Let’s lighten things up a little: The only way I can think of to connect this to ID in any manner is DaveScot’s contention that evolution will continue via self-modification. Other than that, I just thought it was funny.
Recently, several people have generously devoted considerable time to padding the comments section of the Post-Darwinist on the question of whether Hitler was a creationist or a Darwinist. Now, one recent commenter, Mitchell Coffey, went over the top, accusing Cal State prof Richard Weikart, author of From Darwin to Hitler, of being dishonest.
Critiquing my position, he scolds, in part:
This is to be expected if you rely on the immorality of dishonest academics like Richard Weikart. Most of his assertions about Darwin’s beliefs are contradicted by the historical sources — often by the historical sources he himself cites for support! In one case, he out-and-out lies about what he calls Darwin’s “system.”
But if you want to see a straight-out lie by Prof. Weikart, locate his one quote from H.G. Wells. Weikart makes extravagant claims about the significance of the quote, which Weikart wants you to believe meant that Wells believed in killing off “inferior” races.
Weikart, who is fluent in German, replies,
Debra J. Saunders reports that, in an apparent stunning reversal of decades of misdirection, educrats have now decided that junior students should just learn the correct answers in math class. For example, 9 x 9 = 81. Period. That’s not worth arguing about, any more than the alphabet is. You learn it so you can learn other things. Some of those other things, incidentally, are very much worth arguing about. But the student must acquire basic skills before he or she knows enough to comprehend, let alone take part in, an argument. The story is that the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, in an apparent policy switch, now thinks that Grade Fours should know multiplication and division tables. In Read More ›
It is often said that while there are many controversies within evolution as to the specifics of how evolution works, there is no controversy about the fact of evolution. Often times, when ID’ers talk about problems with evolutionary theory, they are accused of misrepresentation — that certainly there are controversies about aspects of evolution, but not controversies about the fact of evolution itself. Thus, any amount of doubt that might be brought on by these criticisms are washed away by the fact that these are mere quibbles over details.
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An ID hypothesis is that abiogenesis is practically impossible without intelligent agency. A predictionmade by this hypothesis is that no method of abiogenesis absent intelligent intervention can ever be demonstrated in a laboratory. The prediction may be falsified in principle by demonstrating a chemical pathway whereby abiogenesis takes place. This is a legitimate hypothesis that makes a testable prediction. Therefore all attempts to demonstrate that abiogenesis is possible absent intelligent intervention is an attempt to falsify biological ID. So I don’t want to hear the tired canard again that ID has no research programs. We have many of them and they’ve been going on for God only knows how long. At least since Aristotle in 350 B.C. said it was Read More ›
Random mutation is so attractive to chance worshippers because it is easy to demonstrate that unpredictable mutations do happen and that, in principle, any possible outcome can be produced. This is to say that, for instance, a shower of cosmic rays can hit a group of people and change the DNA in their germ cells in any manner whatsoever. It’s just a matter of how probable any given change might be. No change is impossible. Set incredulity aside and the comic book characters “The Fantastic Four” become real possibilities. Hence random mutation can explain ANYTHING and the only argument against it is the argument from incredulity. That’s why it just won’t die. It’s too good at its explanatory ability. Nothing Read More ›
Commenter Tom English admonishes us for mocking “legitimate scientists” (these I presume are like real Scotsmen) in their inquiries into how abiogenesis could be accomplished. This raised a question in my mind. If abiogenesis is real science then how may it be falsified in principle? It seems to me that legitimate scientists (TM, Pat. Pending) could look for plausible paths for abiogenesis from now until forever, come up empty handed, and continue to claim as Tom does that any question of its legitimacy is nothing but an argument from incredulity. How convenient. Abiogenesis “research” has everything to win and nothing to lose. So tell me, Tom English, how can abiogenesis be falsified? What prevents it from being a hypothesis that Read More ›
Origin of Life theories attempt to account for the transition from prebiotic matter to biotic matter. Beginning with Darwin’s warm little pond and continuing through the present day, scientists have tried to explain how this intuitively unlikely jump could have been made. In his wonderful article On the Origins of Life (here), David Berlinski summarizes some of the more important assumptions scientists must make in trying to resolve this weighty question: “First, that the pre-biotic atmosphere was chemically reductive; second, that nature found a way to synthesize cytosine; third, that nature also found a way to synthesize ribose; fourth, that nature found the means to assemble nucleotides into polynucleotides; fifth, that nature discovered a self-replicating molecule; and sixth, that having Read More ›
The latest Newsweek gives a sympathetic portrait of Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris. The article closes with the following sentence: If Dawkins, Dennett and Harris are right, the five-century-long competition between science and religion is sharpening. People are choosing sides. And when that happens, people get hurt. Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14638243/site/newsweek.
I will blog on the Catholic Church’s position in more detail later, when I get a chance to get all my links together, but for now:
There are currently two and one half understandings of ID:
1. The specific ideas of biochemist Michael Behe and mathematician Bill Dembski (irreducible complexity and specified complexity) may provide evidence of a level of information in life forms that cannot be explained by the chance interactions of physical laws.
Behe’s or Dembski’s thesis may be correct. Or may not. Even if both are incorrect, correct theses may arise from another quarter.
Surely, the Catholic Church was never going to throw its institutional weight behind either of these theses, as I have pointed out in at least one earlier post. Why should it? Such theses stand or fall in their own arenas in their own good time. The Church has learned at least that much in the age of science.
2. The universe and life forms show evidence of intelligent design in principle. That is not something the Catholic Church can oppose. The entire Bible depends on that idea. Jews and Muslims agree with it, and so did key Greek philosophers, as indeed have most philosophers throughout history. (They disagreed about what, who, how, where, when, and why, but few disagreed about the fact of design until fairly recently.)
For a while, Darwinism looked like it might provide a creation story for post-Enlightenment atheism, … but maybe not.
½. Oh yes, the half idea. Read More ›
I read for a second time today an article about an amazing person nicknamed Kim-puter. Read More ›
Lauren Sandler’s new provocative book Righteous: Dispatches from the Evangelical Youth Movement is out in a bookstore near you (released September 7, 2006). I will comment some more on it since an entire chapter was devoted to Intelligent Design (entitled “Evolutionary Wars”) and quite a bit of that chapter was written about me. Her book will sell to the pro-Darwin crowd who think people like me are part of “a great national ill”.
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Perhaps the significance of this announcement should be read in light Ken Miller’s pronouncement that the Pope should embrace Darwinian evolution and urge Catholics to reject intelligent design: http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/kenneth_miller/2006/09/miller.html.
Vatican: Pope slams evolution
Source: http://ansa.it/main/notizie/awnplus/english/news/2006-09-12_1128196.html
‘Accounts about Man don’t add up without God’ says pontiff (ANSA) – Regensburg, September 12 – Pope Benedict XVI on Monday issued his strongest criticism yet of evolutionary theory, calling it “unreasonable” .
Speaking to a 300,000-strong crowd in this German city, the former theological watchdog said that, according to such theories derived from Charles Darwin’s work, the universe is “the random result of evolution and therefore, at bottom, something unreasonable”.
The homily appeared to throw the Catholic Church’s full weight behind the theory of intelligent design (ID) – a subject of massive controversy in the United States. Read More ›
I haven’t even read the entire article yet. But I just had to post this. From what little I’ve read, this Physorg.com article positively jives with Davison’s theory on evolution. Read More ›
For those not familiar with “turtles all the way down,” I offer the following from wikipedia.
