Pat Hayes of Red State Rabble has composed a rather prolix essay in which he sings the praises of Barbara Forrest and her monumental role in exposing ID as repackaged Creationism. Naturally, Pim van Muers at Panda’s Thumb and Ed Brayton at Dispatches from the Culture Wars are chiming in.
Read More ›
I was just over at Panda’s Thumb and saw that Tara Smith had put up a post informing her readers of a documentary about the Scopes trial to air on The History Channel tomorrow night. It also looks like they will say a little about intelligent design. Will they give ID a fair shake? Tune in to find out.
Our very own Bill Dembski has decided to resign his post at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville and has accepted the position of research professor of philosophy at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas. On behalf of everyone at Uncommon Descent, I wish you the very best, Bill! To read more, go here. Welcome Back Home, Bill!
Discovered: the missing link that solves a mystery of evolution
Alok Jha, science correspondent
Thursday April 6, 2006
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/frontpage/story/0,,1748005,00.htmlScientists have made one of the most important fossil finds in history: a missing link between fish and land animals, showing how creatures first walked out of the water and on to dry land more than 375m years ago.
Palaeontologists have said that the find, a crocodile-like animal called the Tiktaalik roseae and described today in the journal Nature, could become an icon of evolution in action – like Archaeopteryx, the famous fossil that bridged the gap between reptiles and birds.As such, it will be a blow to proponents of intelligent design, who claim that the many gaps in the fossil record show evidence of some higher power.
Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist, said: “Our emergence on to the land is one of the more significant rites of passage in our evolutionary history, and Tiktaalik is an important link in the story.” Read More ›
Tom Magnuson at ARN “In the News” and Robert Crowther at Evolution News & Views have both reported on a new brochure published by Kansas Science Standards 2005. It’s clear and concise and should really help to dispell any misinformation that has been circulating about.
Andrew Rowell over at ID in the UK has done a very good job of exposing the problems with having methodological naturalism as the exclusive methodology for the natural sciences:
The faith of the methodological naturalist.
The basic articles of faith for a methodological naturalist go something like this:
We have found excellent naturalistic explanations for many phenomenon in nature.
Therefore
we believe every phenomenon in nature will have a naturalistic explanation.
Therefore
we make it a strict rule that science is exclusively the study of possible naturalistic explanations for what can be observed in the universe.
Science is not the search for the truth about the origin, operation and destiny of the universe it is limited exclusively to purely naturalistic explanations of the origin, operation and destiny of the universe.
The methodological naturalist will choose a naturalistic explanation over a meta-nature explanation to be taught as the truth in science lessons even if it is not actually true. Read More ›
Keith Burgess-Jackson at AnalPhilosopher has this to say about militant anti-religious atheists and their treatment of ID as a pernicious threat to be kept out of public school classrooms at all costs:
Leftist Hostility to Religion
Michael Ruse, like me, is (1) a philosopher, (2) a Darwinist, (3) an atheist, and (4) a respecter of religion. Militant atheists such as Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Brian Leiter, who hate religion and despise the religious, are vilifying him for it. See here and here. Leiter calls theists “theocrats,” as if, given the chance, they would impose their religious beliefs on everyone. In fact, it is Leiter and his ilk who would impose their leftist beliefs on everyone. (Read Leiter for a few days. You’ll see what a totalitarian he is.) I am far more concerned about the likes of Dawkins, Dennett, and Leiter acquiring power than I am about Christians (for example) acquiring power. Read More ›
Go here to read the full article.
Not-So-Quick But Nonetheless Dirty Review of the Kitzmiller Decision
By Casey LuskinIntroduction:
This is a response to the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School Board (hereafter “Kitzmiller) decision (see http://www.pamd.uscourts.gov/kitzmiller/kitzmiller_342.pdf to download the full opinion). This response is adapted from an e-mail I sent out to a bunch of friends in late December, 2005, just a few days after the Kitzmiller ruling was released. I’ve been asked by some friends who received the e-mail to post it on the internet in presentable fashion, and so I’m finally getting around to it in February, 2006.The Kitzmiller ruling declared intelligent design is religion, not science, and unconstitutional to teach in public schools. This response here is by no means an exhaustive response to the problems with the Judge’s ruling. In fact, a more extensive discussion of many of these issues may be found in the Response to the ACLU ID FAQ which I wrote in February, 2005, about 7 months before the trial started. In some cases I simply provide links to other places which provide more complete discussions and refutations to the assertions made in the Kitzmiller decision. However, I hope this will help the reader see 4 things clearly: Read More ›
Here’s an excerpt from the Statement:
Science is a process of seeking natural explanations for natural phenomena. Scientists ask questions about the natural
world, formulate hypotheses to answer the questions, and collect evidence or data with which to evaluate the hypotheses.
Scientific theories are unified explanations of these phenomena supported by extensive testing and evidence. The theory
of evolution, supported by extensive scientific findings ranging from the fossil record to the molecular genetic relationships
among species, is a unifying concept of modern science. Of course, our understanding of how evolution works continues to
be refined by new discoveries.
Go here to read the article.
Dee: The two black holes in Intelligent Design
James H. Dee, LOCAL CONTRIBUTOR
Thursday, February 02, 2006
Source: http://www.statesman.com/opinion/content/editorial/stories/02/2dee_edit.htmlAnyone reading this page must know that ID (Intelligent Design) is a much-disputed and assiduously marketed competitor to evolution.
Scientists in every field (and now a federal judge in the Dover, Pa., school board case) have firmly rejected the concept, as has the science adviser to President Bush. But its advocates — who seem to have among their number U.S. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, the president and Gov. Rick Perry — carry on undeterred. Read More ›
Bob Reeves of Lincoln’s Journal Star had this to say regarding Creationism, Evolution, and Intelligent Design today. What Mr. Reeves and others don’t seem to get is that the locus of the issue which is generating so much controversy these days is not the progress of science vs. the authority of the Bible; rather, it’s the reluctance of mainstream science and academia to accept the validity of a concept which keeps a valid scientific theory like evolution from becomming an unscientific ideology. Mr. Reeves entitled his piece “When science and religion converge”. We do, in fact, seem to be witnessing a convergence of science and religion–just not in the way Reeves sees it.
Victoria Clark of the “Epoch Times” published an article today on the battle between Darwinism and Intelligent Design. Although she equates ID with Creationism, she does a nice job of highlighting the religious zeal with which hardline Darwinian fundamentalists hold to their “theory”.
Check this out!