Very cool!

From the newsletter of the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion - Denis Alexander is the director:

Denis Alexander took part in a public debate on Intelligent Design (ID) in Fort Worth, Texas, attended by around 1000 people, discussing the topic (as a theist critical of ID) with an anti-ID atheist, a pro-ID atheist, and a pro-ID agnostic. A further 350 people came to a follow-up discussion with the four panel members the next day.

Opinions and arguments

Update: My letter was published! Here's what my supervisor had to say about one of the correspondents:

I think that [he] may have been (maybe still is) an ultra green goon who used to be tied up with the STS (Science and Technology Studies) criminals and leftwing ratbags at Wollongong.

Hmm...

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John Lennox, an Oxford mathematician and philosopher of science, is currently in Sydney making several appearances for the Centre for Public Christianity, EU and National Science Week. I've met him once at a conference, where he was supporting Intelligent Design in the midst of an unfriendly audience (in a fairly theoretical, speculative, "let's just think about this" kind of way), and he seems a nice and very interesting guy. I don't agree with everything he says (I'm not terribly sympathetic to Intelligent Design) but I thought his opinion piece in yesterday's SMH was spot on.

I was not so keen on the responses today from Vic Stenger and Paul Gittings, so I wrote a couple of letters to the editor. They probably won't get published, so I'll post them here instead, in the tradition of Andrew's Daily Vowel Movements.

The first is a response to Vic Stenger's opinion piece, "Science demands that seeing is believing."

Vic Stenger (“Science demands that seeing is believing”, August 19) claims that science can prove beyond a reasonable doubt that God doesn’t exist, and yet also states that science cannot be used to answer purely metaphysical questions. He argues that if God exists, evidence of his intervention in creation should be seen in our study of the natural world. However, a scientist and philosopher such as Stenger should be aware of the principle of underdetermination. For any evidence we collect about nature, we can develop multiple theories to explain it. Scientific data cannot necessarily decide between theories – these decisions are based on other criteria, such as simplicity, elegance and coherence. As John Lennox (“Why not every scientist worships at Darwin’s feet”, August 18) pointed out, scientific evidence alone cannot adjudicate between naturalism and theism. For a theist, science involves understanding the world and the processes by which God created. But the belief in God comes from outside science, and so does an assumption that there is no God.

The second is in response to Paul Gitting's letter about John Lennox.

Paul Gittings (Letters, August 19) writes that theism says “I don’t know, I don’t want to understand, I just want to be happy in my irrational beliefs.” Can he really believe this of an Oxford professor of mathematics and philosophy of science?

It really seemed to me that both Stenger and Gittings just weren't getting what Lennox was saying. Nowhere in the opinion piece did Lennox come out in support of Intelligent Design, nor did he promote any kind of "god of the gaps" theory. He wasn't arguing that positing God as creator solves any problems currently unresolved by science. Rather, he pointed out that, as an underlying assumption about the world, theism (assuming an intelligent creator) is no more faith-based than naturalism (assuming that everything in the universe came about by purely natural means).

Update: I received an email to say that my letter had been shortlisted for publication in tomorrow's Herald. Just don't know which one...