I am pleased to report that The Spiritual Brain is going into Polish translation. Maybe this is hopeful. For a long while we couldn’t sell TSB abroad because some commentators said the book was “too religious”. I have no idea why. The book isn’t especially religious unless … you mean if any book threatens materialists … ? But wouldn’t people want to know why materialism probably isn’t true? Well, I guess Poles do, and good for them. Given that Darwinism is the creation story of atheism, one question it all raises for me – and this was raised by a relative a decade ago – why is Darwinism even public business? Who cares why the tyrannosaur died? Whether Neanderthal man Read More ›

Sometimes, when discussing the much misunderstood Scopes Trial, I have referred to the textbook from which Scopes was teaching, Hunter’s Civic Biology, which seems to have been an amalgam of civics and biology, with a dose of eugenics thrown in, and smug assertions about “highest” or “lowest”. Bad idea. Enough already with total subject confusion, ecological misunderstanding, and useless social conflict. Here’s an interesting site where Ron Ladouceur gives us a tour of exotic textbooks of our storied past. I am glad my own biology teachers focused on the cell theory of life, the germ theory of disease, and the life and times of the endangered ribbon snake (= ecology). There is only so much students will take away when Read More ›

We would like to remind our readers that Michael Behe has a sub-blog here at UD, which can be accessed at the sidebar under “Intelligent Design Links.”   Last week Behe put up a four-part series replying to science writer Carl Zimmer’s comments about Behe’s response to Joseph Thornton’s recent work.  The final paragraph is classic Behe:  As for “no scientific controversy”, even a brief excursion into the history of science shows many uncontroversial, widely-accepted theories that were in fact wrong. There was no scientific controversy in the 19th century about the existence of the ether, or the adequacy of Newton’s laws. And, if one relies on science journals for her entire perspective, there is no controversy today about whether undirected Read More ›

Jason Rosenhouse has written a blog about Michael Ruse and William Dembski. His complaint against Ruse, among other things, is that Ruse is too cordial, too civil with ID supporters, Dembski especially.

And while I may dislike and disagree with Ruse’s thinking, it is his actions over the last several years that I loathe and detest. I hate the way he has been doing everything in his power to prop up the ID folks. I hate that he persuaded a presitgious university press to publish a book co-edited by William Dembski, which featured four essays defending “Darwinism” that seemed tailor made to make evolution look bad. I hate that he contributes essays to anthologies designed to celebrate ID promoters and that he tells debate audiences that Dembski has made valuable contributions to science. Go here for relevant links and further details.

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In a previous post I promised to start at UD a discussion about the incompleteness of physics from an ID point of view. Here is the startup article.

At Aristotle’s time “physics” was the study of nature as a whole. In modern times physics seems to have a more specific meaning and is only one field among others that study nature. Nevertheless physicists (especially materialist ones) claim that physics can (or should) explain all reality. This claim is based on the gratuitous assumption that all macroscopic realities can be deduced entirely from their microscopic elements or states. Also if this assumption were true there would be the problem to understand where those fundamental objects or states came from in the first place. Many physicists even think about a “Theory of Everything” (ToE), able to explain all nature, from its lower aspects to its higher ones. If a ToE really existed a system of equations would be able to model every object and calculate every event in the cosmos, from atomic particles to intelligence. The question that many ask is: can a ToE exist in principle? If the answer is positive we could consider the cosmos as a giant system, which evolution is computable. If the answer is negative this would mean that there is a fundamental incompleteness in physics, and the cosmos cannot be considered a computable system. An additional question is: what are the relations between the above problem and ID? Read More ›