2012

Rodin’s Thinker. Musee Rodin, Paris. Courtesy of Andrew Horne and Wikipedia. (Part four of a series in response to Zack Kopplin. See here for Part One, here for Part Two, and here for Part Three.) As I argued in my previous post, if you want to call yourself a believer in neo-Darwinian evolution, then you have to believe that it is an all-encompassing theory of living things, just as the atomic theory is an all-encompassing theory of chemistry. You have to believe that the theory of evolution is capable of explaining all of the characteristics of each species of organism. The theory of evolution stands or falls on its claim to be a complete theory. As Theodosius Dobzhansky memorably put Read More ›

Leading thinker Thomas Nagel has a new book coming out later this year on why “the widely accepted world view of materialist naturalism is untenable.” Evolutionists will be treated to …  Read more

I admit that I am given to bouts of despair about the condition of Western Civilization. We find ourselves in the proverbial hand basket and it is getting warmer and warmer. Recently a friend asked if I thought he should get involved in politics. Eeyore has nothing on me, and I replied in a somewhat gloomy tone, “Of course, but don’t expect to win any more than you should expect to stand on the seashore and hold back the tide.” “Why even try if we can’t win,” he replied. In response I appealed to the somewhat fatalistic Norse ethos which holds that even in the face of overwhelming odds we should continue to fight until the inevitable end, and when we go Read More ›

The vast majority of people who live in Louisiana hold beliefs about the human mind and about free will which are broadly compatible with those of Darwin’s contemporary, Alfred Russel Wallace (pictured right), but diametrically opposed to those of Charles Darwin (pictured left). However, the National Center for Science Education wants Darwin’s materialistic version of evolution, which denies free will, to be taught in American high schools. Left: A photo of Charles Darwin taken circa 1854. Center: St. Louis Cathedral, New Orleans. Right: A photo of Alfred Russel Wallace in 1862. Images courtesy of Messrs. Maull and Fox, Nowhereman86, James Marchant and Wikipedia. (Part three of a series of posts in response to Zack Kopplin. See here for Part one Read More ›

On the one hand . . . “Vanity, vanity, says the teacher, all is vanity. . . So I hated life, because the work that is done under the sun was grievous to me. All of it is meaningless, a chasing after the wind.” Ecclesiastes 1:2; 2:17 “To be, or not to be, that is the question: Whether ’tis Nobler in the mind to suffer The Slings and Arrows of outrageous Fortune, Or to take Arms against a Sea of troubles, And by opposing end them: to die, to sleep No more; and by a sleep, to say we end The heart-ache, and the thousand Natural shocks That Flesh is heir to? ‘Tis a consummation Devoutly to be wished. To Read More ›

What on earth does the title of a famous Good Friday Sermon have to do with the ID controversy? (Even, come Easter Sunday morning . . . ) A lot. Sadly. As I was reading and thinking about Dr Torley’s latest amazing UD series and some of UD’s ever so fascinating comments [one of the best features of UD is comments], I was led to look at the Dr Townes story, and related matters. One of the findings is how Dr Townes, a Nobel Prize holder for physics, turns out to be a cosmological design thinker who actually supports intelligent design in an evolutionary framework [i.e. pretty similar to Wallace, co-founder of modern evolutionary theory], but sees ID as anti-evolutionism. Read More ›