Not if you go by best-known Darwinist, Richard Dawkins: Note the importance of evidence for reaching Darwinian conclusions. “important as the evidence is, in this article I want to explore the possibility of developing a different kind of argument. I suspect that it may be possible to show that, regardless of evidence, Darwinian natural selection is the only force we know that could, in principle, do the job of explaining the existence of organized and adaptive complexity.” [Daw82] “Darwinism is the only known theory that is in principle capable of explaining certain aspects of life… even if there were no actual evidence in favor of the Darwinian theory.” [Daw96Bp287-88] “The theory of evolution by cumulative natural selection is the only Read More ›

It really depends on how much care has been taken to preserve them.

Recently, Barry Arrington posted on how we can be sure of something (for example, that bin Laden is dead). The burden of proof is on any who might claim otherwise.

For some, the question has arisen whether the oral transmission of the Torah (the books of Moses in Jewish tradition) could be reliable. What about memory lapses, deliberate alterations, etc., especially during the time when oral memory and transmission were normal, alongside scrolls (which were expensive and time-consuming to produce).

Well, I asked the ID community reb, Moshe Averick, author of Nonsense of a High Order: The confused and illusory world of the atheist, how do you know that the Torah goes back to the time of Moses? Here is what he says, Read More ›

Jan Brueghel the Elder, “Paradise,” 1620. Gemaldgalerie, Berlin.

It’s a common enough complaint. Why don’t we live in a perfect world? After all, wouldn’t we expect God to make one, supposing He existed?

Intelligent Design is, in the words of Professor William Dembski, “the study of patterns in nature that are best explained as the result of intelligence.” As a scientific discipline, it makes no claim to identify the Designer of Nature. There are, however, weighty philosophical reasons for concluding that the Ultimate Designer of Nature could only be an Infinite, Uncaused, Intelligent Being who cannot fail to exist. For the purposes of this post, then, I’m going to assume that the Ultimate Designer is God, and that He not only designed the cosmos but maintains it in existence. So the question we need to answer is: why didn’t God make a perfect world?
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This was the question: For a copy of The Nature of Nature , explain why either Richard Dawkins or Francis Collins is the cuter poster boy for selling Darwinism.

The question was first asked (that I ever heard of) by a prominent Canadian cosmologist, who wrote to a number of peers asking for feedback. He wanted a pollster to do a study too, but surely that would be a waste: We should only poll people on matters that will lead somewhere. Essentially, both these men are going to go away and do what they want, no matter what the tally, so why bother?

The winner is StephenB at 21, for clarity of analysis and precision of expression:

So, who is the better con man? In terms of gaining new recruits, I think Dawkins inspires more passion, but Collins probably gets better numbers. So, I give a slight edge to Collins. Whenever possible he avoids clarity of expression and practices the crafty art of “strategic ambiguity,” allowing potential supporters with widely divergent world views to read their own convictions into his message. Notice how, with maddening imprecision, he informs his listeners that there is “no conflict between religion and science,” prompting them to fill in the missing spaces with Christ and Darwin.

StephenB, write me at denyseoleary@gmail.com.

Incidentally, among those who cast a definite vote, it was a tie (not just Dawkins’ “nicer tie”). More below, but watch for the next contest. Read More ›

Over at Why Evolution Is True, Jerry Coyne says that Karl Giberson has left Christian Darwinist site BioLogos:

I am informed that Karl Giberson, formerly Executive Vice President of The BioLogos Foundation, has left the organization. He has disappeared from their posted list of “team members,” hasn’t yet been replaced, and confirmed to me by email that he resigned.

Sources speculate that for a site that tried to provide a bridge for Christians to cross over to Darwinism, Giberson was a bridge too far: Read More ›

Marvin Olasky of World Magazine interviews Robert Sloan, the Baylor prez who recruited the ID folk at the Polanski Centrer and ended up having to leave (that was one of many disconnects between him and the post-Baptist culture at Baylor) You created the Polanyi Center for the Study of Intelligent Design. That became controversial: Why? We brought a couple very fine scholars to be there, but immediately they encountered much opposition by the neo-Darwinians.  What objections were there to Intelligent Design at an ostensibly Christian university? I don’t think there was a good objection. Critics said you’re going to embarrass us professionally, everyone knows evolution is true, and who are these people but a bunch of seven-day creationists? The list Read More ›

Yesterday, original Darwinist assumptions about “junk DNA” were offered; today, again courtesy Donald Johnson’s Probability’s Nature and Nature’s Probability LITE: A Call to Scientific Integrity. Now, let’s see what the ID guys had to say about it (p. 57):

“Junk DNA” has been classified as a misnomer by ID proponents as early as 1986 [Den86], since “Junk DNA and directed evolution are in the end incompatible concepts” [Den98] The journal Science refused to print a 1994 letter that pro-ID scientist Forrest Mims wrote warning about assuming that “junk DNA” was useless [Mim94*]*9. Rejected Publications

They’ve been saying it ever since, popular or otherwise. Read More ›

Because they were right-handed! Or so says this MSNBC story on handedness and language:

Frayer and his colleagues looked at these markings on the teeth of Neanderthals (from around 100,000 years ago) and their ancestors from 500,000 years ago. In both groups, most of the teeth showed more right handed scratches than left.

[ … ]

No animals other than humans show such a bias toward right-handedness. In some primates, such as chimps and gorillas, a small 5 percent shift toward the right can be seen in some studies. This is an example of brain asymmetry, where one side of the brain takes on functions that the other side doesn’t. Read More ›

It builds on you because he makes his key point last.

In “Same Old New Atheism: On Sam Harris,” (The Nation May18, 2011), Jackson Lears critiques new atheist Sam Harris’s view of morality, beginning with an account of evolutionary psychology that could have come from this desk,  and then…  Read More ›

From New Scientist (30 April 2011), we learn that in a recent evolutionary psychology study, “Deliberate inaction judged as immoral as wrong action”: An actor whose hesitancy to act led to the death was seen as less immoral than an actor whose direct actions led to the death. But the students judged deliberate inaction that led to the fatality as equally immoral as direct action that caused the death.  In fact, in many jurisdictions, if a person has a professional duty of care, it is not a matter of opinion; failing to report child abuse, for example, can lead to criminal charges. It’s good to know that students sense why those laws exist.

Donald Johnson, a scientist who checked out of Darwinism, had a look at the junk DNA file in Probability’s Nature and Nature’s Probability LITE: A Call to Scientific Integrity (2009), p. 56:

Dawkins popularized the idea that any DNA not actively trying to get to the next generation would slowly decay away through mutation and that genes are the basis of evolutionary selection. [Daw76] Sagan writes concerning junk DNA “some, maybe even most, of the genetic instructions must be redundancies, stutters, and untranscribable nonsense. Again we glimpse deep imperfections at the heart of life.” Non-coding sections of DNA were seen as the result of mutations that haven’t yet resulted in formation of useful genes so that they would provide a selective advantage. This theme was echoed in authoritative textbooks also: “Introns have accumulated mutations rapidly during evolution, and it is often possible to alter most of an intron’s nucleotide sequence without greatly affecting gene function. This has led to the suggestion that intron sequences have no function at all and are largely genetic “junk”. “Much repetitive DNA serves no useful purpose whatever for its host. Rather, it is selfish or junk DNA, , a molecular parasite that, over many generations, has disseminated itself throughout the genome… ” Read More ›

ID friendly philosophers Tim McGrew (of Western Michigan University) and Lydia McGrew offer some thoughts on “undesigned coincidences” as evidence for the reliability of documentary evidence. Using a passage in the Gospel of John, Lydia argues,

… as John is telling the story about the feeding of the five thousand, it would be quite natural for him to say that Jesus asked Philip where they could buy bread if he were really an eyewitness–that is, because he remembered that Jesus did ask Philip. (Tim talks about why it was Philip in the interview.) But John himself might have had to stop and think for a moment if someone had asked him, “Why did Jesus ask Philip rather than any of the other disciples?” Presumably when John told the story, he wasn’t particularly thinking about some special reason for Jesus to select Philip for the question.But if someone were forging the story as fiction, he would have a reason for choosing to use a given disciple as a character at that point in his fictional narrative, and therefore he would be unlikely to choose that character without making the reason clearer to his readers.

Interesting observation. A commenter notes that Read More ›

… in the last year of his life.

Not anyone’s idea of a fundamentalist Christian, Gordon Rattray Taylor (1911-1981) was the author of a well-known anti-population-growth work and other trendy stuff as well. In the last year of his life (1983) Taylor wrote The Great Evolution Mystery, disowning Darwinism. Some excerpts here.

He talked about this, for example:

A Mystery of the Natural World: A Worm Armed for War

 

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Last night the media erupted with news that Osama Bin Laden has been tracked down and killed by American forces. President Obama went on national television and proclaimed that Bin Laden is dead. I believe him. Why should I believe Obama? Because no one in their right mind would declare to be true that which can easily be proven false. Think about it. Radical islamists have an obvious interest in disproving the president’s claims, both to make Obama look like a fool and to encourage their followers. They have no interest in allowing the world to believe the Americans have won a major victory in the war on terror. Therefore, simple logic dictates that Obama would not make the claim Read More ›

A recent Harris poll revealed “Most Americans Opposed to Banning Any Books” (April 12, 2011):

While few Americans think that there are books which should be banned completely, opinions differ on books that should be available to children in school libraries. Strong majorities say that children should be able to get The Holy Bible (83%) and books that discuss evolution (76%) from school libraries.

Majorities also say so for other religious texts such as the Torah or Talmud (59%) and the Koran (57%), but approximately a quarter say these texts should not be available (24% and 28%, respectively) to children in school libraries. Half or more say that children should be able to get books with vampires (57%), books with references to drugs or alcohol (52%) and books with witchcraft or sorcery (50%) in school libraries, but between 34% and 41% say that each of these types of books should not be available there.

There is no consensus on books with references to sex (48% say they should be available, 45% say they should not) and violence (44% say should, 48% say should not). A majority of Americans say, however, that books with explicit language should not be available to children in school libraries (62%).

How would these results change if the “books that discuss evolution” were non-Darwinist or wrote sympathetically about design?

Also:

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