Denyse O'Leary

I do not usually bother with anonymous posts at the Post-Darwinist, but some strike me as interesting. Take this one on ID-friendly law prof Frank Beckwith’s tenure case: Beckwith is not a law professor. He does not have the requisite education to be a law professor. He has no juris doctorate. Therefore, he can only teach at the undergraduate level. And even then, he can only teach the “philosophy of law.” Not law itself. Now, at the time, I wondered why the hoo-haw a person so knowledgeable about the state of law teaching should wish to send me an anonymous post. But people who detract from the reputation of others – particularly those others who may be their superiors in Read More ›

I’d left the conference early on Friday night. The house was packed out and the U organizer worried about the Fire Marshal’s opinion of people sitting on the stair grades, so I ceded my seat.

(So much for “ID is dead …” Not in Toronto, anyway.)

Thus I missed the presentation by emeritus chemist Dr. David Humphreys, in support of the view that the molecules of life give evidence of purposeful design. I bet they do. I also missed the presentation by astronomer Hugh Ross of Reasons to Believe.

When I got back early Saturday morning, there was a distinct buzz because Ross had “witnessed” during his presentation.

A commenter, from my first post-conference sketch, asks,

Denyse: thanks for your first anecdotal response. I have read elsewhere (on this blog?) that the current generation may simply have to die off, given the faith system/creation myth of naturalism/darwinism. A key issue then is what the young people think, both graduate and undergraduate students. What were the objectives of the organizers? How evenly balanced were the ID friendly and evolution friendly speakers? What was the temper of the questions asked? Finally, how well received was the notion of a testable creation model?

Well, the blog’s imputed elsewhere may have been thinking of Thomas Kuhn’s quotation from Max Planck,

“a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it” (Kuhn, 1962).

I call Planck right in this, especially when a system – whether it is the Ptolemaic universe or Darwinism – is a creation story or validation of religion of some kind.

Let’s not forget Ben Wattenberg reminding Richard Dawkins on NPR of his own words in The Selfish Gene,

Living organisms had existed on earth without ever knowing why for 3,000 million years before the truth finally dawned on one of them. His name was Charles Darwin.

– Richard Dawkins on Ben Wattenberg’s PBS Think Tank (1996)

Wattenberg’s comment was “That sounds to me like a religious statement. That is a – that is near messianic language.”

Dawkins, of course, denied that, saying

Two top-of-mind events, for now:

(In the order of remembrance of things past, not necessarily long term importance)

1. The depth of the crisis with Darwinian evolution became apparent to me when I watched and listened to the Darwinian biologists present.

For these people, Darwinism is a cult. They simply cannot understand objections to Darwinian evolution as actual objections. For example, the fact that very few instances of speciation are actually observed makes it very difficult to test Darwinian evolution against other kinds. This may be an accident, to be sure, but it is an accident with consequences. It means that the “overwhelming evidence” that supposedly exists for Darwin’s theory is really just overwhelming belief on the part of people like themselves.

But there they sit, placid with overwhelming belief, like pious grannies – and mistaking it for overwhelming evidence.

In the comments box to my post of yesterday, someone wrote re Hugh Ross speaking at the ID conference in Toronto: I also find folks like Hugh Ross who’s speaking there in Toronto somewhat unsavory (if I may use such a word). He should be a big supporter of Intelligent Design, yet his article in the first issue of Salvo (http://www.salvomag.com/subscribe.html) was just terrible. Y’all should have a look in preparation for the conference — or is there still hope to win him over and so even we had better be nice? From Denyse: Well, Hugh Ross is currently our guest in Toronto, so we will give him a polite hearing no matter what he says. My own view is Read More ›

BIll Dembski wrote,

E.O. Wilson thinks that after years of reaming religious believers he can now ingratiate himself with them. Fine. Let him and his colleagues give up their monopoly on the teaching and government funding of materialistic evolutionary theories.

Can E. O. Wilson really save the world?
Ivan Semeniuk
New Scientist, 30 September 2006

http://www.newscientist.com/channel/opinion/mg19125711.300-can-e-o-wilson-really-save-the-world.html

Often cited as Darwin’s true heir, E. O. Wilson has an audacious planet-saving strategy: to unite evangelical Christians and scientific secularists

Oh, and the ID cause is going belly up according to a recent Ken Miller talk, as quoted in  another Dembski post below.

Okay, so why have I been running around these last few days getting ready for a conference on ID at the University of Toronto? (which so far has not been cancelled – it would never have been cancelled  due to lack of interest, but due to admin fear)

There’s a stack of stuff here I haven’t even read yet, to do with ID, and I don’t have time to blog in general, and don’t have a moment to call the shots on who will win the Liberal leadership race in Canada, even though I am supposed to broadcast on that later today.

This is a pretty lively dead, if you ask me. 

Anyway, re E. O. Wilson, swatched above, here’s what an old comrade Nancy Pearcey (www.npearcey@aol.com) says about what it really means when people who have sneered at religious folk in the past suddenly start to make nice:

 … the strategy here is what Phil Johnson described as switching off between the offensive and the defensive teams.  When Darwinists are feeling confident, they send out the offensive team, which takes the Dennett/Dawkins line that evolution has debunked religion. 

When they realize that for PR purposes they have to tread more carefully, they send out the defensive team, which takes the line that religion is fine as long as it stays in its place.  The important question is how they define its place.  Just like Gould, this SciAm editorial puts all the real facts on the side of Darwinism, while defining religion as a comforting gloss people can put on the facts of materialistic science if it makes them feel better. 

Religion can be tolerated if it helps weaker folks “reconcile” themselves to the hard-edged materialism that the real scientists are courageous enough to hold. 

The depressing thing isn’t that Wilson tries it on. Read More ›

Here’s a first in Canada, maybe: A conference at the University of Toronto (September 29-20, 2006) on intelligent design and the universe/life that is not just the usual “God and science” snore – at least the organizers will do everything in their power to keep it from being the usual theistic evolution cop-out snooze. Here’s what you will NOT primarily hear: “Faith, you see, is about feelings and involves no evidence at all. Materialism is about facts because it is based on evidence. And, guess what, folks, materialism IS science! So if ever you get it into your little pinhead that you think you see design in the universe or life forms, or that you have consciousness or free will, rest Read More ›

A key problem with the argument over Darwinian evolution (evolution by natural selection acting on random mutations) is that so few actual examples of speciation (new species forming) have ever been observed that we really have no way of knowing for sure whether Darwin had the right idea. I suspect that explains precisely why acceptance of Darwinism is so often treated as some kind of loyalty test for support for science in general. That is, the Darwinist is taking a great deal on faith. And those Darwinists who also happen to  be fanatics  by temperament behave just as other fanatics do when they think they have found certainty: They go about like bulls looking for a fight - demanding that you too, brudder, Read More ›

No friend to religion, Andrew Brown nonetheless says that Richard Dawkins’s “incurious and rambling” diatribe against religion “doesn’t come close to explaining how faith has survived the assault of Darwinism, opening with It has been obvious for years that Richard Dawkins had a fat book on religion in him, but who would have thought him capable of writing one this bad? Incurious, dogmatic, rambling and self-contradictory, it has none of the style or verve of his earlier works. It gets better from there – or worse, I guess, if you bought The God Delusion. Which reminds me to come to the point of this blog: When was the last time Dawkins had an original idea in biology? I don’t mean an Read More ›

I first got interested in alligators when I discovered, from zoologist Norbert Smith, that the “reptilian brain” theory – according to which alligators cannot show emotion because the mammalian brain (which they don’t have) must evolve first – can’t be true. Alligators are quite capable of showing emotion or curiosity about anything that they are capable of understanding. That includes sex and baby alligators. Their intellectual limitations come in part from the fact that they are exothermic (cold-blooded), and therefore cannot keep up activities for as long as endothermic (warm-blooded) animals. Now, I see Smith has written a book, summarizing a lifetime of research into the passive fear response. It has long been held that animals speed up their metabolism Read More ›

Recall Frank Beckwith, that gifted prof at Baylor, who specializes in church-state issues, who was mysteriously denied tenure recently?

Beckwith appealed, was turned down again* – by a narrower margin, it is said – and a decision is expected shortly. What’s come out since the first denial is that his former department chair, who is believed to have undermined Beckwith’s tenure chances, recently resigned amid allegations that he plagiarized the work of Ronald Numbers , a well-known American scholar, best known for his studies of creationism.

As World‘s Mark Bergin notes,

Beckwith is among academia’s foremost pro-life advocates and has written articles supporting the constitutionality of teaching intelligent design. The tenure committee accused him of inappropriately focusing on such areas of expertise in his courses on church-state relations. In his appeal of tenure denial, Beckwith responded that “because these ethical issues are central to the most important and disputed questions in church-state studies today, it seems to me to be not only permissible, but obligatory, for a professor in this area of study to address these issues.”

Well, um, yes. Anyone in the news business knows that stories about abortion or intelligent design lead over the mast. Should Beckwith have asked students to wade through tomes on interstate trucking rules instead? How about “Proper venting for turnips in transit – a federal or state responsibility?” or “Bovine-produced methane gas in re current environment regulations”?

Recently, several people have generously devoted considerable time to padding the comments section of the Post-Darwinist on the question of whether Hitler was a creationist or a Darwinist. Now, one recent commenter, Mitchell Coffey, went over the top, accusing Cal State prof Richard Weikart, author of From Darwin to Hitler, of being dishonest.

Critiquing my position, he scolds, in part:

This is to be expected if you rely on the immorality of dishonest academics like Richard Weikart. Most of his assertions about Darwin’s beliefs are contradicted by the historical sources — often by the historical sources he himself cites for support! In one case, he out-and-out lies about what he calls Darwin’s “system.”

But if you want to see a straight-out lie by Prof. Weikart, locate his one quote from H.G. Wells. Weikart makes extravagant claims about the significance of the quote, which Weikart wants you to believe meant that Wells believed in killing off “inferior” races.

Weikart, who is fluent in German, replies,

Read More ›

Debra J. Saunders reports that, in an apparent stunning reversal of decades of misdirection, educrats have now decided that junior students should just learn the correct answers in math class. For example, 9 x 9 = 81. Period. That’s not worth arguing about, any more than the alphabet is. You learn it so you can learn other things. Some of those other things, incidentally, are very much worth arguing about. But the student must acquire basic skills before he or she knows enough to comprehend, let alone take part in, an argument. The story is that the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, in an apparent policy switch, now thinks that Grade Fours should know multiplication and division tables. In Read More ›

I will blog on the Catholic Church’s position in more detail later, when I get a chance to get all my links together, but for now:

There are currently two and one half understandings of ID:

1. The specific ideas of biochemist Michael Behe and mathematician Bill Dembski (irreducible complexity and specified complexity) may provide evidence of a level of information in life forms that cannot be explained by the chance interactions of physical laws.

Behe’s or Dembski’s thesis may be correct. Or may not. Even if both are incorrect, correct theses may arise from another quarter.

Surely, the Catholic Church was never going to throw its institutional weight behind either of these theses, as I have pointed out in at least one earlier post. Why should it? Such theses stand or fall in their own arenas in their own good time. The Church has learned at least that much in the age of science.

2. The universe and life forms show evidence of intelligent design in principle. That is not something the Catholic Church can oppose. The entire Bible depends on that idea. Jews and Muslims agree with it, and so did key Greek philosophers, as indeed have most philosophers throughout history. (They disagreed about what, who, how, where, when, and why, but few disagreed about the fact of design until fairly recently.)

For a while, Darwinism looked like it might provide a creation story for post-Enlightenment atheism, … but maybe not.

½. Oh yes, the half idea. Read More ›

Gil Dodgen, who is a concert pianist (as well as a present, former, and possibly late hang glider), offered some useful thoughts on this pop sci amusement by Drake Bennett in the Boston Globe on the alleged origin of music.

The evolutionary benefits of our affinity for food (nutrition) and sex (procreation) are easy enough to explain, but music is trickier. It has become one of the great puzzles in the field of evolutionary psychology, a controversial discipline dedicated to determining the adaptive roots of aspects of modern behavior, from child-rearing to religion.

One thing I want to draw attention to is that this story actually backs away from uncritical acceptance of the claims of evolutionary psychology.

Yes. Evo psycho is described above as “a controversial discipline”, rather than as “the latest in scientific understanding of our origins.” Hmmmm. (Well, of course, evo psycho should be described as a controversial discipline at best, but whodathunk that the pop sci media would get around to considering the possibility that it is?

The main problem with evo psycho is that its subject, like that of exobiology , has never been observed. Its subject is early humans but we only know modern humans. (Simply living under primitive conditions is not pixie dust and will not turn a modern human into a Pleistocene caveman; it would merely demonstrate that no evolution took place.)

Better still, an actual skeptic was interviewed for the Boston Globe story. That’s not usual, so let’s enjoy it: Read More ›