DonaldM

By now, I’m sure most of you have heard about the academic freedom controversy surrounding Ball State University and the investigation of physics professor, Eric Hedin (pronounced he-deen).  Discovery Institute’s Evolution News and Views has published several stories over the past few weeks, most notably this, this, this and this.  (Articles on the entire saga can be found here.) Today, the DI launched a new web-page so you can help get the message of academic freedom to the BSU Board of Trustees.  If you believe in academic freedom, like I do, then please take a look at the page and add your voice.  The kind of treatment foisted upon Prof. Hedin is what you might expect in a totalitarian regime, Read More ›

On August 6th, Steven Pinker, the well-known Psychology Professor from Harvard, had an article in New Republic entitled Science is Not Your Enemy, in which he lambasts those who decry scientists for propounding scientism.  You’d expect rebuttals of Pinker to come from the likes of Wesley J. Smith who indeed took Pinker to task in an article in National Review Online, which we discussed here at UD as well.  You wouldn’t expect attack from your own side, however, but that is precisely what P.Z. Myers has done on his popular anti-ID blogsite Pharyngula in a post entitled Repudiating scientism, rather than surrendering to it.  Never one to mince words, PZ launches right in: When I heard that Steven Pinker had Read More ›

President Joanne Gora of Ball State University has publicly declared that the worldview of philosophical naturalism (PN) is the only legitimate worldview that may be taught in any science classroom at BSU.  Her comments were in response to the controversy raised by the Freedom From Religion Foundation over certain aspects of an upper level elective course taught by Science Prof. Eric Hedin on the Boundaries of Science.  Including in his reading list for the class were books favorable to the theory of Intelligent Design (ID) with respect to the origin of natural systems, including biological systems. ID stands in contrast to the favored view within science that all things in nature are the result of undirected, natural cause and effect.  Read More ›

I don’t know the actual origination of this quote.  Its been on T-shirts and such.  If anyone knows the actual source, please let us know.  Meanwhile, enjoy! (Atheists: its okay to laugh at yourselves, too!) ATHEISM: The belief that there was nothing & nothing happened to nothing & then nothing magically exploded for no reason, creating everything & then a bunch of everything magically rearranged itself for no reason what so ever into self-replicating bits which then turned into dinosaurs. Makes Perfect Sense.

Recently some astronomers have dramatically increased their estimates of how many planets in our little corner of the Cosmos might fall in the habitable zone around red dwarf stars!  There could be as many as 60,000,000,000 such habitable planets in the Milky Way alone! Based on data from NASA’s planet-hunting Kepler spacecraft, scientists have predicted that there should be one Earth-size planet in the habitable zone of each red dwarf, the most common type of star. But a group of researchers has now doubled that estimate after considering how cloud cover might help an alien planet support life. “Clouds cause warming, and they cause cooling on Earth,” study researcher Dorian Abbot, an assistant professor in geophysical sciences at the University of Read More ›

A month or so ago, I alerted UD readers that atheists in Florida were about to place their stone monument of the Ten “commandments” of atheism.  Well, today they have unveiled their monument to atheism in front of the Bradford County, Florida, courthouse, right near a monument listing the traditional Ten Commandments from the Old Testament scriptures.  Personally, I have no problem with the monument itself being placed in a public square.  We’re a pluralistic society, all ideas are welcome and open for debate.  That is what freedom of speech is all about.  (As a side note, contrast that with Nick Matzke, the suppressor!) “When you look at this monument, the first thing you will notice is that it has Read More ›

Over at his Why Evolution is True website, the infamous Jerry Coyne has given his lame excuses for not wanting to take up a genuine offer from ENV’s David Klinghoffer to debate and discuss Steve Meyer’s latest Book Darwin’s Doubt as well as discussing anything else Darwin related.  In his “I’m too busy and important to do that’ rant he writes: You ID advocates can also make your case, but the website rules are that we can then ask, before you post further, about your evidence for God The Intelligent Designer. This is the last time I’ll be engaging the Discovery Institute directly on these issues. DIers are not scientists but religious zealots concealing clerical collars beneath threadbare lab coats. I Read More ›

Some members of the Cornell University Creative Machines Lab have a little video on Youtube called The video is in conjunction with a paper put out by members of the Creative Machines Lab. You can all decide if you think evolution has finally been explained.  Enjoy!

In the comments of this UD post from yesterday, (comment #21) I referred to Nick Matzke’s rant over at the Panda’s Thumb yesterday as yet another illustration of the double standard’s Matzke’s has when it comes to his critiques of anyone who dares challenge Darwinian Orthodoxy.  In my comments yesterday, I gave an example of Matzke being guilty of the very same thing he (falsely)accuses Meyer of doing.  Today, I want to call out Matzke on another of his famous ploys: the bluff!  In earlier days, before he gained his current status among the defenders of the Darwinian Faith, Matzke posted and commented on various ID sites under various pseudonyms.  His favorite ploy was to use what we came to Read More ›

The Fox News website recently ran this story on the 7 Weirdest Jobs in Science.  To this list I would add an eighth – Evolutionary Biologist (EB).  To be an EB these days, not only does one have to explain away large bits of contrary data, but also believe that the mass amounts of complex specified information observed throughout biological systems is easily explained by the blind, purposeless forces of matter and energy interacting over eons of time through chance and/or necessity. Given the choice of being an EB or one of the 7 other Science careers mentioned, I’d opt to be a Scatologist.  At least the crap they talk about is real!

A visual artist and a Ph.D. in computational genomics have gotten together to predict what we mere human mortals will look like in, say, 100,000 years. Given the prediction, I for one am glad I won’t be around to see it actually happen. The current design appeals to me much more. But maybe others will feel differently.

Atheists in Northern Florida have succeeded in getting permission to put up a a rival monument to a nearby monument to the Ten Commandments. For the first time we will have what will amount to an Atheist Decalogue literally carved in stone. I for one look forward to seeing what is in this decalogue with great anticipation. It isn’t yet clear what exactly the 10 Atheist laws will be, but whatever they are, it will be very interesting to see whether or not the atheist glitterati (Dawkins, Harris, Dennet, et.al.) sign on. If they don’t, this might be the first instance of denominationalism creeping into the atheistic religion. In any case, at last the core beliefs (or lack thereof) of Read More ›

Our old friend PZ Myers holds school boards in utter contempt. In a recent blog post at his widely followed Pharyngula blog site, he takes contemptuous pot shots at the Springboro, OH School Board for having the audacity to even consider a “critical thinking” policy in the curriculum. The Springboro Community City School District is considering a so-called “critical thinking” policy that would require teachers to explore “all sides” of controversial issues. The proposed policy change would direct teachers to discuss creation science or intelligent design when teaching about the theory of evolution. <a href=”http://www.rawstory.com/rs/201…..-proposal/ Full story here. PZ can’t restrain his contempt: Please. There is no controversy here. Evolution happened, teach it. The best argument that one student provided Read More ›

This my third installment of a discussion I began here and continued here on the validity of the claim that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”, or what I call the EC-EE claim. In the first installment we looked at the EC-EE claim itself and asked whether the EC-EE claim is an example of an EC-EE claim that failed to live up to its own standard. In the second installment, we looked at what exactly are the extraordinary claims being made by ID that so require such extraordinary evidence, or is it Darwinian evolution that is really making the extraordinary claim and so far has failed the EC-EE test? In this third post I want to look at the evidentiary side Read More ›

In my earlier post on this subject, I attempted to address the question of whether or not the claim “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”, or what I called the EC-EE claim, was itself an extraordinary claim requiring extraordinary evidence. In this post, I want to take a step back from that and just grant that the EC-EE claim is valid, at least as a general guideline, along the order of, say, Ockham’s Razor. That granted, let’s see where that may lead us with respect to how the EC-EE claim is used as an argument against certain kinds of claims on the basis that they are “extraordinary”. For my point of departure, I’ll revisit the quote from Michael Shermer I referenced Read More ›