We will be having a regional meeting again this year, November 13-14 in Seattle, at the Discovery Institute (208 Columbia Street • Seattle, WA 98104). Register for the meeting online at this page. This year’s meeting in on the topic “What is Information?” This question seems to keep coming up. At the annual meeting in Pittsburgh, J.P. Moreland argued that information must have a spiritual/non-physical aspect. Randy Isaac has argued that there is no information in biological systems because information presumes communication between intelligent agents. Bill Dembski has argued that information can never be spontaneously created, only destroyed, except by an intelligent agent. In the physics world, information is viewed as exchangeable with energy.
We have six speakers who will be addressing different aspects of this topic:
Friday night:
7:00 PM registration
- 7:30 PM Doug Axe, Discovery Institute. Doug is an experienced biochemist and has a new book coming out on the science of biological information.
- 8:15 PM Jeff Zweerink, Reasons to Believe. Jeff’s expertise is in cosmology and physics and he will be discussing information in the context of cosmology.
Saturday morning:
8:30 AM coffee
- 9:00 AM Winston Ewert, Evolutionary Informatics Lab. Winston has worked closely with Bill Dembski on computational aspects of information.
- 9:45 AM Perry Marshall, business consultant and electrical engineer. Perry Marshall is a well known marketing expert and Christian apologist; he has a new book this year entitled Evolution 2.0: Breaking the Deadlock Between Darwin and Design.
- 10:30 AM Casey Luskin, Discovery Institute. Casey has long been one of the most visible public faces of the Discovery Institute and will be giving new arguments on whether semantic information, rather than functional information, is necessary to infer design.
- 11:15 AM David Snoke, University of Pittsburgh. I will review the standard view of physicists of the physical nature of information, including in quantum mechanics, and how this affects the design argument.
We plan to end by lunch on Saturday and have lunch together.
The meeting will be free to paid-up members of the CSS. If you are in the Seattle area, come by, and invite your friends!
