Rallying to the logic of design.

 Postcard from Venice: First Pan-European Conference on Intelligent Design

Gunter Bechly

Recently I had the great privilege and honor to attend a remarkable event in the beautiful and historic city of Venice, Italy. It was the first pan-European conference on intelligent design theory, organized by the Centro Italiano Intelligent Design (CIID), in collaboration with the foundation En Arche (Poland), BioCosmos (Norway), Centre for Intelligent Design (UK), Zentrum für BioKomplexität & NaturTeleologie (Austria), and Discovery Institute (USA). The conference was titled “Cosmos, Life, Intelligence, Information” and it was held at the prestigious and absolutely stunning venue of the Ateneo Veneto, which represents the oldest cultural institute still operative in Venice. The institute is dedicated to the spreading of science, education, and art and was officially founded in 1812, but originally dates back as far as 1458. It is situated in the historic center of Venice in a building from the early 1500s. The event was not advertised in advance and only included about 60 invited guests, to avoid any possible intervention by the Darwinist thought police, whose zealous activists already had prevented several such conferences at prestigious venues in the past.

The speakers came from all over Europe and America and addressed very different topics related to the question of intelligent design. After an introduction by the president of CIID, Carlo Alberto Cossano, the German physicist Professor Alfred Krabbe talked about “Fine-tuning in the universe,” which surprised me with some striking examples of fine-tuning in physics and astronomy that I had never heard of before. Professor Ferdinando Catalano elaborated on the strange relation between mathematics and physics in his talk “But does light ‘reflect’?”, and his Italian compatriot Professor Alessandro Giorgetti emphasized the extreme unlikelihood of the emergence of life from inanimate matter in his lecture about the “Origins of life and exobiology.”

Discontinuities in the Fossil Record

Next, I presented a talk about the “Scientific Challenges to Neo-Darwinism,” based on the discontinuities in the fossil record, the waiting time problem, the species pair challenge, and the incongruence of different lines of evidence in phylogenetics and molecular clock studies. Professor Steinar Thorvaldsen, an information scientist from Norway, talked about “Measuring the information in genes and DNA,” and Polish biologist Professor Stanisław Karpiński asked “Is the theory of evolution coherent or fragmentary?”, presenting fascinating new discoveries about communication and information processing in plants. British physician Dr. David Galloway introduced “The engineering of oxygen delivery in the newborn human” as another case of irreducibly complex systems. Last but not least, Dr. Casey Luskin from Discovery Institute gave an “Update on avenues of ID inspired research,” which showed the remarkable progress of intelligent design in the past years.

A Concluding Debate

The event concluded with a panel debate between theistic evolutionist Dr. Erkii Vesa Rope Kojonen (Finland) and ID proponent Casey Luskin about the compatibility of evolution and design. Both speakers are Christian theists, who agree that there is evidence for design in nature that cannot be sufficiently explained by blind forces of chance and necessity, but they differ in their views as to how and when the input of intelligent design happened. Rope Kojonen thinks that it was only at the very beginning of the universe, through a fine-tuning of the laws of nature and the initial conditions, while the development of life happened by mere Darwinian processes in this fine-tuned fitness landscape. On the other hand, Casey Luskin made a strong case for the necessity of ongoing activity of an intelligent designer during the history of life to explain complex adaptations and new proteins. While Rope Kojonen relied more on philosophical and theological arguments, Casey Luskin focused on the empirical scientific evidence and an inference to the best explanation, which in his and my humble opinion clearly favors intelligent design theory over theistic evolution. Nevertheless, it was very encouraging to see how such an exchange of different views can happen in a very respectful, charitable, and kind manner, very much unlike the aggressive attitude of many vocal ID critics on the Internet. After a discussion and Q&A session, the event ended with a wonderful dinner in an inspiring atmosphere of camaraderie and friendship.

All the talks were professionally recorded and will be made available on YouTube soon, and there are plans to publish English abstracts of the talks.

CIID should be congratulated for the excellent organization of this conference, which I hope will mark the beginning of more regular events like this in Europe to foster interdisciplinary exchange and advance the field of intelligent design research.