Atheist Raises Money for Vandalized Church For those who are not intimately familiar with the ID debate and its substance (I assume that some who visit this website fall into this category) there is an acronym, FSM: Flying Spaghetti Monster. This is an attempt by those who oppose any inference to design (the evidence be damned) within the cosmos or living systems, to portray such proponents as being out of touch with reality and incapable of thinking logically or rationally. Of course, it is the Darwinist who has abandoned reason and logic in pursuit of a materialistic philosophical agenda that is being devastated on a daily basis by the discoveries of legitimate modern science. As anyone who is familiar with Read More ›

in an “everything on the table….let the students decide” approach, says HuffPost. Could she possibly be channelling her own base? Michele Bachmann expressed skepticism of evolution at the Republican Leadership Conference in New Orleans, Friday. “I support intelligent design,” Bachmann told reporters following her speech at the conference, CNN reports. “What I support is putting all science on the table and then letting students decide. I don’t think it’s a good idea for government to come down on one side of scientific issue or another, when there is reasonable doubt on both sides.” “I would prefer that students have the ability to learn all aspects of an issue,” Bachmann said. And that’s why I believe the federal government should not be Read More ›

At Enlightenment Next, we learn from physicist Brian Swimme, This is the greatest discovery of the scientific enterprise: You take hydrogen gas, and you leave it alone, and it turns into rosebushes, giraffes, and humans. Which is happening everywhere in the universe at a pace we can account for. Or maybe not. See also “Evolve already?”

Caroline Crocker, author of Free to Think, on Darwin trolls harassing students on campus:

At a recent conference in Hawaii I was approached by a group of about eight students lamenting about how only one side of the evolution issue is taught in their classrooms and that anyone who suggests that there may be scientific evidence for the other side is ridiculed. In fact, at universities throughout the country, faculty and administrators harass students who attend Intelligent Design and Evolution Awareness (IDEA) club meetings, where they just want to openly and freely investigate the evidence supporting evolution versus intelligent design.  The IDEA club organizers at some universities complain that Read More ›

In Incognito, Baylor College of Medicine’s “rock star” neuroscientist David Eagleman argues for  neuroscience to determine prison sentences, using the term:

Not everyone with a brain tumour undertakes a mass shooting, and not all males commit crimes. Why not? As we will see in the next chapter, it is because genes and environment interact in unimaginably complex patterns. This irreducible complexity has consequences: Read More ›

According to a report by CNN political correspondent, Peter Hamby, US Presidential Candidate Michele Bachmann recently went on record as saying:

“I support intelligent design”  . . .  “What I support is putting all science on the table and then letting students decide. I don’t think it’s a good idea for government to come down on one side of scientific issue or another, when there is reasonable doubt on both sides” . . .  “I would prefer that students have the ability to learn all aspects of an issue”  . . . “And that’s why I believe the federal government should not be involved in local education to the most minimal possible process.”

This is in itself interesting, as it means that significant numbers of policy makers are increasingly aware of the problem of Lewontinian-Saganian, NAS, NSTA style a priori imposition of evolutionary materialism on science education.

But, this is not the main issue for this post.

That comes up when Mr Hamby provides a “definition” of ID:

Intelligent design suggests that the complexity of the universe cannot be explained by evolution alone, and must also be attributed to a creator or supernatural being.

By now, surely, CNN’s reporters and editors — never mind that artful wriggle-room word, “suggests” — know they could easily find a reasonable, non-loaded, accurate definition of ID, such as is provided by New World Encyclopedia:

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In a wide-ranging and thoughtful discussion, The European’s Martin Eierman asks Nick Bostrom, director of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute about the potential for genetic engineering enhancements of the mind, and Bostrom replies,essentially, that “we’ll get used to it.”

Bostrom: If you want to develop new drugs, you have to show that they are safe and effectively treat a disease. So when you want to find ways to enhance our brain activity, you perversely have to show that we are currently sick and need treatment. You cannot say, “I simply want to make this better than before”. We need to remove that stigma.

Some would butt in, before we try to enhance “mind,” “conciousness,”or “intelligence,” hadn’t we better decide what they are? There are no scientifically satisfactory definitions for any of these concepts. (There are the push poll definitions of various factions, but that is another matter.) Read More ›

In the beginning was Darwin, and he created Science. Incluyding, to hear devotee Jerry Coyne tell it, he created biogeogaphy. This naturally irritates science historian Michael Flannery, who knows the facts: It should be stated at the outset that what Coyne really means by “evolution” in his title is Darwinism. That cleared up, Coyne predictably goes to the man himself: “he [Darwin] realized that evolution was necessary to explain not just the origins and forms of plants and animals but also their distribution across the globe. These distributions raise a lot of questions . . . .” (p. 95) Darwin, he goes on to say, pondered these questions and devoted two chapters to the subject in Origin (chapters XI and Read More ›

According to the Bible, God created the universe so that He and His creatures could enter into an eternal, loving relationship. Christians, insofar as they accept that teaching, can readily understand their role in the cosmos and the broader context in which they find life’s meaning. In this context, God acted as both creator and designer: God brought time, space, and matter into existence and then “formed” man out of the dust of the earth.

Like all visionary designers, the God of the Bible knew exactly what He wanted and, like all competent builders, He saw to it that His finished product would conform to his original specifications. What is the point of being an all-wise Creator if you don’t know what you want to create? What is the point of being an omnipotent creator if you can’t get what you want? What is the point of being an all-good creator if you don’t care what you get? Whether or not God used an evolutionary process to produce man’s body is irrelevant to the point. What matters is that, regardless of how God might have arranged for the arrival of homo-sapiens—slowly and gradually, quickly, or in spurts– He intended that result and nothing else. From a Biblical perspective, evolution, if true, could only be a maturation process that unfolds according to the Creator’s plan and produces a result that conforms to His specifications.

Opposing the teleological paradigm, Darwinists posit a non-teleological model, a “purposeless, mindless process that did not have man in mind.” According to this world view, evolutionary change does not aim toward any final end because there is no final end to move toward. Evolution doesn’t know where it is going because the mutations are random and the environment, which determines the selection process, also doesn’t know where it is going. The process does not “unfold” or “mature” because there is no plan to direct the unfolding, nor is there a final end point into which the process can mature. So the purposeless, process moves aimlessly along, producing emergent mindless accidents for no reason at all.

Christian Darwinists, who make up the majority of Theistic Evolutionists, seek to reconcile the Biblical teleological with the Darwinian non-teleological model. In their view, a purposeful, mindful God could have used a purposeless, mindless process to create biodiversity. Of course, anyone who is capable of reasoning in the abstract will immediately understand that such a synthesis is logically impossible. Read More ›

At MSNBC (6/16/2011), Jennifer Walsh advises us, “Humans are evolving slower than thought” and that “We probably separated from chimps evolutionarily longer ago than expected.”: The researchers found that on average, humans seem to have about 60 new mutations passed down every generation — that’s 60 changes out of 6 billion letters, or bases, that make up the genome. Previous methods, which indirectly calculated the rates, overestimated that number to be about 100 to 200, the researchers said. This means that we are accumulating new genetic mutations — the foundation of evolution — about a third as quickly as previously thought. If this mutation rate has been steady throughout human evolution, it pushes the fork between humans and chimps back Read More ›

Specifically, the “genes” that make someone a bad driver or unfaithful spouse do not exist. Geneticist Steve Jones points out that we are just not finding the genes headline writers need.

2011 being the centenary of the death of Darwin’s cousin eugenicist Francis Galton (one consequence of Darwinism as a public religion is the innumerable saints’ days), British geneticist Steve Jones tackles the unlovely subject of “The man who drew up the ‘ugly map’ of Britain”* (BBC News , 16 June 2011), offering some interesting comments, especially on the role of popular media in creating an impression of genetic determinism which he says, folks, just ain’t there:

We know of more than 50 different genes associated with height.

That has not percolated into the public mind, as the Google search for “scientists find the gene for” shows. The three letter word for – the gene FOR something – is the most dangerous word in genetics. As Galton did not realise and as headline writers still do not, it is almost entirely ambiguous.

Yet far more people read headlines about the gay gene, the fat gene, and the “vote conservative” gene than read genetics papers.  Read More ›

Here.

The BioLogos crowd seems to have a hard time critiquing intelligent design without casting aspersions on the character and motives of those with whom they disagree.

Darrel Falk, after briefly granting in the video that intelligent design proponents are motivated by “wonderful reasons,” turns right around and sticks in the stiletto. What’s the real reason intelligent design proponents won’t admit they are wrong, wrong, WRONG? Well, according to Falk, ID proponents won’t admit they have been refuted because “everybody is embarrassed because they have invested so much money, they have invested so much personal ideology, reputation, even ego… It’s pretty hard to say, ‘I guess I was wrong.'”  Sean Carroll offers a similar assessment for why ID scholars won’t shut up despite being scientifically bankrupt in his view: “So for, you know, PR reasons, or political reasons, or whatever it might be, they keep talking.” Read More ›

Because Brad Monton was here first.

Here, in A Summary of Scientific Method SpringerBriefs in Philosophy, 2011, Peter Kosso tackles “Is intelligent design science” – a topic that used to be confined union hall megaphones and humanist picket signs (except always expressed as a negative assertion):

Is the theory of intelligent design scientific or not? Well, we can’t even begin to answer this question, at least not in a reasonable and profitable way, without a clear understanding of what it is to be scientific. There must be something shared by all the sciences that makes them scientific, and it would be this something that is missing from the unscientific or the pseudoscientific. That something is not what they study. Geology, biology, and physics study pretty different things, whereas biology and intelligent design study pretty much the same thing. What is common to the sciences is the basic structure of how they study, and the standards they use to judge acceptable results. This is the scientific method. Read More ›

One of the most common objections to design thought is the idea that it is about the improper injection of the alien  supernatural into the world of science. (That is itself based on a strawman misrepresentation of design thought, as was addressed here a few days ago.)

However, there is an underlying root, a common distortion of the origins of modern science, which Nancy Pearcey rebutted in a  2005 sleeper article as headlined, that deserves a UD post of its own.

Let’s clip the article:

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Recently, kairosfocus posted some thoughts on quoting materialists saying what they actually think when they talk to each other or what they assume are sympathetic audiences (“quote mining”), a practice they very much dislike. After all, when kairosfocus quotes them to people for whose ears the frank admissions were not intended, he is necessarily quoting them “out of context.” That the materialists mean it and that the rest of us might be best off to know that they mean it is beside the point, of course.

He has also asked why the Darwin vs. design debate has become so poisonous and polarized. A critical factor is the easy money tied up in Darwinism – well-paid lecture room mediocrities fronting unsubstantiated ideas to a captive audience until retirement.

Darwinists may not think they’re well-paid but if viewpoint productivity mattered, Read More ›