Denyse O'Leary

Recently, a caffeine-deprived friend was grousing about the fact that ID proponents don’t tend to be welcomed at “open theology” conferences.

“Open theology” implies a much more limited sort of God than the Immortal, invisible, God only wise of the Western monotheist (Jewish, Christian, Muslim) tradition.

Now, it’s unclear to me why the ID guys, who are mostly hard math and science types, should even want to hang out with these children of a lesser god. But my friend insisted on hearing the view from O’Leary’s Point, so here goes. And I have followed it up with a testable prediction, too: Read More ›

So many media outlets have voted themselves the guardians of the bottom-up theory of life and the opponents of the top-down theory of life. Consistent with their mission, they seem to compete for what they can get wrong about intelligent design or any other idea that insists that mind comes first. Evidence has nothing to do with it. The Post-Darwinist skewers the nonsense.

Here is my review of Francis Collins’ The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief (Free Press, New York, 2006), with a look at the other reviews. Collins is a snapshot in time: the Christian scientist reassuring everyone that materialist science is no threat  – on the very eve of the big blowout. Some might think I haven’t been nice enough to him. Well, if nice is all you want … next time ask Mary Poppins to write a review. Introduction Part One:How genome mapper Collins became a Christian Collins owes his conversion to C.S. Lewis, but he typifies the petering out of Lewis’ legacy. Too many people have relied on Lewis and too few have followed in his Read More ›

Over the past few months,  The Post-Darwinist has been host to quite the little controversy over whether Hitler was a social Darwinist or a creationist. If you want to pursue that in detail, try

“Does Darwinism devalue human life?” (July 2, 2006)

What did Hitler believe abut evolution? (September 2006)

“Hitler as a Darwinist: Prof accused of academic dishonesty” (September 15, 2006)

Recent posts (October 9, 2006) (Scroll down to Coral Ridge for the Anti-Defamation League flap.)

Now, I was brought up to believe that Hitler was one sick puppy. Indeed, I have Jewish friends who will not use his name, calling him only “that man.” So I don’t know how much it matters in principle what he thought about origins. But having listened to both sides, I think that he was, for all practical purposes, a social Darwinist who doubted the creative power of natural selection alone.

Anyway, Professor Richard Weikart , an expert on Nazi ideology, has often been the target of Darwinists who need to believe that Hitler was exclusively a creationist, which Weikart can hardly confirm for them. Prof. Weikart writes me to say: Read More ›

You wrote: “‘flunk all the IDiots and make room for smart students’ … is clear-cut viewpoint discrimination.” It’s more than that. The Darwinists know as well as anyone else how little good evidence exists for their current position* – which is much more far-reaching than Darwin’s original position, as their current position posits that the mind, the will, the cosmos, origin of life, you name it, is supposedly governed by Darwinian mechanisms. They are way overstretched, and my gut tells me that they do not expect to be rescued any time soon. How to make students swallow it all without protest? The simplest and surest way is to get rid of those who are not going to swallow it. It Read More ›

University of Toronto-based Larry Moran, of textbook fame, has just informed the Post-Darwinist of that very entertaining proposal.

Here is a piece I just put up elsewhere, in five parts, on peer review. Introduction Part One: If peer review always worked before, why doesn’t it work now? Part Two: How bad can it get? Pretty bad. Part Three: How the system is slowly becoming more open and dynamic, whether anyone wants it to or not Part Four:How will we know if a more open system works better?

Discovery Institute notes the following from Douglas Futuyma’s Evolutionary Biology (1998, 3rd Ed., Sinauer Associates), p. 5: Darwin showed that material causes are a sufficient explanation not only for physical phenomena, as Descartes and Newton had shown, but also for biological phenomena with all their seeming evidence of design and purpose. By coupling undirected, purposeless variation to the blind, uncaring process of natural selection, Darwin made theological or spiritual explanations of the life processes superfluous. Together with Marx’s materialistic theory of history and society and Freud’s attribution of human behavior to influences over which we have little control, Darwin’s theory of evolution was a crucial plank in the platform of mechanism and materialism… This is especially interesting in view of Read More ›

In Of Designers and Dunces, Roddy Bullock entertaininglyly addresses the claim made by Professor Donald Wise of the University of Massachusetts that defects in the human body show that there is no design in nature. Unwise person: I’ll admit it’s art, but it’s bad art. Wise person: But you will agree that it is the work of an artist. Yes? Unwise person: No. A “bad design” claim, if sustainable, might come better from a medical doctor than a geologist, but medical doctors do not appear to be among materialism/Darwinism’s fans.

We wrestle with significant questions regarding the mind and the brain: Is the mind an illusion? Is it merely the buzz created by neurons? Is it an immaterial reality? One thing we will certainly need to sort all this out is academic freedom: Pundit David Horowitz brings us up to date on his academic freedom campaign: In September 2003, I began a national campaign to persuade universities to adopt an academic bill of rights, aimed at extending traditional academic-freedom protections to students and restoring objectivity and fairness to classrooms. Mounting such an effort is not easy. Getting the issue of campaign finance reform on the national radar, for example, reportedly required some $120-million and the work of several major public-interest organizations. Read More ›

Check out my new blog on the neuroscience issues that border on the intelligent design controversy, the Mindful Hack: First two stories: 1. Blindness: Spiritual blindness worse than physical? 2. Sigmund Freud … fallen so far and so fast?   Note: The Post-Darwinist will continue as before, and I will continue to contribute to this and all blogs I am not locked out of. Mindful Hack tracks my latest co-authored book, The Spiritual Brain (co-authored with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard), currently in copy editing.

I have a running debate with a couple of coworkers about how (in their opinion) stupid biological taxonomy is because taxonomists don’t simply choose a species concept and stick with it.

Apparently, his co-workers are not trained biologists (except for undergrad degrees) and complaining about taxonomy does ease their way through a dreary day, no doubt.

Read More ›

A Brazilian friend advises me that Great Errors in Science , which highlights the importance of academic freedom in the sciences, is available in Portuguese. He explains more at his Portuguese-language blog. Apparently, three articles were written by Brazilian “Ivy league equivalent” professors that my friend has the good fortune to know. My friend, who has a copy, quotes, Science is not only a vital activity for the survival and development of humanity. It is also one of the most beautiful productions of human intelligence. But only the acceptance of its limited character, partial and uncertain can avoid that it transforms itself into a fossilized belief system But that, of course, is precisely what Darwinism has become, complete with ridiculous hagiography. Read More ›

The intelligent design controversy has certainly spilled out of its original home among non-materialist Americans.

Here are some useful leads: For Britain, “Infighting among the Darwinists”, Media and Darwinists still ID’s best friends, and the manipulations around what UK PM Tony Blair supposedly said (scroll down). Then there is Quebec (Canada), the Muslim world, and the Catholic Church’s distancing itself from Darwinism. National Center for Science Education also notes the following, no doubt with some overlap with the above.

A recent article in Time made clear that American pundits actually believed that “I.D. lost some of its journalistic heat last December when a federal judge dismissed it as pseudoscience …” (a legal decision in Pennsylvania in 2005).

Just how they could possibly have believed that remains a mystery to me. But I must stop and remind myself that these people probably also believe in, for example, “evolutionary psychology.”  Read More ›

(Note: Unexpectedly, this months-long problem has just got solved, shortly after the bloggers started complaining publicly about it. – d.)   Web guy Micah Sparacio permits me to publicize this problem at the Post-Darwinist, so I thought I would mention it here too, for the benefit of our blog readers and commenters: On approximately the 19th of September, the blog operated by Bill Dembski and friends  Uncommon Descent was delisted from the Google search index. No reason has ever been given for why the site was delisted, despite requests for reinclusion. This blog has tens of thousands of legitimate links, especially from trusted institutions of higher education. This blog had been around for well over a year. This blog has Read More ›