Atheism

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 ›

If so, maybe you are a Christian Darwinist and didn’t know it.

Michael Dowd, impresario of the thirty-three ring circus around Christian Darwinism, describes his own position as “creatheism”:

CREATHEISM: a concept introduced in the early 21st century, grounded in an empirical understanding of the nested emergent nature of divine creativity. For creatheists “God” is a holy name for Ultimate Reality—the all-encompassing Wholeness—that which includes yet transcends all other realities. Creatheism regards Nature as a revelation or expression of the divine, particularly in its emergent creativity. Creatheism understands humanity as a self-reflective aspect of Creation that allows the Wholeness of Reality, seen and unseen, manifest and unmanifest—i.e., God—to be honored in conscious awareness and to guide our own deliberate manifestations of that divine creativity.

What does all this mean exactly? He explains: Read More ›

This was the question: For a copy of The Nature of Nature , explain why either Richard Dawkins or Francis Collins is the cuter poster boy for selling Darwinism.

The question was first asked (that I ever heard of) by a prominent Canadian cosmologist, who wrote to a number of peers asking for feedback. He wanted a pollster to do a study too, but surely that would be a waste: We should only poll people on matters that will lead somewhere. Essentially, both these men are going to go away and do what they want, no matter what the tally, so why bother?

The winner is StephenB at 21, for clarity of analysis and precision of expression:

So, who is the better con man? In terms of gaining new recruits, I think Dawkins inspires more passion, but Collins probably gets better numbers. So, I give a slight edge to Collins. Whenever possible he avoids clarity of expression and practices the crafty art of “strategic ambiguity,” allowing potential supporters with widely divergent world views to read their own convictions into his message. Notice how, with maddening imprecision, he informs his listeners that there is “no conflict between religion and science,” prompting them to fill in the missing spaces with Christ and Darwin.

StephenB, write me at denyseoleary@gmail.com.

Incidentally, among those who cast a definite vote, it was a tie (not just Dawkins’ “nicer tie”). More below, but watch for the next contest. Read More ›

It builds on you because he makes his key point last.

In “Same Old New Atheism: On Sam Harris,” (The Nation May18, 2011), Jackson Lears critiques new atheist Sam Harris’s view of morality, beginning with an account of evolutionary psychology that could have come from this desk,  and then…  Read More ›

1997: …natural selection can be made to explain opposed and even mutually contradictory individual adaptations. For example, Darwinists claim that camouflage coloring and mimicry (as in leaf insects) is adaptive and will be selected for, yet they also claim that warning coloration (the wasp’s stripes) is adaptive and will be selected for. Yet if both propositions are true, any kind of coloration will have some adaptive value, whether it is partly camouflage or partly warning, and will be selected for. — Richard Milton, Shattering the Myths of Darwinism, p. 130 Apparently, when his book appeared, Milton was accused of being a fundamentalist Christian, an accusation which not only offended but perplexed him. Surely that would never happen in 2011.

… some of our good friends, patented experimental biologists (usually known as ‘wet’ biologists) who have read previous versions of this manuscript, slapped us on the wrist because they think what we are saying is overkill. They told us, ‘no one is that kind of Darwinian any more.’ We’d be happy if that were so, but there is good reason to doubt that it is. And if it is true, the news has not been widely disseminated even among wet biologists … – Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini, What Darwin Got Wrong (London: Profile Books, 2010), p. 91.

Consider some feature of the universe, such as its beginning to exist (assuming that it did begin to exist). There are various competing explanations we can consider for such a feature, and one of those explanations will be that the feature was due to an intelligent cause. We may judge this explanation to be the best one but it doesn’t follow that the explanation is true. The right account could be that there’s no explanation at all for why the universe has the feature that it does.

Thus, if the doctrine of intelligent design is as I’ve stated above, with the claim that the best explanation for the features is an intelligent cause, then I endorse intelligent design. Read More ›

…  here’s Jerry Coyne on Giberson and Collins’ Biologos: Finally, Uncle Karl [Giberson] and Francis Collins have a new book! It’s called The Language of Science and Faith (the subtitle is Straight Answers to Genuine Questions), and appears to be based largely on the “frequently asked questions” section of BioLogos. Now Collins wasn’t supposed to be engaged in this Jebus-proselytizing after he took up the reins of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), but I’ve seen assurances (I can’t find them at the moment) that his contribution to the book preceded his NIH directorship. I doubt, however, whether the volume will do much for his reputation. Whether the volume “does much for his reputation” depends principally on who needs the Read More ›

Brendan O’Neill invites readers to avoid the latest “anti-Bibles”, asking, Why, given their obtuse and ostentatious hostility towards organised religion and spiritual hoo-ha, are the so-called New Atheists so keen to refashion the Bible? What’s with all these secularist versions of ‘the good book’, minus the original’s miracles and resurrections and instead offering us guides to life firmly rooted in scientific fact and what poses as rationalism? This bible bonanza tells us a lot about the New Atheists. About their arrogance, their ignorance about where moral meaning comes from, and, most fundamentally, their allergy to, their utter estrangement from, the idea of transcendence.The first question that any remotely inquisitive person will surely ask about these ‘new bibles’ is this: how massive Read More ›

Jerry “No, Uncommon Descent did NOT invent him*” Coyne asks:

When is The Chronicle of Higher Education going to put the kibosh on the irrelevant and incoherent tirades of Gnu-Bashers [new atheist bashers – ed.] like Michael Ruse and Jacques Berlinerblau, whose continual attacks on atheists don’t do the journal any good? But in the meantime, one person still mans the Gnu Barricades: David Barash. Barash, a biologist at the University of Washington, has posted his latest on Tuesday, “The emperor’s new nakedness.” Taking his fellow Chronicle “bloggers” to task, he points out what’s really new in New Atheists: their popularity and their unwillingness to respect religious claims (on a related note, read Jason Rosenhouse’s epic new post on atheist “incivility”) …

Anyway, it is an argument that materialist atheists should just be rude.

Okay, so go ahead, new atheists: Be rude.

Some people are so unrude, they won’t even tell you it suits you.

* Can we quell this rumour for once and for all? Read More ›

Bradley Monton, author of Seeking God in Science: An Atheist Defends Intelligent Design (Broadview Press, 2009), has this to say about design theory as a legitimate approach to science:

I’ll start with Ken Miller’s 2008 book Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America’s Soul. In additon to giving straightforward biology-based criticisms of Behe’s irreducible complexity argument … Miller also has a more fundamental critique of intelligent design (the “Battle for America’s Soul” part).

Miller makes the claim that the intelligent design movement doesn’t just want to “win the battle against Darwin”; the intelligent design movement wants to “win the greater war against science itself.”
This claim that the intelligent design movement is anti-science is quite a strong claim. The way intelligent design proponents typically portray their activity is that they are looking for scientific evidence for the existence of a designer. This may be confused science, but it’s not anti-science. Moreover, some Read More ›

Sources note that, while Darwin stalwart Jerry Coyne has his hands full critiquing the Catechism of the Catholic Church, his colleague Eric Davidson … dismisses Coyne’s view of macroevolution as a “lethal error” and neo-Darwinism as “erroneously” assuming things, in E. Davidson, “Evolutionary bioscience as regulatory systems biology,” Developmental Biology 2011, in press: Of the first of these approaches (e.g., Hoekstra and Coyne, 2007), I shall have nothing to say, as mechanistic developmental biology has shown that its fundamental concepts are largely irrelevant to the process by which the body plan is formed in ontogeny.  In addition it gives rise to lethal errors in respect to evolutionary process.  

“OK; so if Darwin got it wrong, what do you guys think is the mechanism of evolution?” Short answer: we don’t know what the mechanism of evolution is. As far as we can make out, nobody knows exactly how phenotypes evolve. We think that, quite possibly, they evolve in lots of different ways; perhaps there are as many distinct kinds of causal routes to the fixation of phenotypes as there are different kinds of natural histories of the creatures whose phenotypes they are … – Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini, What Darwin Got Wrong (London: Profile Books, 2010), p. 153 This does not sound like the beginnings of another modernist cult or religion.

Bradley Monton, the atheist philosopher who is friendly to design, makes a number of his papers available here, including “Against Multiverse Theodicies”, “Mixed Strategies Can’t Evade Pascal’s Wager”, “Design Inferences in an Infinite Universe”, “God, Fine-Tuning, and the Problem of Old Evidence”, and “Is Intelligent Design Science? Dissecting the Dover Decision.”

Here’s his book, Seeking God in Science: An atheist defends intelligent design. Some illuminating comments on the book:

“This is a brave and important book. Monton does not defend ‘intelligent design’ as true – he thinks it is most likely false. Instead, he defends it as a hypothesis worth taking seriously. He argues convincingly that it can be formulated as a scientifically testable hypothesis, and that there is some important empirical evidence for it – not as much evidence as its supporters claim there is, but some evidence. Virtually all voices in this debate insist either that ID is not even worth taking seriously or else that it is manifestly the truth. It is refreshing to see a talented philosopher give the thesis its due and make a serious attempt to weigh the evidence for and against it, without the weight of the ‘culture wars’ hanging over every sentence.” – John T. Roberts, Associate Professor of Philosophy, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill  Read More ›

Historically, not a rare event. Here Rabbi Moshe Averick does an interview with host Ken R. Unger,a “true Renaissance Man”, who notes Atheists sound real smart until they come up against someone who knows science better than they do. Today’s guest, Rabbi Moshe Averick, is just that kinda guy. His book Nonsense a High Order: The Confused and Illusory world of the Atheist takes on top atheists and he usually comes out on top. Learn why he believes Intelligent Design is more scientific than the outdated pseudo science of Evolutionary Theory. Broadcast starts here.