Books of interest

Approx noon EST, Theistic Evolution: Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,915 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #2 in Books > Christian Books & Bibles > Theology > Creationism #13 in Books > Christian Books & Bibles > Theology > Apologetics #46 in Books > Religion & Spirituality > Religious Studies > Theology From the editorial reviews: — “This volume fills a wide and expanding gap for Christians who continue to struggle with the relationship of evangelical Christianity to the claims of science. Specifically, for those who have rightly rejected the claims of unguided evolution, this book takes on the similar challenge of the possibility of theistic evolution. Scholarly, informative, well-researched, and well-argued, this will be the best place to begin to ferret out reasons for conflict among Christians who take science seriously. I highly recommend this resource.” —K. Scott Oliphint, professor of apologetics and Read More ›

Here’s the trailer for the new book, Theistic Evolution, with a foreword by sociologist Steve Fuller, who studies ID professionally. The Problem with Theistic Evolution from Crossway on Vimeo. Here’s the outline of chapters. Amazon is currently offering a 28% discount (November 30). Note: News posting will be light till this evening due to other deadlines. See also: Do claims about “front-loading” design make theistic evolution viable? An engineer offers some thoughts. and Physicist Lee Spetner weighs in on the Adam and Eve controversy Adam and Eve have never been so hot since the days everyone went to church. At least not to judge from the current Bottleneck War in genetics. Keep your scorecard handy.

David Bentley Hart at The New Atlantis. “The Illusionist” is a longish essay, reviewing Daniel Dennett’s Bacteria to Bach and Back. Read it all but here are some highlights: In a sense, the entire logic of From Bacteria to Bach and Back (though not, of course, all the repetitious details) could be predicted simply from Dennett’s implicit admission on page 364 that no philosopher of mind before Descartes is of any consequence to his thinking. The whole pre-modern tradition of speculation on the matter — Aristotle, Plotinus, the Schoolmen, Ficino, and so on — scarcely qualifies as prologue. And this means that, no matter how many times he sets out, all his journeys can traverse only the same small stretch of Read More ›

How about a better question: Are pop science media doomed? No, seriously, from Matthew Cobb, reviewing Jonathan B. Losos’ Improbable Destinies at New Scientist: Jonathan Losos, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard University, approaches this through the contrasting views of the late Stephen Jay Gould and University of Cambridge palaeontologist Simon Conway Morris. Alongside the widespread phenomenon of convergent evolution, life produces many unique forms. The human lineage is one such. But before the reader can conclude that our uniqueness suggests we are the whole point of evolution, Losos plays his trump card: the duck-billed platypus. More. Wow, that’s deep. And it’s also timely, now that a platypus has just been elected Prime Minister of Australia. 😉 Does Cobb’s publishability depend on Read More ›

Here. Years ago, we pioneered the term noviewer, to describe people who review books without reading them. Now a friend has written to ask for a contest to come up with term to describe the reviewer who is the author’s public relations specialist. For example, the book is called Darwin was right and the reviewer is shouting Amen! fifty times. Or anyway, that is what it sounds like. Sounds like fun. Judged October 15. Free shipping [of a copy of J. Scott Turner’s Purpose and Desire:What Makes Something “Alive” and Why Modern Darwinism Has Failed to Explain It,] to postal address provided by winner. Here are the entries we received: At 1 full bore reviewer At 3 cheer-reader At 6 Read More ›

A lot of people are now reading Scott Turner’s Purpose and Desire:What Makes Something “Alive” and Why Modern Darwinism Has Failed to Explain It, and one of them is retired linguist Noel Rude (Native American languages). Turner’s challenge to Darwinism is the fact that life shows internal purpose, which cannot be accounted for by the mere declaration that it evolved in order to do so. Rude reflects, Someone ought to write a book titled, let me suggest, “Materialism and its Dissidents.”  Having recently read J. Scott Turner’s “Purpose and Desire,” I’m reminded of what a fellow linguist used to call “Aristotle’s anima.”  An ardent Darwinist, he nevertheless would tell me that Darwinism couldn’t work without the desire to live–something no completely Read More ›

J. Scott Turner’s new book, Purpose and Desire: What Makes Something “Alive” and Why Modern Darwinism Has Failed to Explain It here: 1. J. Scott Turner writes, “I have come to believe that there is something presently wrong with how we scientists think about life, its existence, its origins, and its evolution. . . . What’s worse is that being forced to make the choice actually stands in the way of our having a fully coherent theory of life, in all its aspects, most notably its evolution. In other words, this bias is now hindering scientific progress” (p. xi). How does Turner’s claim here strike you? Do you resonate with it at all? Why or why not? 2. Turner describes Read More ›

Prize: A hardback copy of J. Scott Turner’s Purpose and Desire: What Makes Something Alive and Why Modern Darwinism Has Failed to Explain It Recently, a friend linked us to the fact that Amazon had deleted 900 reviews of US 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s new book, What Happened: Books get reviewed badly, and people leave reviews for books they didn’t read or products they’ve never used. These things happen. But of the book’s 1,600 or so reviews as of this morning, only 338 were from users with verified purchases of the book—that is, those who actually bought the item on Amazon.com. A person could conceivably buy a book in a store and then hate it so much she runs Read More ›

A friend wrote around to ask what books offer the strongest arguments for evolution and various suggestions came forward, but one person we located offered some general advice worth sharing: For each argument or piece of evidence, ask yourself the following questions: 1. What kind of “evolution” this is supposed to prove or could be used to prove? (“Inherited changes”, “Adaptations to ekological niches”, “Common descent with creature X”, “Universal common ancestry”, “The existence of a mechanism that could account for the emergence of heritable features needed if A & B share a common ancestor”, “Different ecosystems at different times”, “More advanced species on top of the geological column” or something else?) 2. Is it useful in what it aims Read More ›

From Salvo online: Zombie Killer: The “Icons of Evolution” Have Joined the Ranks of the Undead: You cannot kill all zombies simply by destroying their brains. Only intelligence will kill the really nasty ones. About fifteen years ago, I read Jonathan Wells’s Icons of Evolution (2000). The sheer brazenness of the outdated information that continued to be paraded in decades of textbooks dealing with evolution was striking—even to a longtime textbook editor (now retired) like me. For example, Ernst Haeckel’s doctored vertebrate embryo illustrations from more than a century ago (intended to cement the idea of common descent) were the best modern evolutionary science could offer.1 Which says something about modern evolutionary science. The textbook publishing industry depends on a Read More ›

An excerpt at ScienceFriday from Improbable Destinies: Fate, Chance, and the Future of Evolution by zoologist Jonathan B. Losos: Ironically, it was research on the birds bearing Darwin’s name—the Galápagos finches—that drove the dagger through the heart of the idea that evolution is always slow. Like the peppered moth, Darwin’s finches have become one of the poster-child examples of evolution, and not just because of their name and history. Rather, much of their fame stems from the extraordinary forty-year research program of Princeton biologists Rosemary and Peter Grant. Starting in 1973, the Grants spent several months each year on the small, crater-shaped Galápageian island of Daphne Major. Their goal was to study the population of the medium ground finch (so named Read More ›

From Daniel Mallock at New English Review, a review of The Little Book of God, Mind, Cosmos and Truth by Kenneth Francis: The problem of meaning and values is a central issue. Regarding the philosopher Nietzsche and his famous assertion that “God is dead,” Mr. Francis writes that this concept “… gave great comfort to psychopaths and those seeking moral autonomy. In other words, everything is permitted if God does not exist.” The issue of meaning is one of the central issues of religion and of philosophy, too. If there is no God, then humanity itself and everything that we do is an accident—a galactic happenstance—that shatters human attempts to ascribe meaning and value to thoughts, actions, feelings, and to Read More ›

Recently, we’ve been running a featurette, Tales of the Tone Deaf, featuring dim profs writing in dozy journal about why people doubt Science and how to fix them. They do not appear able to process the fact that the public is well aware of any number of dubious findings about nutrition, for example, marketed for decades as Science. And is beginning to learn about the corruptocrat crime labs. Yes, Science again. And then there are all the scandals around peer review to stumble over. Skeptics are replacing worshippers for a reason. The growing reputation of universities for suppressing honest discussion in favour of group thumbsucking does not help. No matter, a new book by Austin Ruse, Fake Science: Exposing the Read More ›

Re J. Scott Turner’s forthcoming Purpose and Desire: From David Klinghoffer at Evolution News & Views, His book, Purpose and Desire: What Makes Something “Alive” and Why Modern Darwinism Has Failed to Explain It, underlines that Turner is not an “anti-Darwinist.” On the contrary, he explains that “I want deeply for it” – meaning the modern theory of Darwinian evolution – “to make sense.” The reasons for his disillusion, which he outlines in this fascinating contribution to the evolution debate, turn upon long-ignored problems with the theory, and counterevidence from the mysterious nature of life itself. It is still a couple of months too early for reviews of Purpose and Desire, but Kirkus welcomes it with a pre-publication starred review Read More ›

Rob Sheldon’s book is The Long Ascent: Genesis 1–11 in Science & Myth, Volume 1 (Wipf & Stock). The book tries to probe the minds of early biblical characters struggling to understand nature in the absence of any formal body of science knowledge. Order here. As “Part I” suggests, he is working on another installment in the series.