernatural ID (from p77 of PN&NP): "Some believe that nature itself possesses intelligence capable of design. For example, Shapiro’s natural genetic engineering 'employs a combinatorial search process based upon DNA modules that already possess functionality... Such a cognitive component is absent from conventional evolutionary theory because 19th and 20th century evolutionists were not sufficiently knowledgeable about cellular response and control networks... It also answers the objections to conventional theory raised by intelligent design advocates, because evolution by natural genetic engineering has the capacity to generate complex novelties' [Shapiro 2010]. Even though he denies ID, what he proposes is precisely ID! A cell would have a cognitive mind capable of doing a combinatorial search of possible outcomes to design the best mutation before mutating."