Privileged%20Planet%20and%20Intelligent%20Design

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Privileged Planet and Intelligent Design

• Ray Bohlin, Ph.D.
• Probe Ministries
• www.probe.org

2
Privileged Planet Premiered

• June 23, 2005 at the Smithsonian Institutes
  National Museum of Natural History in Washington,
  D.C.
• Discovery Institute seeks a Washington venue to
  premiere the film
• The Smithsonian asks to see the film

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Privileged Planet Premiered

• Smithsonian approves the premiere and instructs
  Discovery on how the invitation should look and
  read.
• Smithsonian asks for a 16,000 donation and
  requires invitation to say Smithsonian is the
  co-host.
• Discovery Institute complies and the Smithsonian
  approves the invitation.
• Invitations go out June 1st.
• Evolutionary community is mortified!

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The Invitation
5
The Reaction

• Is one of Washingtons most prestigious museums
  promoting intelligent design?
• It looked as though the Smithsonian was
  supporting intelligent design.
• The Smithsonian was duped.
• We urge you to preserve the Smithsonian
  Institutions prestigious scientific reputation
  by not allowing the film to be shown.
• The film blurs the distinction between
  well-accepted, peer-reviewed, testable science
  and ideologically based, untestable assertions.

6
The Museums Response

• After dozens of calls and emails from
  researchers and the public, the museum decided
  last week to return the donation and issue a
  statement disavowing the event. Nature June 8,
  2005
• Upon reviewing the film again we immediately
  recognized the difficulty . . . the science is
  sound . . . but it leads to conclusions that are
  philosophical, not scientific. Physics Today
  August 2005

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Officially

• Upon further review we have determined that the
  content of the film is not consistent with the
  mission of the Smithsonian Institutions
  scientific research. Neither the Smithsonian
  Institution nor the National Museum of Natural
  History supports or endorses the views of the
  Discovery Institute or the film.

8
Officially

• The Smithsonian publicly announced they would
  return the 16,000 but later said privately that
  it needed to keep 5,000 for expenses.
• Hopefully this did not include the cost of valet
  parking which mysteriously set up on the wrong
  side of the museum.

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Host Committee

• Mr. Ken Ferguson, COO, National Geographic
  Television
• George Gilder
• Hon. And Mrs. Edwin Meese
• Dr. Bijan Nemati, NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory
• Hon. Rep. Thomas E. Petri
• Hon. Sen. Rick Santorum
• Dr. Philip Skell, National Academy of Sciences

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Film and Reception
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Reviews

• In a book of magnificent sweep and daring,
  Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay Richards drive home
  the arguments that the old cliché of no place
  like home is eerily true of Earth. Not only that,
  but if the scientific method were to emerge
  anywhere, the Earth is about as suitable as you
  can get. Gonzalez and Richards have flung down
  the gauntlet. Let the debate begin it is a
  question that involves us all.
• Simon Conway Morris,
• Professor of Evolutionary Paleobiology,
  University of Cambridge

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Reviews

• This thoughtful, delightfully contrarian book
  will rile up those who believe the Copernican
  principle is an essential philosophical
  component of modern science. Is our universe
  designedly congenial to intelligent, observing
  life? Passionate advocates of the search for
  extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) will find
  much to ponder in this carefully documented
  analysis.
• Owen Gingerich, Harvard Smithsonian Center
  for Astrophysics

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Additional Useful Quote

• "Our willingness to accept scientific claims that
  are against common sense is the key to an
  understanding of the real struggle between
  science and the supernatural. We take the side
  of science in spite of the patent absurdity of
  some of its constructs, in spite of its failure
  to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of
  health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the
  scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so
  stories, because we have a prior commitment, a
  commitment to materialism. It is not that the
  methods and institutions of science somehow
  compel us to accept a material explanation of
  the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that

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Additional Useful Quote

• we are forced by our a priori adherence to
  material causes to create an apparatus of
  investigation and a set of concepts that produce
  material explanations, no matter how
  counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the
  uninitiated.
• Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we
  cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door."
• Richard Lewontin, "Billions and Billions of
  Demons," New York Review of Books, January 9,
  1997, p. 28.
• Lewontin is an evolutionary biologist at Harvard
  University