Professor Jerry Coyne has written an op-ed piece for USA Today entitled, Why you don’t really have free will. The kind of free will that Professor Coyne is concerned with is the kind that ordinary people believe in: “If you were put in the same position twice — if the tape of your life could be rewound to the exact moment when you made a decision, with every circumstance leading up to that moment the same and all the molecules in the universe aligned in the same way — you could have chosen differently.” Coyne is adamant that any lesser kind of freedom is not worth having: As Sam Harris noted in his book Free Will, all the attempts to Read More ›

Since the question of the history of ideas roots of a certain Herr Schicklegruber’s thoughts seems to repeatedly come up, it is worth the while to here post the Lecture “From Darwin to Hitler,” by Prof Richard Weikart so that we all may see what he has to say: [youtube w_5EwYpLD6A] For record, so no comments. Comments may continue in the current “Who said this?” thread, here. My own view is simple: no responsible discussion of this topic or related concerns can ignore the evidence brought forward by prof Weikart here. END _______________ U/D Jan 5: CSU not UC, Thanks to an eagle-eyed reader.

“Gradually the myths crumble. All that’s left is to prove that in nature there is no frontier between the organic and the inorganic.”

Over at The New Atlantis Robert P. Kraynak asks if Darwinists can logically ground a theory of justice: What is so strange about our age is that demands for respecting human rights and human dignity are increasing even as the foundations for those demands are disappearing. In particular, beliefs in man as a creature made in the image of God, or an animal with a rational soul, are being replaced by a scientific materialism that undermines what is noble and special about man, and by doctrines of relativism that deny the objective morality required to undergird human dignity. How do we account for the widening gap between metaphysics and morals today? How do we explain “justice without foundations” — a Read More ›