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'Unlocking the Mystery of Life' (67 mins - Amazon Astore UK | US) - The scientific case for Intelligent Design - is produced by Illustra Media:

"Time, chance, and natural selection. Since Darwin, biologists have relied on such processes to account for the origin of living things. Yet today, this approach is being challenged as never before..."

The video starts with the 'landmark meeting' held by Phillip Johnson (TalkOrigins article on Phillip Johnson) in Pajaro Dunes California in 1993 and describes the development of the Intelligent Design movement through contributions from well-known names such as Paul Nelson, Stephen Meyer, Michael Behe, William Dembski, Jonathan Wells, and Scott Minnich.

Sample quotations from the 'Unlocking the Mystery of Life' video:

Phillip Johnson:

I sometimes wonder why anybody talks about anything else. Because this is the most interesting topic there is. Where did we come from? How did we get here? What brought us into existence? What is our relationship to reality as a whole?

The argument for intelligent design is based upon observation of the facts. Now that's my definition of good science. It's observation of the facts. And when you observe the facts, as Michael Behe has done, you observe this incredible pattern of interrelated complexity...

Paul Nelson

For Charles Darwin, natural selection explained the appearance of design without a designer. There was no longer any need to invoke an intelligent cause for the complexity of life. In effect, natural selection became a kind of designer substitute.

When we came together at Pajaro Dunes we certainly didn't agree on everything, but we did share a real dissatisfaction with the mechanism of natural selection and the role that it was playing in biological explanation.

The co-option argument doesn't explain this. You see, in order to construct that flagellar mechanism - or the tens of thousands of other such mechanisms in the cell - you require other machines to regulate the assembly in those structures. And those mechanisms, themselves, require machines for their assembly.

When I look at molecular machines, or the incredibly complex process by which cells divide, I want to ask, 'is it possible that these things had an intelligence behind them? That there was a plan and a purpose to this structure?'

Stephen Meyer

It's part of our knowledge base that intelligent agents can produce information-rich systems… so the argument is not based on what we don't know, but its based on what we do know about the cause and effect structure of the world.

We know, at present, there is no materialistic explanation, no natural cause that produces information. Not natural selection, not self- organizational processes, not pure chance. But we do know of a cause that is capable of producing information and that is intelligence. And so when people infer design from the presence of information in DNA, they're effectively making what's called (in the historical sciences) an inference to the best explanation.

So when we find an information-rich system in the cell, in the DNA molecule specifically, we can infer that intelligence played a role in the origin of that system, even if we weren't there to observe the system coming into existence.

Michael Behe

It's really interesting to notice that the more we know about life and the more we know about biology, the more problems Darwinism has, and the more design becomes apparent.

...for the longest time, I believed that Darwinian evolution explained what we saw in biology. Not because I saw how it could actually explain it, but because I was told that it did explain it. In schools I was taught Darwinian biology.

And through college and graduate school, I was in an atmosphere which just assumed that Darwinian evolution explained biology and, again, I didn't have any reason to doubt it.

It wasn't until about ten years ago, that I read a book called, "Evolution, a Theory in Crisis," (critique) by a geneticist by the name of Michael Denton (an Australian). And he put forward a lot of scientific arguments against Darwinian theory that I had never heard before.

...and the arguments, seemed pretty convincing. And, at that point, I started to get a bit angry because I thought I was being led down the primrose path. Here were a number of very good arguments... and I had gone through a doctoral program in biochemistry, became a faculty member... and I had never even heard of these things. And so, from that point on, I became very interested in the question of evolution and since have decided the Darwinian processes are not the whole the explanation for life.

William Dembski

I came to this trying to look at how do we reason about design. What are the logical moves that we have to go through in order to come to a conclusion of design?

And, what I am trying to do...is to establish reliable, empirical, scientifically rigorous criteria for deciding whether something is, in fact, designed.

I was looking at the logic of it, and what I found was that you need improbability and you need specification, the right sort of pattern...

Jonathan Wells

Darwin wanted to explain everything in the history of life in terms of undesigned, unintelligent natural processes.

...and when he looked for an explanation, what he found was that a process he could observe in domestic populations also operates in the wild.

Now, Darwin, himself, was very familiar with domestic breeding. He studies pigeon breeding, and he knew that - for centuries - human breeders had been able to make dramatic changes in populations by selecting only certain individuals to breed. Darwin really suggested that this same process operates in the wild...

Scott Minnich

Howard Berg at Harvard has labeled it [the flagellar motor] the most efficient machine in the universe. These machines, some of them, are running at 100,000 rpms. And are hard-wired into a signal transduction or sensory mechanism so that it's getting feedback from the environment.

The bacterial flagellum - two gears forward and reverse, water-cooled, proton motive force. It has a stator, it has a rotor, it has a U-joint, it has a drive shaft, it has a propeller. And they function as these parts of machines...

It's not convenient that we give them these names. It's truly their function.

Irreducible complexity was coined by Mike Behe in describing these molecular machines. Basically, what it says, is that you have multicomponent parts to any organelle or system within a cell…all of which are necessary for function. That is, if you remove one part, you lose function of that system.

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Previous posts include:

"Darwinism's Rules of Reasoning: Phillip Johnson on Pierre Grasse"

"Intelligent Design: 'A War on Science' (BBC Horizon Video - 49 mins)"

"Recent 'Intelligent Design The Future' Podcasts"

"Intelligent Design Defended by Unsolved Genetic Puzzle"

"Scientist Exposes Evolution's Weaknesses in Politically Incorrect Book About Darwinism and Intelligent Design"

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