A few days ago Sal posted the following quote from Darwin: From Letter 3154 — Darwin, C. R. to Herschel, J. F. W., 23 May [1861] One cannot look at this Universe with all living productions & man without believing that all has been intelligently designed As Jack Krebs pointed out (and Sal freely admited, which was why he posted under “humor”), this was a quote mine, and Saint Charles went on to distance himself from this view.   Nevertheless, as Darwin’s son Francis made clear in his book, Darwin was haunted by thoughts of design to the end of his life.  In a July 3, 1881 letter to W. Grahm Darwin wrote:  “Nevertheless you have expressed my inward conviction, though far Read More ›

Yesterday a friend and I rode our bikes up to the top of Vail Pass, and when we got back down we stopped in Breckenridge for lunch.  After lunch we decided to walk around Breckenridge for a while, and we soon found ourselves in a wonderful little art gallery on Main Street.  One large bronze in particular caught my attention.  It was a comic piece of a bear standing beside a tree looking at a squirrel on a branch even with the bear’s face.  The squirrel was holding out an acorn as if he were offering it to the bear in exchange for not eating him.   I loved it.  As I looked at the piece the word “whimsy” came to mind.  I inquired about the price and Read More ›

That’s the warning I received from an anonymous “wellwisher” (?) here at the Post-Darwinist: I do hopw that the makers of “Expelled” are aware of the lawsuits launched against the makers of “What the Bleep…”, given that they obtained their interviews with several biologists unders false pretenses. I asked a contact at the studio, and he tapped back, No worries. Reality is, in the U.S. you can sue a baloney sandwich if you want. Well, I guess that Bleeps all. Note: An incident similar to this one may be what the anonymous correspondent has in mind. Also Here’s my review of What the Bleep …? I hadn’t realized that famous former atheist Antony Flew was one of the people saying Read More ›

I highly recommend this from the Discovery Institute: (Free Video) How To Teach the Controversy Legally (DvD Order Details) How To Teach the Controversy Legally

I can only speak for myself, and not the rest of those at UD, but in my opinion, voting against any mandate to teach ID or creation science in the public schools is the right thing to do. As much as I advocate that ID is correct, it is not the time to teach it in the public schools. Creationist Don McLeroy, chairman of the Texas School board, agrees.

McLeroy’s position is to be applauded by everyone. He might be the one guy that Darwinists, Creationists, and ID proponents will support with respect to not mandating ID or creation science in the public school.
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Reading reviews of a book one wrote is one of the best ways to study popular cultural assumptions about who you are and what you are trying to say:

From the Booklist review

Neuroscientist Beauregard is no flighty New-Ager or Creationist but, he says, one of a minority of neuroscientists who don’t adhere to strictly materialist interpretation of the human mind. … That is, it is too limiting to strictly confine the origin of all human thought to material or chemical interactions. In this complex tome, he …

I am glad that the Booklist reviewer explained the key point a non-materialist neuroscientist would want to make. But for the record, Mario Beauregard – no New-Ager or Creationist – is a perennialist. And The Spiritual Brain is not a complex tome. As psychiatrist Jeff Schwartz says,

It clearly explains non-materialist neuroscience in simple terms appropriate for the lay reader, while building on and extending work that Sharon Begley and I began in The Mind and The Brain, and work that Mario and I collaborated on in academic publications.

[other links to much Mindful Hack fun below] Read More ›

[photo of Eugenie Scott from www.ExpelledTheMovie.com serving as one of the Class Officers of The Big Science Academy. She will have a starring role in the best pro-ID movie yet.]

ID is a lineal descendent of William Paley’s Argument from Design (Paley 1803,)

Eugenie Scott
NCSE

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Here’s an interesting but off-topic story. A newspaper in Kuala Lumpur ran a newspaper article showing a picture of Jesus smoking (a cigar or cigarette or something). The Malay Indians have expressed outrage and asked for apologies (which the newspaper has extended). The Malay Indian Congress has threatened to have the newspaper shut down but, thus far, there has been no hint of rioting in the streets, burning cars, etc. Hmmm… Read more…

Readers of this blog will know that my favorite game is “spot the irony” (based upon Monty Python’s “spot the looney” game).  Here a colleague from another listserve brings Richard Dawkins’ statement from “The Enemies of Reason” We’ve got to go back to the evidence and see what is true. We must favour verifiable evidence over private feeling otherwise we leave ourselves vulnerable to those who would obscure the truth. We should be open minded, but not so open minded that our brains fall out. The scientific method tests with objective observation and statistical analysis. Individual scientists may or may not be honest, but science with its’ safeguards of peer review and repeated experiment has scrupulous honesty built into it Read More ›

Just when you thought things couldn’t get any sillier, now Sam Harris, author of “Letter to a Christian Nation” publishes a letter in Nature calling all good scientists to oppose religion at every turn. Unfortunately for Sam, the letter is frought with inaccuracies and mischaracterizations that would make PiZza Myers proud. He even goes so far as to scold Nature for not taking a hard enough line against this pernicious evil.

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The audacity of the secular humanists never ceases to amaze. Their upcoming conference titled “The Secular Society and Its Enemies” is an ill-conceived rip-off of Karl Popper’s THE OPEN SOCIETY AND ITS ENEMIES. Had they read and understood Popper, they would realize that they are the enemies to which he was referring. I encourage readers of this blog in the New York area to attend this conference — doing so will immeasurably enrich your education and show you what we’re up against:

David Klinghoffer, author of the new book Shattered Tablets: Why We Ignore the Ten Commandments at Our Peril (Doubleday), gives a disconcerting interview in National Review Online about life in Seattle. Here’s a sample: Lopez: What’s the point of a First Commandment protest rally? Klinghoffer: Oh, I attended one, though it wasn’t spoken of explicitly. It was a rally for Richard Dawkins, the atheist Darwinist bestseller guy, at Seattle’s town hall. The First Commandment — “I am the Lord your God…” — really sticks in the craw of materialists like Dawkins, much more so than any other of the Ten Commandments. Everyone was bundled in flannel and they were applauding him for applauding them for being such a bunch of Read More ›

Here is ad hoc, paradigm-driven, rationalistic science at its best: (paraphrase follows) “We know that humans and gorillas had a common ancestor. This finding of an extremely early but largely modern gorilla means that the ancestor must have been much earlier than we thought.” This, along with the Egyptian footprints, ought to be telling a different story, it seems to me. But, in order to see that story you have to adopt an empericalist view of science and be willing to run with the data rather than forcing the data into your paradigm. Read More

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

Responding to PZ Myers’ usual commenters, Randy Olson, of FLOCK OF DODOS fame, remarks: Are you folks really this clueless? You make me think of a baseball team that finishes the season in last place, then spends the off season criticizing all the other teams, as if that will address the problem. I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but that is an excellent trailer they have produced. Not some amateurish clunky mess that you would expect from a science organization. The music cue, “Bad to the Bone,” would have cost them $25,000 at least (assuming they have paid the rights — someone might want to look into that, but I’m guessing they have). Rights for music in Read More ›