Denyse O'Leary

My lead author on the book The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist’s case for the existence of the soul, Mario Beauregard, has an article coming out in Progress in Neurobiology which describes a number of studies in non-materialist neuroscience.

(Non-materialist neuroscience = the mind exists and uses the brain but is not the same thing as the brain. Please, nobody, write to me to ask how this is relevant to ID. Use your imagination.)

Neuroimaging techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) can now show the ways in which people reorganize their brains by changing their minds. However, their ability to do this is in direct conflict with materialist theories of mind, according to which the mind either is simply the brain at work or is a side-effect of brain processes – or perhaps does not even exist. As Beauregard writes, Read More ›

Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams seems determined to think for himself about evolution, despite flak from a Darwinist “ass hat” (his term). Although not an intelligent design supporter, Scott makes some of the very points that the ID guys and other non-Darwinians make about the Darwinist interpretation of the fossil record:

I’ve been trying for years to reconcile my usually-excellent bullshit filter with the idea that evolution is considered a scientific fact. Why does a well-established scientific fact set off my usually-excellent bullshit filter like a five-alarm fire? It’s the fossil record that has been bugging me the most. It looks like bullshit. Smells like bullshit. Tastes like bullshit. Why isn’t it bullshit? All those scientists can’t be wrong. Read More ›

In a comment to one of my posts of yesterday, on the popular myths (and ridiculous hagiography) around Darwin, someone responded, “I am not seeing the ID relevance of this article.”

Really not? Okay then, let me unpack it. When I started covering the ID controversy in depth (about 2002 onward, while writing By Design or by Chance? ), I quickly became aware that the Darwin myths were the single most important reason why – irrespective of any evidence whatever – average educated people could not imagine that Darwin and his heirs might be mistaken in their interpretation of the history of life. Read More ›

Here’s how Cambridge’s Jim Enderby’s review of some recent Darwin books begins: On the morning of November 24, 1859, Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species made its first appearance and the world changed forever. An age of faith was plunged into profound religious doubt, and believers of every kind rose to pronounce anathema on Darwin’s godless tract, sparking a fresh battle in the long-running war between science and religion. But while the reactionaries raged, the scientific community soon came to accept natural selection, and the rediscovery of Gregor Mendel’s work in 1900 (which marked the founding of modern genetics) set the seal on Darwin’s triumph by providing the missing piece to his puzzle – a scientific understanding of just Read More ›

In a recent article in the New York Times magazine, by Richard Panek, we read a very well written but surprisingly pessimistic assumption about what physicists can learn about the universe: If so, such a development would presumably not be without philosophical consequences of the civilization-altering variety. Cosmologists often refer to this possibility as “the ultimate Copernican revolution”: not only are we not at the center of anything; we’re not even made of the same stuff as most of the rest of everything. “We’re just a bit of pollution,” Lawrence M. Krauss, a theorist at Case Western Reserve, said not long ago at a public panel on cosmology in Chicago. “If you got rid of us, and all the stars Read More ›

British journalist Melanie Phillips has an interesting item on “post-normal” science: The ‘post-normal’ science of climate change From the horse’s mouth — climate change theory has nothing to do with the truth. In a remarkable column in today’s Guardian Mike Hulme, professor in the school of environmental sciences at the University of East Anglia and the founding director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research — a key figure in the promulgation of climate change theory but who a short while ago warned that exaggerated forecasts of global apocalypse were in danger of destroying the case altogether — writes that scientific truth is the wrong tool to establish the, er, truth of global warming. Instead, we need a perspective Read More ›

Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor has won the Templeton Prize: Taylor has long objected to what many social scientists take for granted, namely that the rational movement that began in the Enlightenment renders such notions as morality and spirituality as simply quaint anachronisms in the age of reason. That narrow, reductive sociological approach, he says, wrongly denies the full account of how and why humans strive for meaning which, in turn, makes it impossible to solve the world’s most intractable problems ranging from mob violence to racism to war. “The deafness of many philosophers, social scientists and historians to the spiritual dimensions can be remarkable,” Taylor said in remarks prepared for the news conference. “This is the more damaging in that Read More ›

A student appended a comment to one of my blog posts, charging that intelligent design is just a God of the Gaps argument (if we assume design we cannot learn very much about the world), and asking for a response. Here it is, and here is an excerpt: “The concern you expressed above, that an inference of design means that “we wouldn’t learn very much about the world”, beautifully captures the default position of defenders of materialism – whether they claim to be churchgoers or not – and that may be where you first encountered it. (I am not saying that you are a materialist; I am saying that you have beautifully captured their default position.) Their view makes sense, Read More ›

Nobody seems to be blogging these days, including me, but a friend sent me something interesting: I’ve often said that the ID guys owe a good deal of their success to their opposition, and here is an example of just what I mean, kindly provided by ID embryologist Jonathan Wells’s Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design (Regnery, 2006), about Paul Mirecki: From Chapter 15 (p. 173): Anti-Christian zealots are often in the forefront of attacks on intelligent design. In 2005, the chairman of the University of Kansas Religious Studies Department, atheist Paul Mirecki, proposed to teach a course titled “Intelligent Design Creationism and Other Mythologies.” Mirecki boasted on a web site that “fundies” would see the course as a Read More ›

Recently, a friend wanted some help in explaining to a hostile audience (1) why there is an ID controversy, (2) why it gets bigger, and (3) why it is not going away.

He was facing an audience, I expect, who would rather believe conspiracy theories than evaluate evidence.

His audience is probably a lost cause, but it may be worth a try if lunch is served.

Conspiracy theorists usually believe themselves more virtuous than their mythical conspirators, so their theories provide both pretended knowledge and pretended virtue at once. As a result, the theories are pretty hard to disconfirm by evidence. Read More ›

In a recent column on the “lost tomb of Jesus,” Frank Pastore observes ,

Poor James Cameron. He wanted some of that Da Vinci Code action so badly that he jumped on a 27 year old story line that everyone else in Hollywood had wisely passed on. He ignored so many early warning signs, too. When he was hav-ing trouble early on finding A, B, or even C list “scientific experts” who were willing to throw their careers away if they would only validate his silly theories – and they all continued saying no – he didn’t let that slow him down one bit. He pressed on and signed the minor league guys. And later, when the best he could come up with for his advance publicity hook was to claim statistically similar names and unrelated DNA samples – He still didn’t pull the plug – even though any-one who has ever seen just one episode of CSI is sharp enough to spit out the bait. Read More ›

Riffing off Joey Campana’s valuable backgrounder on the REAL relationship between the Templeton Foundation andID, Denyse O’Leary suggests that there is a power struggle  going on over at Templeton, with funding for ID as a key bone of contention. How else to reconcile the views of honcho Charles Harper and honchess Pamela Thompson? They are not singing from the same hymnbook.

O’Leary looks at the spate of anti-God books and other promotions for the new Church of Atheism, and suspects that atheism was way more fun in the days when it was just a quiet, Godless Sunday at home.

Now, the church – as we all know – is the weak point of any religion. And when all you’ve got is a church – and remember, these people are supposed to be “beyond” belief – well, to me, that sounds a bit like getting married and finding out that you have no spouse but two mothers-in-law … and more too, if you want them!

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In this video, a rabbit somewhere in Texas chases a big snake up a tree.

Recently, a house cat also chased a bear up a tree. (You have to scroll way way down to see a vigilant ginger cat at the bottom of the tree.)

One of the many reasons I have little use for evo psycho is that animal behavior is often not at all predictable. It may be difficult to say what behavior enabled a given animal to become an ancestor, and therefore what may be encoded in genes. And genuine common ancestors may be rare. Read More ›

Here’s a show that was a lot of fun! Australian science journalist Robyn Williams, author of Unintelligent Design: God Isn’t as Smart as She Thinks She Is and I go at it, with Sheridan Voysey of Open House Australia trying to moderate. I must at some point say more about Williams’ interesting book, summarized at Amazon,

Why make the earth, the solar system, our galaxy and all the rest when the Garden of Eden was all that was wanted? And then there’s lifespan. During long periods of human history, the life expectancy of men was a mere 22 years and children were lucky to toddle, let alone grow up. Why the waste? And shouldn’t we sue God for sinus blockages, hernias, appendix flare-ups and piles, not to mention bad backs? Using all sorts of examples from the natural and scientific world Robyn Williams takes on the stalking monster of fundamentalist religion and creationism in a short, wicked and witty debunk of intelligent design. This is a book to infuriate the Christian fundamentalists and amuse the rest of us.

Williams is fundamentally – so to speak – confused about the difference between intelligent design, optimal design, and perfection, as I pointed out at the time. Read More ›