Intelligent design: Chance cannot do all that atheists (and theistic evolutionists) hope

A friend writes to tell me how intelligent design is applied in crime detection.

"Back Door" Cheating Scandal Rocks Online Poker

In roughly four years, an online poker cheat ring netted approximately $10M. A Australian player outed the ring via statistical analyses that demonstrated that showed that cheating must have occurred.

Detective work by an Australian online poker player has uncovered a $US10 million cheating scandal at two major poker websites and triggered a $US75 million legal claim.

In two separate cases, Michael Josem, from Chatswood, analysed detailed hand history data from Absolute Poker and UltimateBet and uncovered that certain player accounts won money at a rate too fast to be legitimate.

According to the Sydney Morning Herald, an internal investigation discovered that employees had defrauded players for three years because a security hole had allowed cheats to see other players' hidden cards.

Actually, the same thing happened here in Ontario (a province of Canada)

So are all these people wrong? Is chance king?

Or is there design in the universe? And can design be detected by rational methods? One must hope so.

Find out why there is an intelligent design controversy:

Darwinism and politics - a really bad mix?

In a column explaining why Teddy Roosevelt had his flaws as a US Prez ("Choosing the right role model, October 5, 2008"), George Will offers some interesting information:

Having read Darwin's "The Origin of Species" at age 14, and having strenuously transformed himself from an asthmatic child into a robust adult, he advocated "warrior republicanism" (Hawley's phrase). TR saw virtue emerging from struggle, especially violent struggle, between nations and between the "Anglo-Saxon" race and lesser races. Blending "muscular Christianity," the "social gospel" -- which sanctified the state as an instrument of moral reclamation -- and Darwinian theory, TR believed that human nature evolved toward improvement through conflict.

Well, that's classical Darwin fascism, believe it or not (and I don't).

TR invested the materialist doctrine of evolutionary struggle with moral significance for the most manly "races." He wanted the state to rescue America from the danger, as he saw it, that a commercial republic breeds effeminacy. Government as moral tutor would pull chaotic individualists up from private preoccupations and put them in harness for redemptive collective action.

Sounds to me like a recipe for government paying a ton of tax money for a zillion civil servants to poke their collective nose into the smallest corner of everyone's business and promote laws against everyone who offends them, on the theory that we are "helping" evolution.

It's nice to see that someone is actually talking about this.

Find out why there is an intelligent design controversy: