Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Masculinity-Threatened Men

According to the 26Aug2005 issue of THE WEEK (p. 20), “Researchers at Cornell University tested the effect of insecurity on men’s attitudes by giving a survey on gender identity to about 50 men. The men were then told that an analysis of the survey showed that they exhibited ‘weak’ male characteristics — indeed, that their attitudes were effeminate. Read More ›

“Most Scientific Papers Are Probably Wrong”

Lehigh University biologists have, just shy of a consensus, condemned intelligent design (the lone dissenter — surprise, surprise — is Michael Behe). The various anti-ID blogs (go here and here) are crowing about this, as though this vindicates their criticism of ID and, to boot, must somehow be disconcerting to us.

Quite the contrary. Read More ›

Hate Mail with a Religious Theme

Now and again I receive irate emails. The funniest of these come from Peter Pajakowski, who makes me appreciate the Polish jokes I heard growing up in Chicago. For the record, I have no shame, enjoy the attacks of critics, and think I’m completely right. So there.

Enjoy the following two letters: Read More ›

John Mark Reynolds in Touchstone — Out of Touch?

My friend and colleague John Mark Reynolds at Biola University has just published a piece in Touchstone titled “Séances & Science: The Lessons of the Spiritualist Challenge to Darwinism” (go here). The piece is meant as a warning to the ID movement not to repeat mistakes of the past. Read More ›

The Undermining of Science?

If intelligence is a real causal power in the natural world that is not reducible to the law-governed interactions of matter and energy, then how can intelligent design avoid undermining science? This worry can be restated as follows: Read More ›

“Intrinsic Intelligence”

Just Check the ID
By Sally Jenkins
Monday, August 29, 2005
Washington Post

….Jeffrey M. Schwartz, a neuroscientist and research professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine, is a believer in ID, or as he prefers to call it, “intrinsic intelligence.” Read More ›

Bill Buckley on ID

In the United States, the battlefront is in the schools, on the question of evolution and creationism. If a 14-year-old student is introduced to the contingent possibility that life evolved as it did because its creator so willed it, which of the following risks, from the hard-line evolutionists’ point of view, is that student taking? 1) His intellectual disqualification by admitting creationism, for which there is no scientific no warrant, into his thinking? 2) A lifelong intellectual confusion, perhaps disabling in its consequences, which will keep him from prevailing as a responsible thinker and actor? Or perhaps, 3) a lifetime as an agent of teleological confusion, with the result that he will not only mislead himself, but also mislead others? Read More ›

ID in Italy

ID is in the news in Italy. The University of Milan has published an article on recent developments in ID in the U.S. (Vita e pensiero, vol. 4, September 2005). A preview of that article was published in a national newspaper called L’Avvenire, 13 August 2005, p. 23 by a journalist named Luigi Dell’Aglio, and it has already generated reactions (both positive and negative). Cardinal Schönborn’s article in the The New York Times (July, 2005) has provoked a steady stream of media attention, and the Italian press is swimming right along in the path.