An open letter, signed by some 42 Nobel Laureates, has been sent to the Louisiana legislature and to Gov. Bobby Jindal regarding the 2008 Louisiana academic freedom bill, which offers protection to teachers who encourage critical thinking and objective discussion about evolution and other scientific topics. The statement reads, in part: Dear Members of the Louisiana Legislature, As Nobel Laureates in various scientific fields, we urge you to repeal the misnamed and misguided Louisiana Science Education Act (LSEA) of 2008. This law creates a pathway for creationism and other forms of non-scientific instruction to be taught in public school science classrooms. The warning flags many of us raised about this law have now been proven justified. Members of the Livingston Read More ›
I wrote the index to Nature of Nature , a multilateral discussion of the issues around intelligent design (which originated in a conference that got Bill Dembski fired from Baylor while back.) Hardest index I ever wrote, and I have written hundreds. What makes it difficult is that – unlike with most books – the authors disagree about just about everything. So one can’t just identify indexable terms, one must actually read. Such a rare practice these days. I ended up just telling the publisher to be patient – as I would have to be – so I could get it right. But that index should be good for the reader, to help identify sources for widely made assumptions. For Read More ›
In “Chimps lose out by aping others” (New Scientist, 23 April 2011), we learn, Chimps seem curiously unable to use their own initiative to gain the best possible reward if this means behaving in a different way to a dominant group member. However, Hopper is not convinced that this behaviour means that chimps are less clever than we thought. “Copying what a dominant group member does could help the chimps to maintain alliances,” she says, much like the way humans follow fashion trends. News flash: “Troubled pop star turns up as homeless bag lady. Millions of women follow suit.”
Trouble in Paradise? Coyne Attacks NCSE and BCSE on his Science Blog – Phrayngula Coyne has launched a response to the NCSE and BCSE – it comes after some complaints from the ‘otherside’ about the indifference of Coyne and Dawkins to the efforts of the BCSE and NCSE who feel they do all the work, and Dawkins and co just rake in the dosh. I will refrain from gloating.
According to “Evolution of Human ‘Super-Brain’ Tied to Development of Bipedalism, Tool-Making” ScienceDaily (Apr. 20, 2011),
Scientists seeking to understand the origin of the human mind may want to look to honeybees — not ancestral apes — for at least some of the answers, according to a University of Colorado Boulder archaeologist.
It’s not known how many entomologists agree but,
CU-Boulder Research Associate John Hoffecker said there is abundant fossil and archaeological evidence for the evolution of the human mind, including its unique power to create a potentially infinite variety of thoughts expressed in the form of sentences, art and technologies. He attributes the evolving power of the mind to the formation of what he calls the “super-brain,” or collective mind, an event that took place in Africa no later than 75,000 years ago.[ … ] Read More ›
Brendan O’Neill invites readers to avoid the latest “anti-Bibles”, asking, Why, given their obtuse and ostentatious hostility towards organised religion and spiritual hoo-ha, are the so-called New Atheists so keen to refashion the Bible? What’s with all these secularist versions of ‘the good book’, minus the original’s miracles and resurrections and instead offering us guides to life firmly rooted in scientific fact and what poses as rationalism? This bible bonanza tells us a lot about the New Atheists. About their arrogance, their ignorance about where moral meaning comes from, and, most fundamentally, their allergy to, their utter estrangement from, the idea of transcendence.The first question that any remotely inquisitive person will surely ask about these ‘new bibles’ is this: how massive Read More ›
In the controversies around design, How did the term “skeptic” come to mean “people who believe in multiverses, space aliens, and random creation of meaningful information?” How did the term “fundamentalist” come to mean “people who believe based only on evidence”?
Rev. Michael Dowd, in his own words a “religious naturalist” andalso “evolutionary Christian mystic naturalist” wants us to know about “Evolutionary Christianity”:
FEATURING MANY OF TODAY’S MOST INSPIRING CHRISTIAN LEADERS AND ESTEEMED SCIENTISTS—INCLUDING NOBEL LAUREATES, TEMPLETON PRIZE-WINNERS, AND LUMINARIES FROM NEARLY EVERY DENOMINATION.
HOST: Rev. Michael Dowd, author of Thank God for Evolution, which was endorsed by 6 Nobel Prize-winning scientists and religious leaders across the spectrum.
On the one hand:
Episode 3: Denis Lamoureux – “Beyond the Evolution vs. Creation Debate”Denis Lamoureux, a leading evangelical contributor to the public understanding of evolution, is a professor of science and religion at the University of Alberta. He is a council member of the Canadian Scientific and Christian Affiliation, and author of I Love Jesus and I Accept Evolution.
– How the “intelligent design” movement dishonors God and distorts science
– Why and how the church is sometimes its own worst enemy, and what to do about it
– How evolution can strengthen and deepen conservative, Bible-centered faith
In another UD thread I made a passing comment about the fact that I had just read Doug Axe’s essay on protein folds in The Nature of Nature. I commented: Speaking of The Nature of Nature, today I read Doug Axe’s essay, The Nature of Protein Folds: Quantifying the Difficulty of an Unguided Search through Protein Sequence Space on page 412. Anyone who reads this and comes away believing that Darwinian mechanisms can produce this technology is living on another planet than I do, or perhaps in a hyper-version of Alice’s Wonderland where a near infinite number of impossible things are believed before breakfast. You can reference the thread in the link above for comments from Mung, who went to Read More ›
Yes, Nancy, fishing for a reaction here: I hope your book does well, but feel continually frustrated by the shallowness of current Christian culture. I didn’t think it was possible to be shallower than secular pop psychology, but Christian bookstores prove me wrong, time and again. I kid you not, I can’t stand even going into a Christian bookstore, even on business. Rows of books on Christian weight loss … I mean, we used to have a discipline called fasting, which is why people didn’t bother with Christian weight loss. Yes, there are a few thoughtful books like yours, but I find it a trial foraging my way through the Christian bookstore to find them.
A more sinister aspect to all this is that “new atheist” books are bestsellers, while the Christian is reading … Armageddon fantasies? Why is that sinister? Because, so far as I can see, the new atheists are a highly illiberal movement, and they tend to regard tolerance as the Islamist does: not as a solution but a problem. Look at Dawkins’s simple inability to understand that astronomer Martin Gaskell had been, put plainly, wronged. Because new atheists hate Christians more than they hate anyone else, the Christian may wake up from his potboiler to discover an actual Armageddon, perpetrated through the political and justice systems. Indeed, in some places it’s starting to happen now: It’s one thing Islamists and new atheists can agree on.
But don’t we sort of have it coming, when we choose escape into shallowness? Will any remedy actually work? Over to you: Read More ›
(Photo of Asimo, a humanoid robot created by Honda. Wikipedia photo taken by Gnsin at Expo 2005.)
Over at Why Evolution Is True, Professor Coyne has suddenly woken up to the fact that for many people (including scientists), morality is a powerful reason for believing in God. Coyne thinks this is silly, and that the whole attempt to derive morality from God is doomed. But the arguments he puts forward for his point of view are rather facile, and he fails to address the central problem with his own position.
What might that problem be? Like most atheistic scientists, Professor Jerry Coyne doesn’t believe in free will. As he puts it:
Indeed, studies of the brain are pushing back notions of free will in precisely the way that studies of evolution have pushed back the idea of a creator-god.
We simply don’t like to think that we’re molecular automatons, and so we adopt a definition of free will that makes us think we’re free. But as far as I can see, I, like everyone else, am just a molecular puppet. I don’t like that much, but that’s how it is.
It seems to me that in view of physical determinism (plus fine-scale physical stochasticity involving quantum events), there is no way that we can make decisions that are truly free. Some, like [Humanities professor William] Egginton, simply finesse the question by redefining “free,” but I don’t think that these redefinitions of “free will” comport with how most of us understand the term, or with how it’s been historically (not philosophically) understood.
(Emphases and square brackets mine – VJT.)
So tell me, Professor Coyne: if we are not free, then (a) how are we supposed to be good, (b) why should we bother anyway, and (c) why should we blame those who refuse to make the effort, if their decisions aren’t really free?
Another inconsistency of atheists who share Professor Coyne’s views on freedom is that they are nearly always angry at someone – be it the Pope or former President George W. Bush or global warming deniers. I have to say that makes absolutely no sense to me. Read More ›
(Schaeffer has been called “the last ” great modern theologian,” who “strongly argued for rationalism in apologetics.” – d.)
His response to scientific questions was summed up in one phrase: No final conflict. If Scripture is revelation from God, then it must be true. And therefore it will be consistent with the truths discovered by human reason and scientific investigation.
At various points in history, the two may be appear to be in conflict. But in that case, either our interpretation of Scripture is mistaken or our interpretation of the facts is mistaken. There can be no final conflict.
The reason this is important is that, as we noted above, many evangelicals are now following the path taken by theological liberals. The fact/value split helps us understand what’s at stake. Liberals agree with secular critics that Scripture is historically and scientifically false and full of errors. In others words, they are willing to give up the realm of facts. Then they hope to maintain Christianity as spiritually meaningful in the realm of values.
For example, in USA Today a rabbi writing about evolution writes, Read More ›
(It’s like saying “You can have a life-saving treatment anda 100 kg pile of hardened cement chained to your neck too!”
Way back when, Nancy, you wrote a piece for Christianity Today on design, one of several that set me thinking about all these issues.
But I got the feeling that Christianity Today has now backed off somewhat in favour of “Jesus n’ Darwin n’ us more evolved ones.” Is this fair on my part? If so, what happened?)
Theistic evolution has been around long before Darwin. Once again, the key thinker was Hegel. He taught a kind of progressive pantheism, in which God was the soul of the world, evolving along with it. As a result, many Romantics embraced a spiritualized form of evolution.
This explains, says historian John Herman Randall, why Darwin’s biological evolution was welcomed so quickly when it first appeared in 1859—not so much by scientists but by thinkers in fields like history, philosophy, theology, and the social sciences.
It also explains, Randall adds, “why they pretty uniformly misunderstood him . . . and why they failed to see the real significance of his thought.” That is, they thought they could use Darwin to support their own spiritualized version of evolution, failing to see that what he was proposing was a completely materialist version.
What do we mean by the phrase: the fact/value split? It does not simply mean there is a difference between factual knowledge and moral knowledge. People have always known that. Rather, it is the claim that there is no such thing as moral knowledge at all—that morality and theology are reducible to non-cognitive feelings and personal preferences. Literally, whatever you happen to value.
This affects ID because any view that can be linked to religion is put in the “value” category—where it is reduced to private preferences and prejudices.
The way it works is a bit like the good cop/bad cop strategy. The New Atheists are a good example of the bad cop stance. They assert that science has disproved Christianity, and that those who are mature and courageous will discard the false comforts of religion. Christopher Hitchens has said, “I think religion should be treated with ridicule, hatred, and contempt.”
But when the public protests being treated with ridicule and contempt, then the good cops step forward. They assure everyone that there really is no conflict between science and religion, and that they respect everyone’s “cherished values” or “deeply held beliefs.”
But emotive language like that should be a red flag: It means theological views are being reduced to private feelings instead of objective truths.
Consider an example. Paul Kurtz, the founder of the Council for Secular Humanism, wrote an article in the Skeptical Inquirer denouncing religion as “fantasy and fiction.” Yet at the same time, he urged his fellow skeptics to soften the blow when talking to the public by assuring them that “religion and science are compatible.”
Depending, of course, on how you define religion. Read More ›
Postmodern thinkers reject the ideal of objectivity not only in art but also in science. The roots, once again, are in the philosophy of Hegel. If history was the progressive unfolding of the Absolute Mind, that implied that ideas themselves evolve—law, ethics, philosophy, theology.
Hegel taught that no idea is true in an absolute or timeless sense. What is regarded as true in one stage of history will give way to a “higher” truth at the next stage of the evolution of consciousness. This radical relativism is called historicism because it says there is nothing that stands outside the ever-changing historical process.
In order to make his claims, ironically, Hegel had to presume that he alone had the power to stand above history and see it objectively as it really is. In other words, he had to exempt his own views from the historicist categories that he applied to everyone else’s views—which renders his position self-contradictory.
Nevertheless, Hegel’s concept of cultural evolution—that each culture produces its own “truth”—had enormous influence. It is the origin of postmodernism. Postmodern thinkers decided that not even science uncovers timeless, universal truths. It is just another social construction.
As a result, to sustain the scientific enterprise today, we need to reach back in history ask how science arose in the first place. Most historians agree that the scientific outlook actually rests on fundamental concepts derived from a biblical view of nature.
Consider, for example, the idea of “laws” in nature. Read More ›
According to
