Discovering Intelligent Design: A Journey into the Scientific Evidence

This is a terrific book to do as an individual study, group study or book club. Authors methodically guide you through every important topic related to intelligent design. This will bone you up on things learned in high school biology as well as astronomy, physics, chemistry, and earth science....that are important to know for understanding ID. Appropriate for sharp high school students and adults of all ages. Luskin and company did a masterful job!

This I guess you would call it a handbook is ideal for studies at high school of the idea of Intelligent Design. This concept has been subjected to unmerciful attacks by certain sections of the science community, but it is clear they really have no idea what ID is. This book takes one through the key concepts of ID. You can decide for yourself if ID's claims are bad science or reasonable. Should be part of any high school science class, but the opponents of ID wield great influence in academia and so schools (especially public schools) will probably not see this book in their libraries. So it is best for personal study. Recommended highly.

I teach high school level biology labs and found this a good, clear presentation of intelligent design for junior high or high school students.

Excellent introduction to all of the various facets of the universe and life that point to intelligent design for their origin.

I have a M.S. and I was very pleased with this book for use in a private, pluralistic high school. I didn't get complaints from non-Christians. I loved the section about Douglas Axe's work. This is a great text book. A very good case for Intelligent Design.

Most excellent study of intelligent design. High School, college and grad students can understand in easy to read format.

Discovering Intelligent Design is a high school level science book that covers ID arguments for intentional purpose in both biology and cosmology. Anyone with a high school education should be able to follow the arguments laid out in the book. The prose is clear and allows for reading through as a book (rather than a workbook), but only if you find the subject matter interesting. The feel is similar to that of Jonathan Well's "The Politically Incorrect Guide to Intelligent Design": clear and straight-forward, and provides a good overview of the current debate.The strengths of the book are many. First, it provides an invaluable resource for anyone needing a high-level overview of current design thinking to contrast with current evolutionary thinking. Home-school educators of high-school level students and diligent parents appear to be the target market. In that regard, this book fills a unique market niche. Second, the questions at the end of each chapter are well thought out to promote interesting discussion and review core concepts. Insightful (and sadly necessary) are the sections covering many of the logical fallacies used to attack ID, many of which you can witness for yourself by reading some of the one star reviews for this very book. They include (which I'll paraphrase from memory of the reviews):1. Ad Hominem: "Casey Luskin only has an MS in Biology, so he isn't a Real Scientist (TM) ", "One author is a home-school educator...therefore....uhmm....she doesn't know anything?", etc.2. Genetic Fallacy: "Luskin works for the Discovery Institute, therefore, his ideas must be wrong. They're dishonest people, you know."3. Questioning Motives: "Evolution skeptics only get degrees to appear smart and bolster their credentials. They're not real scientists." (Really? Getting a degree is hard work. I doubt anyone would go through that hell just to be mocked by idiots on the internet who disparage their credentials anyway.)4. Straw Man: "ID creationists argue that something is too complex, and we don't know how it happened, so GODDIDIT!" (No. As the authors patiently explain, mere complexity doesn't signify anything; the pattern must also match an independent specification. This is key: mere complexity does not equal specified complexity. Second, we see functional information in nature, much more than random Darwinian sampling could plausibly have discovered during the time scales available (if population genetic equations do, in fact, hold). We know of a cause, and only one cause, capable of producing such large amounts of functional information on such short time scales: intelligent agency. Therefore, intelligent agency is currently the only causally adequate explanation. This is based on what we do know (the information generating capabilities of intelligent agents and the causal inadequacy of Darwinian search methods on biological time scales) rather than on what we do not. And the only mention of God came from anti-design bigots, not from ID arguments.)5. Guilt by Association: mentioning that Casey Luskin works for the Discovery Institute, that young earth creationists also argue against the causal adequacy of Darwinian mechanisms, etc.6. Argument from Authority: almost all scientists adhere to Darwinian explanations of life's origin and development. Therefore, they are probably right. (Hmmm...this would only make sense, but still be fallacious reasoning, if all scientists came to their conclusions more-or-less independently, which they most certainly did not. Instead they are trapped within a system vigorously seeking to squash dissent on origins issues and preserve orthodoxy through institutional and legal means. What we actually see is closer to a "Castro consensus", where the front-runner wins by default, simply because all other contenders fear for their (academic) lives.)The full list of fallacies is provided on page 214, and sadly, examples of each fallacy can be found on the 1-star reviews of this book on Amazon.Discovering Intelligent Design also had a few missteps. On page 23, seven "tenets" of materialism are listed, of which #7 is "All organisms are related through universal common ancestry." Now I will nitpick, since most materialists certainly hold to something like Darwinism, and the current theory is indeed that of universal common ancestry. But if we're going to be clear thinkers, we can see that materialism can hold whether all organisms descend from one ancestor or many. If creating new life by unguided mechanisms were easy, then we might actually expect many origins of life, since it could happen all the time. Thus, I find calling this a "tenet" of materialism incorrect (though still descriptive of what most materialists do currently believe).I found the use of common design as an explanation of biological similarity a little facile, too. It is given without any underlying research as to whether or not the patterns seen in biology fit the patterns seen in human design, other than in very general and superficial terms. What I'd like to see is a quantitative analysis of whether or not the statistical features of repeat pattern use in human construction fits well the distribution of reuse seen in nature. It is possible they do not, in which case another explanation would be needed. This is an area ripe for research, but to use it as an explanation without doing the hard leg-work is as bad as claiming that co-option is a defeater of irreducible complexity without providing a detailed, quantitative analysis of exactly how.Lastly, there is a really bad example of Darwinian search given on page 200, which doesn't resemble Darwinian search at all. Instead it gives an example of needle-in-a-haystack search, and claims the Darwinian algorithm works likewise. However, Darwinian search requires an information-laden, directed, and relatively smooth fitness landscape to function well (since the algorithm is really a path-following algorithm at its heart, thus dependent on the existence of nice paths to follow), all of which a NIAH landscape is not. This example should be corrected or changed in future editions.Overall, I would recommend this book for study-groups and home-school educators looking for an easy-to-understand presentation of what ID practitioners actually argue. This isn't a book to get detailed ID research results from (see the peer-reviewed ID literature for that, e.g., [...] but is a good starting place for anyone seeking an accessible high-level overview. It is a strong contribution that fulfills a current market need.

This is a well written and informative book on Intelligent Design. Don't listen to the ID hater reviews and those who equate this with creationism, it's not. By saying such a thing automatically exposes their ignorance and bias. Ken Hamm of the Bill Nye debate fame is a "creationist" because "creationists" start with the Bible first and use it as part of their argumentation. If there is any disagreement between science and the Bible then science is incorrect. They are Young Earth creationists and are the ones given the most visibility by the media.ID proponents start with science and do not quote or reference the Bible or any other holy book. It I strictly based on the scientific data. It's a shame that the news media, athiests and skeptics are biased such that they paint I.D. proponents and most Christians as "creationists". ID may have theological implications, but so does the Big Bang theory.