Denyse O'Leary

Oh, call them “Christian evolutionists” if you want. Terminology wars are fun but let’s talk about facts.

In “Karl Giberson Has a Problem With Bill Dembski’s “View of Science”, Anika Smith (ENV, May 13, 2011) responds to Giberson’s article at Patheos,

When he finally does get around to addressing Dembski himself [after a side trip into young earth creationism], Giberson objects to Dembski’s use of marketing metaphors as an ad hominem attack, which is strange considering that Dembski wrote that this is something that scientists and people with ideas generally ought to communicate and advance them, with nothing cynical or slimy about it. Either Giberson is hypersensitive and looking for an excuse to display his lofty umbrage, or he is working to avoid the actual questions raised by Dembski’s review. Most likely it’s both.He does, however, give us a nice quote for giggles:

The scientific literature is not filled with growing concerns about the viability of the theory; scientific meetings do not have sessions devoted to alternative explanations for origins; and leading scientists are not on record objecting to the continuous and blinkered embrace of evolution by their colleagues.

Has he never heard of Jerry Fodor? Lynn Margulis? The Altenberg 16?

That’s a question I too have wrestled with, while writing a book, and here’s my assessment. Read More ›

Forgotten, that is, in this current discussion of atheist/agnostic sympathizers with ID?

Scruton seems to be of no fixed religious views, has a great aversion to the “new atheists” (based on the sharp contrast between their street thug culture and the civilized atheism of his youth), and has written thus about their “artistic Darwinism”:

Over the last two decades, however, Darwinism has invaded the field of the humanities, in a way that Darwin himself would scarcely have predicted. Doubt and hesitation have given way to certainty, interpretation has been subsumed into explanation, and the whole realm of aesthetic experience and literary judgement has been brought to heel as an “adaptation,” a part of human biology which exists because of the benefit that it confers on our genes. No need now to puzzle over the meaning of music or the nature of beauty in art. The meaning of art and music reside in what they do for our genes. Once we see that these features of the human condition are “adaptations,” acquired perhaps many thousands of years ago, during the time of our hunter-gatherer ancestors, we will be able to explain them. We will know what art and music essentially are by discovering what they do.- “Only Adapt: Can science explain art, music and literature?” (Big Questions Online, December 9, 2010)

Problem is, Read More ›

You might have a hard time explaining your interest to “new atheist” Sam Harris. Having just received a courtesy hard cover copy of his The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values (Free Press, 2010), I looked at the index and noted that the reader seeking information about intelligent design theory is referred to: Creationist “science.” Harris may well have written the index himself (?).

Well, following the page references, on p. 34, in the midst of a discussion of why it is wrong to think there is moral equivalence between typical human views of murder and Jeffrey Dahmer’s*, we read, Read More ›

File under: “Wrong shakeup sought”

Here, Laura J. Snyder (“Wanted: Another Scientific Revolution”, The Scientist , 2011-05-01) wants a new Breakfast Club of scientist philosophers:

Each of the four men was brilliant, self-assured, and possessed of the optimism of the age: Whewell, who later created the fields of mathematical economics and the science of the tides; Charles Babbage, a mathematical genius who would invent the prototype of the first modern computer; John Herschel, who mapped the skies of the Southern hemisphere and coinvented photography; and Richard Jones, a curate who went on to shape economic science. The four composed what I call the “Philosophical Breakfast Club,” also the title of my latest book, which chronicles the way they transformed the “man of science” into the professional scientist.

The thesis (and book, excerpt here) sounds very interesting. She flags one outcome:

One of the unintended consequences of the revolution wrought by the Philosophical Breakfast Club has been that the professional scientist is now less interested in, and perhaps less capable of, connecting with the broader public, sharing the new discoveries and theories that most excite the scientific community.

Isn’t the situation more like this? Read More ›

In “Why don’t we love our intellectuals?,” John Naughton (The Observer, 8 May 2011) exemplarily misses a critical distinction:

While France celebrates its intelligentsia, you have to go back to Orwell and Huxley to find British intellectuals at the heart of national public debate. Why did we stop caring about ideas? When did ‘braininess’ become a laughing matter?

Perhaps it happened about the time many people were well-informed enough to assess the results of listening to people who live by and for fashionable ideas.

Here, in his perception of modern Britain, the confusion becomes evident: Read More ›

[Contest now judged. here. “Impress your friends with a piece of Mars is open until Saturday, May 28, 2011. The “Why do people refuse to read books they are attacking?” contest is open till Saturday June 4.] In this version of the very long-running human evolution soap opera (Ewen Callaway, Nature News, 9 May 2011), we didn’t kill the Neanderthals; they died before we got there. (Episode 4440). In a different episode, they were our squeezes and in-laws – which is probably why we killed them. Anyway, they weren’t as stupid as they pretended, either. Some folk, looking at all this, say “Science, unlike religion, changes its mind in the light of new evidence.” That may be so (the evidence Read More ›

Jane Harris Zsovan, author of Eugenics and the Firewall talked to Uncommon Descent recently about her book on the controversial topic of social Darwinist eugenics in Western Canda in the mid-twentieth century.

Denyse: The thing that struck me, reading your book, was how widespread the idea was in the province of Alberta, that sterilizing “socially challenged” people was a great idea. You write, “Many early eugenicists were leftists, but most important, Social Darwinist ideas behind right-wing eugenics absolved the wealthy of responsibility to help the poor.” (p. 8.) True, and many were pastors and churchgoing people. Today’s evangelicals would likely have a hard time believing that, but it’s a fact.

Read More ›

“if you include a link to a site “where hate material is posted”, you could go to jail for two years.”

This is how, as a Canadian commentator explains:

If you wanted to confirm the notion that elections are a waste of time, you could hardly do it more swiftly than the new Canadian Conservative majority government is with its omnibus crime bill. Clause Five criminalizes the “hyperlink” – that’s to say, if you include a link to a site “where hate material is posted”, you could go to jail for two years.[ … ] Read More ›

by being too trite for words: Here’s a sample from Sean Kean’s pod tranny:

One example is a book called The Rape of Troy by Jonathan Gottschall. And what he does is, he analyzes the sources of the conflicts in The Iliad – a little bit in The Odyssey too, but mostly in The Iliad – and he tries to look at it from the point of view of the number of available young women for men in the society, and he finds that there’s a lot of conflict. And most of the major conflicts in The Iliad are based on trying to find young women for the men to marry. That’s a little bit of a simplification, of course, but that’s the basic conflict in the book – over and over again they’re fighting about having women to marry. And it sort of gets at that they’re really fighting – even if they talk about honor or wealth or other things – in some fundamental sense, they’re really fighting for their evolutionary legacy.

Mmm, just as I suspected Sean Kean is suffering from evolutionary tone deafness. As it happens, the story really is about honor and wealth (to the extent that wealth confers honor), and about one man’s anger when he is dissed: To make that clear, it begins, Sing, Goddess, the wrath of Achilles … ”

Sure, all those guys wanted girls, except for the ones who wanted guys. In some places we take that for granted, like going to the bathroom. Read More ›

The thing to see is that their worldview – even if they are Catholic – would not allow them to get it right.

If they did, they could hardly get the words published in a respectable paper. Remember that when you renew your subscription: The constrained language of current media reporting does not usually permit these people to tell us a straight story. On anything.

Here, Jay Richards at Discovery Institute, himself a Catholic, comments on the reaction to the Pope saying, at Easter, Read More ›

In The Language of Science and Faith Karl Giberson and Francis Collins admonish us,

Most working biologists today actually have little interest in Darwin himself, and few have read The Origin of Species. In fact, most scientists do not use the label “Darwinism” any longer. The modern theory of evolution has contributions from many scientists over the last 150 years and has become the core of biology. (P. 21)

Okay, but how about this from the Discovery Institute: “We’d love to take credit for Darwinism, but can’t.”:

Any “God” that can be believed in or not believed in is a trivialized notion of the divine, and certainly not what we’re discussing here. Like life, reality simply is – no matter what beliefs one may hold about its nature, purpose, direction, and so forth – is open for discussion, and differences among those choices are unresolvable. But who can deny that there is such a thing as “Reality as a whole” and that “God” is a legitimate and proper name for this ultimacy? The transparency of this point is surely one reason why, as I share this perspective across North American, it garners the assent of theists, atheists, agnostics, religious nontheists, pantheists, and panentheists alike.

– Michael Dowd, Thank GOD for EVOLUTION! (San Francisco/Tulsa: Council Oak Books, 2007). p. 123.

Hmmm. Read More ›

In “Scientists Think Spirituality Is Congruent With Scientific Discovery, Religion Is Not” Medical News Today (06 May 2011), we
learn,

More than 20 percent of atheist scientists are spiritual, according to new research from Rice University. Though the general public marries spirituality and religion, the study found that spirituality is a separate idea – one that more closely aligns with scientific discovery – for “spiritual atheist” scientists.

[ … ]

For example, these scientists see both science and spirituality as “meaning-making without faith” and as an individual quest for meaning that can never be final. According to the research, they find spirituality congruent with science and separate from religion, because of that quest; where spirituality is open to a scientific journey, religion requires buying into an absolute “absence of empirical evidence.”

This story encapsulates the cleverest riff that materialist atheists have ever constructed to deny the reality of the mind and substitute the notion that apes r’ us: Getting everyone to accept that  “faith is based on buying into an absolute ‘absence of empirical evidence.’” Countless Christian academics play house with materialist atheists, constructing “existential” theories about faith that gut the traditional “show me a sign” demand for evidence.

For years, I laboured as co-author of a book that fruitfully assumed the exact opposite. We found that: Read More ›

Will Provine, history of biology prof, has won the first-ever awarded David L. Hull Prize for

his “extraordinary contributions to scholarship and service in ways that promote interdisciplinary connections between history, philosophy, social studies and biology, and that foster the careers of younger scholars.” – Krishna Ramanujan, Cornell Chronicle May 4, 2011

Hull was a famous Darwinian evolutionist. In a world where Christian Darwinists struggle to convince Christians to jettison deeply held beliefs in order to embrace Darwin, Provine has done his best to tell the truth. To make clear that 78% of evolutionary biologists, following in Darwin’s footsteps, believe not only that there is no God but that there is no free will. Like himself.  Read More ›

For one thing, “The end is far” is “science^TM,” not “religion^TM.”

Here, The Atlantic‘s Graeme Wood reports on “What will happen to us?: Forecasters tackle the extremely deep future” (Boston Globe, May 1, 2011), featuring recent Templeton winner Martin Rees and others on deep and distant futures, the theory being that it is now possible to be much more certain of the distant future than in the past:

The community of thinkers on distant-future questions stretches across disciplinary bounds, with the primary uniting trait a willingness to think about the future as a topic for objective study, rather than a space for idle speculation or science fictional reverie. They include theoretical cosmologists like Sean Carroll of the California Institute of Technology, who recently wrote a book about time, and nonacademic technology mavens like Ray Kurzweil, the precocious inventor and theorist. What binds this group together is that they are not, says Bostrom, “just trying to tell an interesting story.” Instead, they aim for precision. In its fundamentals, Carroll points out, the universe is a “relatively simple system,” compared, say, to a chaotic system like a human body — and thus “predicting the future is actually a feasible task,” even “for ridiculously long time periods.”

Past is past now …  Read More ›