Creationism

Denyse O’Leary writes about Barbara Forrest’s fact-free attack on Frank Beckwith, which recently appeared in Synthese. While Denyse focused more on Beckwith’s response to Forrest’s scholarly article diatribe, it might be worth taking a closer look not only at Forrest’s article, but the entire issue of Synthese in which it is found. First Forrest. In the abstract for her article with the breathtaking title “The non-epistemology of intelligent design: its implications for public policy”, Bar writes:

Intelligent design creationism (ID) is a religious belief requiring a supernatural creator’s interventions in the natural order. ID thus brings with it, as does supernatural theism by its nature, intractable epistemological difficulties.

Okay, so we’re only 2 sentences into the abstract and we can already see that Bar has no clue what ID is about. Read More ›

If this isn’t a hoax, it is a rarely sighted genuine effort to “teach creationism in the schools”, as opposed to an attempt to replace the Beard Almighty with some/any kind of science thinking about evolution:

Still, when asked about adding creationism to the curriculum, Lake Zurich School Board candidate Doug Goldberg said to the Daily Herald interviewers, “I’m a good, God-fearing American and the answer is ‘Yes.'”- “Suburban School District Candidates Believe Creationism Should Be Taught” (HuffPo, 2 28 11)

Well, does Mr. Goldberg think that Francis “junk DNA yes?/no?” Collins and the infinite variety of folk over at Biologos (= anything but evident design) are not God-fearing?

Heck, more “God” yatters out of those guys than ever did out of little old Catholic me. The trouble with the Christian Darwinists is that they have way more God than evidence.

And aren’t most of the Thumbsmen and Darwinoid trolls Americans*, while not God-fearing (and I am no judge of whether they are “good”)? Read More ›

My attention was recently drawn to this critique of physicist Stephen Barr’s comments on church father Augustine (354-430 CE). Barr, a frequent critic of intelligent design, argues that Augustine did not take the Genesis account literally. This site argues, more plausibly in my view, that Augustine aged, he became more drawn to literal accounts of events in Scripture.

None of which would matter except that Augustine is often misused as a poster boy for bashing literalism, as Thomas Aquinas is misused by Catholic Darwinists as opposed to the idea that design can be detected in nature.

The point everyone seems to miss is this: We don’t know what Augustine or Aquinas (or Aristotle) “would have” thought, if they had been given the information available today. It’s the nature of history that they were not given it, and were reasoning from what they knew. Read More ›

The opening of  the current version of the Wikipedia article, “Evolution as theory and fact,” (with links and references removed) reads: The statement “evolution is both a theory and a fact” is often seen in biological literature. Evolution is a “theory” in the scientific sense of the term “theory”; it is an established scientific model that explains observations and makes predictions through mechanisms such as natural selection. When scientists say “evolution is a fact”, they are using one of two meanings of the word “fact”. One meaning is empirical: evolution can be observed through changes in allele frequencies or traits of a population over successive generations. Another way “fact” is used is to refer to a certain kind of theory, Read More ›

Jack Krebs at Panda’s Thumb claims that I have “come clean” as a young earth creationist. There are a couple of problems with his announcement: (1) It’s not true, and (2) there’s nothing in my words that he quoted to justify his claim. Krebs seems to think that my recent statements clarifying my views represent either a compromise or a “retraction” of my earlier views. But that is false. It’s a matter of public record that I am an evangelical Christian. I have publicly defended the complete trustworthiness and inerrancy of Scripture; but my comments in The End of Christianity led some to believe otherwise. The purpose of my recent statement was to make it clear that I believe in Read More ›

Cornell Geneticist John Sanford argued that Darwinism is wrong because the rate of genetic deterioration is so high that natural selection could not arrest it. If natural selection cannot arrest genetic deterioration, how then could it be the mechanism for evolutionary improvement? Sanford predicted through his research that human genome is deteriorating. This was a daring scientific prediction, and now Michael Lynch of the elite National Academy published on the topic for his inaugural paper. The NAS has now made the paper available to the public free of charge. Read it, and weep, literally: Rate, Molecular Spectrum, and Consequences of Human Mutation Unfortunately, it has become increasingly clear that most of the mutation load is associated with mutations with very Read More ›

A friend advises me that the Creation Museum in Kentucky disturbs some visitors, according to LiveScience. Its sponsors chose to respond by defending their beliefs.

It seems to me that there is a larger principle at stake here. People can have a private museum on their own land about whatever interests them. I could have a museum featuring heritage tomatoes, if I wanted to, on land that I own. Assuming I charged admission or was selling seeds, a question might arise whether it is for profit or not for profit. But that is an administrative issue.

I knew that this was part of a growing culture war when I heard that the fact that the museum ‘disturbs’ some is supposedly important.

I told my friend, who supports the museum’s cause: You don’t need to defend your beliefs. Defend your right to have a private museum. It doesn’t become someone’s business to interfere just because they disagree, and have friends in influential places. Period.

I strongly recommend Jonah Goldberg’s book, Liberal Fascism, for orientation in this area.

I summarize his key findings here. Read More ›

An interesting conference bringing together ID proponents and theistic evolutionists is coming up in Austin this October:  The Vibrant Dance of Faith and Science (http://vibrantdance.org). The organizers are hoping to bring unity to the science-faith debate: Our Mission is to inspire, educate, and unify pastors, scientists, Christian leaders, and concerned lay people, as well as seekers and skeptics, with the growing congruence of scientific discovery with our Christian faith and to explore the implications and applications of that congruence. The key word here is CONGRUENCE. The problem is that ID theorists and theistic evolutionists see such congruence in very different terms. For ID theorists who are also Christians (some are not), evidence of design in nature mirrors the faith claim that God by wisdom created Read More ›

I did an interview recently with the Sceptics’ Society of Birmingham (UK) on the relationship between science and religion, which may be of interest to people here. The interview was conducted over Skype, which explains some of the alien sounds, especially from my end, even though my interlocutor and I were separated by a mere 20 miles. What struck me most about this quite genial interview is the lack of scepticism that today’s self-avowed ‘sceptics’ have towards the scientific establishment. Indeed, they have a rhetorical strategy for deflecting this point. So, if you listen to the whole interview, you’ll hear that my interlocutor periodically draws a strange distinction between ‘intelligent’ and ‘rational’ — as in ‘I grant that anti-evolutionists are Read More ›

This is the title of an opinion piece that appears in the latest issue of the liberal-left weekly UK magazine, New Statesman. It is written by Michael Reiss, who 18 months ago was forced out of his position as director of communications at the Royal Society because he said that creationist and ID views should be treated critically but respectfully, when raised by students in science classes. (As you can see from the end of the piece, he is eminently qualified to speak on these matters.)  Reiss’ sacking has been perhaps the most public demonstration of an Expelled-like phenomenon in Britain to date. To this day, I am surprised at how little outrage it generated. I protested immediately at the Read More ›

[This is somewhat old news, but I think it is worthy of posting.]

Discovery Institute President Bruce Chapman reports:
Which Religious Sins Will Sink the Scientist

The Chief Scientist of the Israeli Ministry of Education, Dr. Gavriel Avital, is being called upon to resign because he has defied two religious doctrines. No, not Jewish doctrines, but secular doctrines of the “scientific consensus”, evolution and global warming.

Pharyngula reported on February 22, 2010The Don McLeroy of Israel
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Today’s Fox News website had this little story, entitled Climate Scientists Plan to Hit Back at Skeptics. In the article, Stanford University climate researcher Paul R. Ehrlich had this to say about global warming skeptics:

“Most of our colleagues don’t seem to grasp that we’re not in a gentlepersons’ debate, we’re in a street fight against well-funded, merciless enemies who play by entirely different rules,” Paul R. Ehrlich, a Stanford University researcher, said in one of the e-mails.

Its worth noting Ehrlich’s use of the phrase “merciless enemies”. In other words, challenge the preferred dogma, and you’re not just ignorant – you’re an enemy, and thus, by extension, deserving of any and all ad hominem attacks hurled your way. One can almost hear “let me assure you, we haf vays to make you accept the dogma!” Read More ›

In this thread, I will suggest the identity of Intelligent Designer of life. The question of the identity of the Intelligent Designer is outside of ID proper, but if a design is detected, it inspires the question, “who is the Designer?”

If the identity of the Intelligent Designer is outside of ID proper, is it outside the speculations of science? I think not. As Dawkins himself once remarked:

You then realize that the presence of a creative deity in the universe is clearly a scientific hypothesis. Indeed, it is hard to imagine a more momentous hypothesis in all of science.

Richard Dawkins
as reported in Dawkins on the Discovery Institute Payroll?

In that spirit, rather than offer a theological speculation, I will offer a speculation based on inference from scientific observation. And I will argue scientific observation suggests the Intelligent Designer is a Deity of some sort.

To begin, I point out this essay in the prestigious scientific journal Nature in 2005 by physicist Richard Conn Henry:

“The ultimate cause of atheism, Newton asserted, is ‘this notion of bodies having, as it were, a complete, absolute and independent reality in themselves.’”
…
The 1925 discovery of quantum mechanics solved the problem of the Universe’s nature. Bright physicists were again led to believe the unbelievable — this time, that the Universe is mental.
…
According to Sir James Jeans: “the stream of knowledge is heading towards a non-mechanical reality; the Universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine. Mind no longer appears to be an accidental intruder into the realm of matter…we ought rather hail it as the creator and governor of the realm of matter.”
….
The Universe is immaterial — mental and spiritual.

Richard Conn Henry
The Mental Universe: Nature Volume 436

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In case we haven’t mentioned it previously at UD, I thought today would be a good day to remember Robert Jastrow, one of the stars of the pro-ID movie Privileged Planet.

Jastrow passed away February 8, 2008, a little more than two years ago today. He was the founding director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and author of the celebrated ID-sympathetic book: God and the Astronomers (available at www.ARN.org).

Now we see how the astronomical evidence leads to a biblical view of the origin of the world…
The details differ, but the essential elements in the astronomical and biblical accounts in Genesis are the same: the chain of events leading up to man commenced suddenly and sharply at a definite moment in time, in a flash of light and energy.

Robert Jastrow
God and the Astronomers

Here is the tribute written in the NY Times:
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Premier Radio, one of the UK’s leading Christian radio stations, has been featuring several interviews/debates in recent weeks on matters related to ID, some of which have been flagged here and here. The most recent one bears the title of this post and was aired last weekend (6th Feb), in which I debated the question with the historian Thomas Dixon, who basically holds that while we may have needed God to do science, we don’t need the deity anymore. My own view is that if we mean by ‘science’ something more than simply the pursuit of instrumental knowledge, then that quest still doesn’t make much sense without the relevant (Abrahamic) theological backdrop.  I continue this line of argument in a Read More ›