Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Off Topic: “Faith & Healing: Where’s the Evidence?”

Here’s something I wrote for the Baptist Press about faith healer Todd Bentley. Unlike Richard Dawkins, Michael Shermer, James Randi, and the skeptical community in general, I don’t throw out all miraculous healings. Indeed, I think they are far more prevalent than we ordinarily imagine. At the same time, we need to guard against wishful thinking.

What do Design Detection and Nazis Have in Common?

Perhaps someone can explain to me what the science of design detection has to do with Nazis, the Holocaust, or Hitler. I sure can’t think of anything. Help me out here. It’s things like this that undermine ruin the effort to get ID accepted as good science. It gives our critics the ammunition they need to convince people that ID is nothing more than a tool being used to promote social reform. Science has left the building once the Nazi card gets played. As far as science is concerned it doesn’t matter if Hitler and Darwin were the same person. The only thing that matters is whether his theories can stand up to scientific scrutiny. It’s a crying shame that Read More ›

Should the Expelled movie have addressed the Holocaust?

Many of us have heard a wearisome amount of commentary about whether the Expelled film should have – or should not have – dwelt on the Darwin-driven Nazi extermination of “inferior” peoples.

Scholar Richard Weikart, who knows more than anyone alive about the  Nazis and Darwin, writes to say,

The point about showing the social and ethical impact of Darwinism is not to *disprove* Darwinism. However, many people fail to understand that Darwinism necessarily has ethical implications, in ways that other sciences do not, because it makes claims about the origins of morality (at least Darwin in Descent of Man made such claims, as have myriads of Darwinists thereafter).

However, while not disproving Darwinism, pointing out the ethical implications and impacts of Darwinism is nonetheless important, as I have learned from reactions to my book, From Darwin to Hitler, and to lectures I have given. Some individuals have told me that before learning about my work on the intersection of Darwinism and bioethics, they didn’t think Darwinism was all that important—they saw it as irrelevant, a mere intellectual curiosity. Darwinism, however, makes claims about life and death issues—indeed, about the very meaning of life and death (in addition to its claims about the origins of morality). Granted, there are various ways philosophically to try to meet these challenges, but knowing the directions that Darwinism has taken historically can help clarify the philosophical issues, it seems to me. For those who think that the social implications have only been felt by Nazi Germany, get John West’s excellent book, _Darwin Day in America_, where he shows the way that Darwinism has impacted many diverse fields in the US.

I do not disbelieve in Darwinism because of its ethical and social consequences. I disbelieve in Darwinism because it is inconsistent with the available evidence. It simply is not true. Showing that people have been (and are being!!) killed in the name of Darwinism, however, lends poignancy and urgency to exposing the falsehood.

If I did not have any other reason to believe Weikart, I need only look at the rubbish at Wikipedia on the subject.

Surely no one sends their students there? It is nothing but a whitewash of Darwin’s racism and the inevitable consequences of same. It will be instructive to see Barack Obama’s campaign get hold of this stuff and turn it into something really slick.

Meanwhile, key news from the north: Read More ›

ConversantLife.com videos for UNDERSTANDING ID

ConversantLife.com is doing a lot of the web marketing of my new book with Sean McDowell (UNDERSTANDING INTELLIGENT DESIGN). Here are some videos they did of Sean and me during a recent bookseller’s convention: www.conversantlife.com/id (scroll down) www.youtube.com/user/conversantlifestyle (scroll down)

The Earth’s Thermostat

I wrote a longish reply to someone on an obscure forum about global warming and thought as long as I put the work into it I should reproduce it to a wider audience so here it is:

You didn’t figure out the shoe size/salary correlation. It’s a classic example in why correlation doesn’t equal causation.

On the face of it’s a strong correlation. The reason it’s strong is so many people with small shoes are children who don’t earn any salary at all.

Read More ›

Who Removed Pharyngula Links from morris.umn.edu?

In the lastest escapades of Paul “Frackin’ Cracker” Myers I found that all links to Pharyngula, where Myers recently promised to film and blog himself desecrating the Catholic Eucharist, have been hastily removed from the University of Minnesota (Morris) website.

Thanks to Google Cache and also The Wayback Machine we can see that these links were there not long ago. What we want to know is who removed them. Was it Paul “Frackin’ Cracker” Myers himself who removed the links in an effort to protect his job or was it the University of Minnesota that removed them to protect itself from Myers? Either way, someone is trying to distance the University of Minnesota from Paul “Frackin’ Cracker” Myers’ personal blog.

Something else that should be investigated is if Myers is using the University’s computers and networks to manage his personal blog, to compose things like the desecration of the Eucharist blog entries, and otherwise leverage taxpayer and tuition funded resources to carry on these activities.

We here are supportive of Paul Myers’ right to use his own time and resources for any legal activities he cares to indulge in but when he begins using the resources of a public university to engage in these activities then it becomes something that he has no right to do. It then amounts to theft of services. The University of Minnesota’s computers and networks are paid for by various sources including the taxpayers but these resources are only to be used for things explicitely approved of by university administrators who are in turn accountable to said sources of funding. Employees of the university should not be free to use these resources for unapproved personal purposes.

Click below to see all the links showing what was recently removed from morris.umn.edu to coverup the university web server’s use associated with Myers personal blog scienceblogs.com/pharyngula.

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Paul Zachary Myers: Evolutionist and Now Imminent Desecrator

This just posted on the Catholic League’s website: MINNESOTA PROF PLEDGES TO DESECRATE EUCHARIST July 10, 2008 Paul Zachary Myers, a professor at the University of Minnesota Morris, has pledged to desecrate the Eucharist. He is responding to what happened recently at the University of Central Florida when a student walked out of Mass with the Host, holding it hostage for several days. Myers was angry at the Catholic League for criticizing the student. His post can be accessed from his faculty page on the university’s website. Here is an excerpt of his July 8 post, “It’s a Frackin’ Cracker!”: “Can anyone out there score me some consecrated communion wafers?” Myers continued by saying, “if any of you would be Read More ›

Design for Photosynthetic Hydrogen

Lubitz, Reijerse & Messinger have published a fascinating review into the intricacies of photosystem II and hydrogenases that produce hydrogen – Note the marvels within Darwn’s blob of “protoplasm”. It is most interesting that Lubitz et al. address the design principles that we can learn from “nature” and apply to creating synthetic photochemical biosynthetic water splitting systems.Though attributed to “nature”, recognizing design principles and applying them are easily understood at the Max Planck Institut für Bioanorganische Chemie. I wonder when No. America will catch up? From the very detailed complexity described, I highly expect some “irreducibly complex” systems are present. Any candidates? Following are a few extracts from this excellent review.
—————————–

Solar water-splitting into H2 and O2: design principles of photosystem II and hydrogenases

Wolfgang Lubitz, Edward J. Reijerse and Johannes Messinger
Max Planck Institut für Bioanorganische Chemie, Germany.

Energy Environ. Sci., 2008 DOI: 10.1039/b808792j

This review aims at presenting the principles of water-oxidation in photosystem II and of hydrogen production by the two major classes of hydrogenases in order to facilitate application for the design of artificial catalysts for solar fuel production. . . .

. . .A promising way for light-driven water splitting would be to mimic the molecular and supramolecular organization of the natural photosynthetic system, i.e. artificial photosynthesis.12,13 . . . Read More ›

Louisiana – what’s the big deal?

So Louisiana has a new law allowing science teachers to teach the weaknesses of time & chance evolutionary theory. What’s the big deal? Evolution by time and chance is as well tested as gravity for Pete’s sake. How long does take to convince a kid that when he throws a baseball into the air gravity will pull it back to earth? According to the theophobic evolutionists there are no weaknesses in their theory. So the teacher will quickly present just a small fraction of the “overwhelming evidence” that time & chance turned mud into Mozart, he’ll have a list of zero things to present to argue against it, and all will be well with nothing lost. The biology teacher can Read More ›

Texas educator sues over job loss and creationism

Published online 9 July 2008 | Nature 454, 150 (2008) A former Texas official is suing the state’s education agency, saying that its policies passively endorse creationism. In a complaint filed with a district court on 1 July, Christina Comer, a former director of state science education, alleged that officials tacitly condone the teaching of creationism through a policy of neutrality. Comer oversaw Texas’s science curriculum until last November, when she was forced to resign for circulating a notice of a talk entitled “Inside Creationism’s Trojan Horse”. In her termination notice, Comer was told that the education agency endeavoured to “remain neutral” on the issue of creationism. Comer’s complaint argues that board neutrality violates the separation of church and state. Read More ›

Climate Change Delusion makes the DSM-IV

Psychiatrists in Australia have identified “Climate Change Delusion” as the latest mental disorder sure to make it into the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV). That’s the head shrinker’s bible if you don’t know.

Doomed to a fatal delusion over climate change

Andrew Bolt
July 09, 2008 12:00am
For The Herald Sun

PSYCHIATRISTS have detected the first case of “climate change delusion” – and they haven’t even yet got to Kevin Rudd and his global warming guru.

Writing in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, Joshua Wolf and Robert Salo of our Royal Children’s Hospital say this delusion was a “previously unreported phenomenon”.

“A 17-year-old man was referred to the inpatient psychiatric unit at Royal Children’s Hospital Melbourne with an eight-month history of depressed mood . . . He also . . . had visions of apocalyptic events.”

(So have Alarmist of the Year Tim Flannery, Profit of Doom Al Gore and Sir Richard Brazen, but I digress.)

“The patient had also developed the belief that, due to climate change, his own water consumption could lead within days to the deaths of millions of people through exhaustion of water supplies.”

But never mind the poor boy, who became too terrified even to drink. What’s scarier is that people in charge of our Government seem to suffer from this “climate change delusion”, too.

Here is Prime Minister Kevin Rudd yesterday, with his own apocalyptic vision: “If we do not begin reducing the nation’s levels of carbon pollution, Australia’s economy will face more frequent and severe droughts, less water, reduced food production and devastation of areas such as the Great Barrier Reef and Kakadu wetlands.”

And here is a senior Sydney Morning Herald journalist aghast at the horrors described in the report on global warming released on Friday by Rudd’s guru, Professor Ross Garnaut: “Australians must pay more for petrol, food and energy or ultimately face a rising death toll . . .”

Wow. Pay more for food or die. Is that Rudd’s next campaign slogan?

Of course, we can laugh at this — and must — but the price for such folly may soon be your job, or at least your cash.

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Late night snack: Charles Darwin and Kemal Ataturk have both been spotted by devotees

Can’t sleep? Thinking of trying that leftover spicy dip again?

Mmmmmm, can’t comment on that but, as you munch ….

As if to prove that modernization and secularization are not the same thing – as sociologist Peter Berger maintains – long-deceased cultural icons are “appearing” again. Darwin’s face has been discovered in a tree and Turkish secularist Kemal Ataturk’s face in a hillside shadow in a remote Turkish village. All the more interesting because Darwin is the icon of North American atheists and Atatürk was a devout secularist.

Apparently, the silhouette of Turkey’s revered founder appears on the shadow that falls on these heights between June 15 and July 5. And thousands of Atatürk lovers, including military officers, bureaucrats and urban professionals, visit the region in order to observe this fascinating solstice.

Mr. Gülcemal Fidan, the mayor of Damal and a member of the ultra-secular People’s Republican Party, or CHP, recently announced that the “Damal Festival in the Shade of Atatürk” will be observed every year, and his office has spared YTL 200,000 (about $163,000) for this year’s organization — which is quite an amount for a tiny and poor area like his. Mr. Fidan also added that they expected Turkey’s Chief of Staff Gen. Yasar Büyükanit to attend the celebrations.

Did Atatürk get “time off for good behavior” to come back and get his devotees favours from the government?

Now, I ask you, reasonable folk, does this – or does it not – beat the “Virgin Mary on a piece of toast“?

Toronto hack’s view: Devotees – of Darwin, Ataturk, or kitsch Catholicism – “see” things.

The Florida toast cult claims that their piece of bread has mystical power. It never went bad in a whole decade – or anyway, no one ate it and got sick. No one ate it at all. It was offered for sale.

Match THAT< Darwin and Ataturk!

(Note: The Catholic Church thinks that Jesus’s mother Mary has sometimes appeared to help people. But read this for qualifying details. Do not try to phone the Pope about your toast. If you have not been living a really holy life, Mary prays for you. But if you are not listening to usual sources of good advice – why not start by listening to them, instead of waiting for a visit from her?)

Meanwhile, at The Mindful Hack, if you still haven’t gone to sleep … Read More ›

John Kwok – the Jekyll and Hyde of Paleobiology

Man, this guy makes PZ Myers look calm, cool, and collected. Click here to read this hilarious exchange between David Heddle and John Kwok on a typical “science” blog. It’s funny until Kwok starts throwing ill-advised libels about. I wonder if Abbie “Potty Mouth” Smith will do him a big favor and flush this down the memory hole (in the words of Jerry Pournelle) “Real Soon Now”. Smithers, release the hounds. And will someone PLEASE do Kwok a huge favor and give him an Amazon gift certificate redeemable for a thesaurus of his choice. I’ve never read anyone who needs one more than this raving lunatic.

That’s What Happens in a “Greenhouse.” Duh!

As DaveScott has pointed out in this space on several occasions, increased levels of atmospheric CO2 is, in at least some very important respects, a good thing.  Now Nature reports scientists are reaching the same conclusion here (sub required). Barley, beets (for those who like food that tastes like dirt) and wheat production increased by 10% when exposed to the year 2050 CO2 levels predicted by some climate models.