1. “THE BEGINNING” NOVEMBER 22, 2009

2.  DEFINITION:  Intelligent Design (ID) is a scientific theory which holds that certain features of the universe and living things are best explained by an intelligent cause and are not the result of an undirected chance-based process such as Darwinian evolution.

3.  HISTORY  Plato  Aristotle  Early Christian writers  1980s

4.  HISTORY  Hoyle  Thaxton, Bradley, Olsen  The Mystery of Life’s Origin  Johnson  Darwin on Trial  Behe  Darwin’s Black Box

5.  HOW CAN YOU TELL IF DESIGN IS PRESENT?  Low probability plus pattern (specificity)  High information content  Cell proteins  Snowflake  “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.”  The cell

6.  THE CELL  Early on: cell contents “protoplasm”  After Watson & Crick: highly complex and interrelated machinery  DNA  Transfer of tremendous amounts of information  Specific sequencing of nucleotide bases  Highly suggestive of “intelligent design”

7.  IRREDUCIBLE COMPLEXITY  Darwin:  “If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.”

8.  IRREDUCIBLE COMPLEXITY  Michael Behe:  “By irreducibly complex I mean a single system composed of several well-matched interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, wherein the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning.”

9.  IRREDUCIBLE COMPLEXITY  Mousetrap

10.  IRREDUCIBLE COMPLEXITY  Bacterial flagellum

11.  ARGUMENTS AGAINST ID  Are things really irreducibly complex?  “I can’t conceive that (fill in the blank)”  Irreducible complexity can evolve