Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Science Says It, So It Must Be So, Right?….Right?…Right?

Science says it, so it must be so, right?  Well, here we have one of the most famous studies of all time coming under fire for presenting false data and conclusions.  Shocking (pun intended).  Sixty-plus years ago, Yale University professor Stanley Milgram used a fake shock-torture setup to show that people are frighteningly easy to manipulate into doing as they’re told. One researcher described the setup as designed discover whether “ordinary Americans would obey immoral orders, as many Germans had done during the Nazi period.” The answer Milgram gave that question was a disturbing yes. I recall this study well.  One of my jobs in grad school was taking films from the library to show in various classes on the Read More ›

What Does It Mean To Be Human? Don’t Ask A Darwinist

“What does it mean to be human?” is one of the fundamental questions we all ask.  Every once in a while something happens to remind us that those influenced by Darwinism usually only answer the question with “not much”.   As a case in point, just today it’s being reported that the father of a son born with two rare diseases was trying to raise money for medical expenses.  He had put up signs at a local mall to raise awareness and funds.  “KC Ahlers said he posted six signs around the Franklin Park Mall in Toledo, Ohio to spread awareness about an upcoming fundraiser for his 4-month-old son, RJ. The father told WTVG on Friday that he discovered three additional Read More ›

John Horgan on Jeffrey Epstein and the decadence of science

Horgan: As genuine progress has stalled, hype has surged. A 2015 study of biomedical papers found that between 1974 and 2014 the frequency of terms such as “novel,” “innovative” and “unprecedented” increased 15-fold. Read More ›

Researchers: The colorful squid does it via a “marvelous molecular machine”

""We had no idea that the mechanism we would discover would turn out to be so remarkably complex yet contained and so elegantly integrated in one multifunctional molecule" Was that a shutter banging or the ghost of Darwin rattling in the night? Hard to tell these days. Read More ›

Ohio Bill Protects Student’s Right to Religious Expression – Will Teaching Creationism Be Next?

Last week, the Ohio House of Representatives passed HB 164, the “Ohio Student Religious Liberties Act of 2019.  The purpose of the bill is to protect the rights of students to religious expressions without penalty in the public school classroom.  Under this bill, a student cannot be given a punative grade for simply expressing their religious views as part of a class assignment.  The bill sounds sensible enough, given the many documented instances of students receiving poor grades on otherwise well written assignments merely because a teacher disagreed with the student’s religious views of the subject.  A key part of the bill says that no school… “shall prohibit a student from engaging in religious expression in the completion of homework, Read More ›

Nancy Pearcey: What Phillip Johnson’s Wedge of Truth made clear

Pearcey: Shortly after Johnson finished his book, his forewarnings were confirmed by the appearance of a book titled The Natural History of Rape, which argued that, biologically speaking, rape is not a pathology; instead, it is an evolutionary strategy for maximizing reproductive success. Read More ›

Jon Garvey (“Hump of the Camel”) weighs in on the late Phillip Johnson

God can create ex nihilo. Claims like “God wouldn’t do it that way” are mere opinion. The question for a scientist ... is, what did he do? And once we are forced back on the evidence, the theistic evolutionists’ darling, Darwinism, comes more and more to be seen as the toad who is not turning into a prince when we finally get the princess to kiss him. Read More ›

Natural selection cannot explain the origin of life on Earth

But the idea continues to exist in the world of half-ideas, the world of “if only.” Ideas that might work as fiction but we want them to be fact. Let’s call it Darwin’s “warm little pond”: “"But if (and oh what a big if) we could conceive in some warm little pond… ” Read More ›