Culture

Do doomsday scenarios bore and frustrate you? Here, in “The draw of doomsday: Why apocalypse aficionados look forward to the end, and how they hope to survive”, Stephanie Pappas (MSNBC News (5/17/20) observes,

Camping [Rev. Doomsday, tomorrow] has made this prediction before, in 1994 — it didn’t pan out — but the thousands of failed doomsday predictions throughout history are no match for what Lorenzo DiTommaso, a professor of religion at Concordia University in Montreal, calls the “apocalyptic worldview.””It’s a very persistent and potent way of understanding the world,” DiTommaso told LiveScience.

While religious doomsdays attract more ridicule, the growth area is secular doomsdays: Read More ›

The folk at Nature’s blog appear so anxious to get people to believe Darwinism dunit that some have resorted to making statements about the history of Christianity and science that are actually true. Get a load of this, from James Hannam, “Science owes much to both Christianity and the Middle Ages” (May 18, 2011): Read More ›

Jane Harris Zsovan, author of Eugenics and the Firewall talked to Uncommon Descent recently about her book on the controversial topic of social Darwinist eugenics in Western Canada in the mid-twentieth century.

Part I is here.

Denyse: You mentioned the silent American eugenics film The Black Stork (1917) (P. 16):

A young man and woman are considering marriage; eugenicist Harry J Haiselden warns that they are ill-matched and will produce defective offspring. He is right; their baby is born defective, dies quickly and floats into heaven.

Courtesy the Moral Uplift League in Baltimore. (Floats into heaven? Well, that gives an oomph to “uplift”, I guess.) Yes, I’d heard of that one, but long forgotten. Looked it up again. And, sure enough, here’s something, from a book called The Black Stork (Oxford, 1999) I’d never heard before – about the famed Helen Keller: Read More ›

They reveal the difference between “science” and science.

As a report on “science”, we offer “How many fields other than human evolution can cheerfully tolerate the following level of vagueness?”: Genetics researchers have discovered a shadowy, possible connection between certain genes and risk-taking tens of thousands of years ago.

From science by contrast, one expects rigor, not speculation based on a few possible pieces of evidence. Here’s why: Any reasonable person, with no knowledge of genetics and no specialized research, could replicate the findings reported in the linked story as follows: “Some people can accept more risk than others, and that sometimes seems to run in families. But you can’t rely on it.” And said reasonable person would be just as rigorous and accurate as the reported study.

That’s because “science,” at its best, doesn’t tell us more than common sense observation can. Linking its pretended discoveries to serious genetics is a frill.

And that’s at “science’s” best, mind! At its worst, “science” is the Bedrock of evolutionary psychology.

Science, by contrast, is about rigor and accuracy that potentially adds to our knowledge. For example, consider the recent post Read More ›

Here vjtorley cites the unspeakable Johansson case (Sweden), asking “Are secular humanism and freedom of thought ultimately incompatible?” The short answer is: Of course.

Secular humanism, as normally argued, denies the reality of the mind. On that, note this item at New Scientist on illusions, real and imagined*, which dramatically dismisses free will and just about everything else,

This might come as a shock, but everything you think is wrong. Much of what you take for granted about day-to-day existence is largely a figment of your imagination. From your senses to your memory, your opinions and beliefs, how you see yourself and others and even your sense of free will, things are not as they seem. The power these delusions hold over you is staggering, yet, as Graham Lawton discovers, they are vital to help you function in the world.

– Graham Lawton, “The grand delusion: Why nothing is as it seems” (16 May 2011)

The only freedom possible, if this folly were true – and the secular humanist believes it is – Read More ›

Apparently, “Satan” has noticed our interview with Nancy Pearcey, author of Saving Leonardo (here), and he is cheesed. He describes Uncommon Descent as “an equally dangerous blog.” Not for lack of trying, Yer Scorchership.

In “Why don’t we love our intellectuals?,” John Naughton (The Observer, 8 May 2011) exemplarily misses a critical distinction:

While France celebrates its intelligentsia, you have to go back to Orwell and Huxley to find British intellectuals at the heart of national public debate. Why did we stop caring about ideas? When did ‘braininess’ become a laughing matter?

Perhaps it happened about the time many people were well-informed enough to assess the results of listening to people who live by and for fashionable ideas.

Here, in his perception of modern Britain, the confusion becomes evident: Read More ›

In “The limits of knowledge: Things we’ll never understand” (New Scientist 09 May 2011), Michael Brooks offers to explain “From the machinery of life to the fate of the cosmos, what can’t science explain?”

We live in an age in which science enjoys remarkable success. We have mapped out a grand scheme of how the physical universe works on scales from quarks to galactic clusters, and of the living world from the molecular machinery of cells to the biosphere. There are gaps, of course, but many of them are narrowing. The scientific endeavour has proved remarkably fruitful, especially when you consider that our brains evolved for survival on the African savannah, not to ponder life, the universe and everything. So, having come this far, is there any stopping us?The answer has to be yes: there are limits to science. There are some things we can never know for sure because of the fundamental constraints of the physical world. Then there are the problems that we will probably never solve because of the way our brains work. And there may be equivalents to Rees’s observation about chimps and quantum mechanics – concepts that will forever lie beyond our ken.

So now we come up against the ultimate failure of materialism. Read More ›

… King David was a mythical figure. And don’t know this:

In “The Birth & Death of Biblical Minimalism” (Biblical Archaeology Review, May/Jun 2011), Yosef Garfinkel notes,

In the mid-1980s the principal argument involved the dating of the final writing of the text of the Hebrew Bible. The minimalist school claimed then that it had been written only in the Hellenistic period, nearly 700 years after the time of David and Solomon, and that the Biblical descriptions were therefore purely literary.

[ … ]

For the minimalists, King David was “about as historical as King Arthur.”  The name David had never been found in an ancient inscription.

Hardly had the minimalist argument been developed than it was profoundly undermined by Read More ›

For one thing, “The end is far” is “science^TM,” not “religion^TM.”

Here, The Atlantic‘s Graeme Wood reports on “What will happen to us?: Forecasters tackle the extremely deep future” (Boston Globe, May 1, 2011), featuring recent Templeton winner Martin Rees and others on deep and distant futures, the theory being that it is now possible to be much more certain of the distant future than in the past:

The community of thinkers on distant-future questions stretches across disciplinary bounds, with the primary uniting trait a willingness to think about the future as a topic for objective study, rather than a space for idle speculation or science fictional reverie. They include theoretical cosmologists like Sean Carroll of the California Institute of Technology, who recently wrote a book about time, and nonacademic technology mavens like Ray Kurzweil, the precocious inventor and theorist. What binds this group together is that they are not, says Bostrom, “just trying to tell an interesting story.” Instead, they aim for precision. In its fundamentals, Carroll points out, the universe is a “relatively simple system,” compared, say, to a chaotic system like a human body — and thus “predicting the future is actually a feasible task,” even “for ridiculously long time periods.”

Past is past now …  Read More ›

Marvin Olasky of World Magazine interviews Robert Sloan, the Baylor prez who recruited the ID folk at the Polanski Centrer and ended up having to leave (that was one of many disconnects between him and the post-Baptist culture at Baylor) You created the Polanyi Center for the Study of Intelligent Design. That became controversial: Why? We brought a couple very fine scholars to be there, but immediately they encountered much opposition by the neo-Darwinians.  What objections were there to Intelligent Design at an ostensibly Christian university? I don’t think there was a good objection. Critics said you’re going to embarrass us professionally, everyone knows evolution is true, and who are these people but a bunch of seven-day creationists? The list Read More ›

Here’s a discussion at New Scientist on proportional representation vs. “first past the post”: Can mathematics help? On 5 May, the UK will hold a referendum to determine which voting system the country should use in future elections, with voters asked to decide whether they want to adopt the alternative vote (AV) or stick with the first-past-the-post (FPTP) system, which is currently used. Can mathematics tell us which system is the most fair?[ … ] Highlighting a more radical solution is David Maclver, a software engineer with a background in mathematics. In 1963 economist Kenneth Arrow proved that no voting system can satisfy a few reasonable and democratic conditions – in other words, democracy is always unfair. MacIver points out Read More ›

Yes, Nancy, fishing for a reaction here: I hope your book does well, but feel continually frustrated by the shallowness of current Christian culture. I didn’t think it was possible to be shallower than secular pop psychology, but Christian bookstores prove me wrong, time and again. I kid you not, I can’t stand even going into a Christian bookstore, even on business. Rows of books on Christian weight loss … I mean, we used to have a discipline called fasting, which is why people didn’t bother with Christian weight loss. Yes, there are a few thoughtful books like yours, but I find it a trial foraging my way through the Christian bookstore to find them.

A more sinister aspect to all this is that “new atheist” books are bestsellers, while the Christian is reading … Armageddon fantasies? Why is that sinister? Because, so far as I can see, the new atheists are a highly illiberal movement, and they tend to regard tolerance as the Islamist does: not as a solution but a problem. Look at Dawkins’s simple inability to understand that astronomer Martin Gaskell had been, put plainly, wronged. Because new atheists hate Christians more than they hate anyone else, the Christian may wake up from his potboiler to discover an actual Armageddon, perpetrated through the political and justice systems. Indeed, in some places it’s starting to happen now: It’s one thing Islamists and new atheists can agree on.

But don’t we sort of have it coming, when we choose escape into shallowness? Will any remedy actually work? Over to you: Read More ›

(Schaeffer has been called “the last ” great modern theologian,” who “strongly argued for rationalism in apologetics.” – d.)

His response to scientific questions was summed up in one phrase: No final conflict. If Scripture is revelation from God, then it must be true. And therefore it will be consistent with the truths discovered by human reason and scientific investigation.

At various points in history, the two may be appear to be in conflict. But in that case, either our interpretation of Scripture is mistaken or our interpretation of the facts is mistaken. There can be no final conflict.

The reason this is important is that, as we noted above, many evangelicals are now following the path taken by theological liberals. The fact/value split helps us understand what’s at stake. Liberals agree with secular critics that Scripture is historically and scientifically false and full of errors. In others words, they are willing to give up the realm of facts. Then they hope to maintain Christianity as spiritually meaningful in the realm of values.

For example, in USA Today a rabbi writing about evolution writes, Read More ›

(It’s like saying “You can have a life-saving treatment anda 100 kg pile of hardened cement chained to your neck too!”

Way back when, Nancy, you wrote a piece for Christianity Today on design, one of several that set me thinking about all these issues.

But I got the feeling that Christianity Today has now backed off somewhat in favour of “Jesus n’ Darwin n’ us more evolved ones.” Is this fair on my part? If so, what happened?)

Theistic evolution has been around long before Darwin. Once again, the key thinker was Hegel. He taught a kind of progressive pantheism, in which God was the soul of the world, evolving along with it. As a result, many Romantics embraced a spiritualized form of evolution.

This explains, says historian John Herman Randall, why Darwin’s biological evolution was welcomed so quickly when it first appeared in 1859—not so much by scientists but by thinkers in fields like history, philosophy, theology, and the social sciences.

It also explains, Randall adds, “why they pretty uniformly misunderstood him . . . and why they failed to see the real significance of his thought.” That is, they thought they could use Darwin to support their own spiritualized version of evolution, failing to see that what he was proposing was a completely materialist version.

Perhaps they did not want to see it. Read More ›