Culture

Denton Bible Church, in Denton, TX, will be hosting the “2010 On Guard Christian Apologetics Conference” on November the 5th and 6th.

Denton Bible Church is delighted to bring a powerhouse group of speakers to the Dallas/Fort Worth/Denton area for this year’s apologetics conference entitled, “On Guard: Defending Your Faith with Reason and Precision.” The name of this year’s conference is taken from the title of one of William Lane Craig’s newest books addressing the subject of apologetics in the local church. We have invited some of the greatest defenders of the Christian faith to speak at this year’s conference on a wide variety of subjects including the historical reliability of the New Testament, the evidence for the resurrection, scientific challenges to the theory of Evolution, and the battle of Worldviews.

Speakers include William Lane Craig, J. P. Moreland, Sean McDowell, Paul Nelson (whose address is titled “The Power and Promise of Intelligent Design in Biology”), Mike Licona, Craig Hazen,  and others.

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The stench of non-science coming out of ScienceBlogs.com has gotten so bad that it has drawn the attention of the New York Times! See: Unnatural Science. It would appear that the opponents of ID must resort to means other than science to challenge the hypothesis of Intelligent Design. Rather than appeals to evidence, the foes of ID resort, in the words of NY Times, to “class warfare”.

Over at Pharyngula — which often ranks in the Top 100 blogs on the Internet— PZ Myers revels in sub-“South Park” blasphemy, presenting (in one recent stunt) his sketch of the Prophet Muhammad as a cow-pig hybrid excited about “raping a 9-year-old girl.”
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Though Myers and other science bloggers boast that they can be jerky in the service of anti-charlatanism, that’s not what’s bothersome about them. What’s bothersome is that the site is misleading. It’s not science by scientists, not even remotely; it’s science blogging by science bloggers. And science blogging, apparently, is a form of redundant and effortfully incendiary rhetoric that draws bad-faith moral authority from the word “science” and from occasional invocations of “peer-reviewed” thises and thats.
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Marilynne Robinson, one of College Crunch’s 20 most brilliant Christian professors, has a new book in which she takes on Darwinism: Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self. This book is based on Robinson’s Terry Lectures at Yale (see here). David Bentley Hart’ review of her book (see here) begins as follows: The chief purpose of Absence of Mind — the published version of Marilynne Robinson’s splendid Terry Lectures, delivered at Yale in 2009 — is to raise a protest against all those modern, reductively materialist accounts of human consciousness that systematically exclude the testimony of subjectivity, of inner experience, from their understanding of the sources and impulses of the mind. Its targets Read More ›

Casey Luskin reports : Nature Immunology Editorial Botches American Law and Science Education

May, 2010 editorial in Nature Immunology makes it clear that they don’t trust religious persons–even those who are neo-Darwinian evolutionists like Francis Collins–in positions of scientific authority. The editorial (written by the journal’s editors) states:

The openly religious stance of the NIH director [Francis Collins] could have undesirable effects on science education in the United States. … In the introduction and in interviews surrounding [Collins’] book release, he describes his belief in a non-natural, non-measurable, improvable deity that created the universe and its laws with humans as the ultimate aim of its creation. Some might worry that describing scientists as workers toiling to understand the laws and intricacies of this divine creation will create opportunities for creationism adepts.
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Strikingly, despite being a world leader in science, the United States still struggles when it comes to scientific education. Creationism is creeping back into the science curricula of public schools. And although intelligent design, the latest form of creationism, suffered a major defeat in the 2005 Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District trial (Nat. Immunol. 7, 433–435, 2006), when the US Supreme Court ruled that including it in science curricula is unconstitutional, creationists are making a comeback.

(“Of faith and reason,” Nature Immunology, Vol. 11(5):357 (May 2010).)

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A friend directed me to this fun little article from the Jewish World Review. I’m not a regular reader of JWR, so missed this wonderful little piece from Paul Greenberg, in which he recalls the Sokal Hoax of 1996. For those not familiar with it, the Sokal Hoax was an article written by Professor Alan Sokal, a professor of Physics at New York University and submitted to a not too widely followed academic journal called Social Text as part of a series on Science wars. The article was entitled Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,( Social Text, Spring/Summer 1996), and was, according to Greenberg, Read More ›

As followers of this controversy will remember from previous posts, the California Science Center (CSC) denied screening of Illustra Media’s film Darwin’s Dilemma: The Mystery of the Cambrian Fossil Record.  A lawsuit ensued, in which the California Science Center was sued to disclose documentation, of which they are legally bound under the Public Records Act to disclose, in an attempt to discover what provoked the obvious discrimination. The outcome of the suit is that the CSC has to disclose the documentation and pay the attorney’s fees of the Discovery Institute.  Here is a short podcast from the Discovery Institute on the matter:

California Science Center to Pay Attorneys’ Fees and Sett…

Intelligent Design The Future

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World renowned physicist Stephen Hawking says “science will win” in a recent interview with ABC news’ Diane Sawyer. From the interview:

But exploring the origins of time inevitably leads to questions about the ultimate origins of everything and what, if anything, is behind it all.

“What could define God [is thinking of God] as the embodiment of the laws of nature. However, this is not what most people would think of that God,” Hawking told Sawyer. “They made a human-like being with whom one can have a personal relationship. When you look at the vast size of the universe and how insignificant an accidental human life is in it, that seems most impossible.”

When Sawyer asked if there was a way to reconcile religion and science, Hawking said, “There is a fundamental difference between religion, which is based on authority, [and] science, which is based on observation and reason. Science will win because it works.”

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Michael Ruse decides that Darwin had no impact on Hitler in this piece.  He decides that Hitler couldn’t have been influenced by Darwin, because Darwin would have been appalled by Hitler.

Finally, when you turn to Hitler himself, the story is murky. To put the matter politely, he was not a well-educated man. There is no evidence he studied Darwin’s writings or much about them. At most, he was picking stuff up off the street or from the barroom or from the doss house where he lived in Vienna before the War. And when you look at Mein Kampf in more detail, the story seems less straightforward. Just before the apparently Darwinian sentiments quoted above, [“Those who want to live, let them fight, and those who do not want to fight in this world of eternal struggle do not deserve to live.”] he wrote: “All great cultures of the past perished only because the originally creative race died out from blood poisoning.” What he is really on about is the Jews. Darwin would have been appalled at such a connection.

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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 ›

Biologos has a review of William Dembski’s new book The End of Christianity: Finding a Good God in an Evil World by Stephen Ashley Blake, with an introduction by Darrel Falk.

From Falk’s introduction:

My theological background is Wesleyan. Theological scholars in the Wesleyan tradition are rarely troubled by death before the Fall. It’s a non-issue for most Wesleyans, but it is an issue for many evangelicals. In fact, this one concept may be the most significant barrier blocking many evangelicals from accepting an old earth and coming to grips with the reality of evolution. Dembski, in this book, leaves the realm of math and biology. This time he dons his theological hat and lays out a view that ought to generate much conversation among those troubled by death before the Fall.

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Premier Radio’s program “Unbelievable?” with Justin Brierley has hosted a discussion with Oxford mathematician John Lennox and astrophysicist Paul Davies concerning topics from Intelligent Design to extra-terrestrial life, and what the broader philosophical and theological implications are for each. A popular science author, Davies is also the Chair of the SETI post detection task force. His latest book “The Eerie Silence” which marks SETI’s 50th anniversary examines the likelihood of the universe producing life elsewhere. John Lennox is a Christian Mathematician and philosopher. He is the author of “God’s Undertaker: has science buried God?” and has debated Richard Dawkins on several occasions. Davies’ work on the fine tuning of the universe for life has been sympathetic to theism. In this Read More ›

The Discovery Institute is having their annual Summer Seminar on Intelligent Design in Seattle Washington this summer from July 9 – 17th, 2010:

The Center for Science and Culture at Discovery Institute announces an extraordinary opportunity for college students in the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities to participate in an intensive nine-day seminar that will prepare them to make research contributions advancing the growing science of intelligent design (ID).

Intelligent Design in the Natural Sciences is designed for college-level juniors, seniors, and first-year graduate students who intend to pursue graduate studies in the natural sciences or the philosophy of science.

Intelligent Design in the Social Sciences and Humanities is designed for college-level juniors, seniors, and first-year graduate students who intend to pursue graduate studies in the social sciences (including law) or the humanities (including theology).

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For those of you who don’t know, TED is a convention of (usually) world-class thinkers who each give a 15-minute talk about a subject. Many of the people in TED are thought leaders. Some of them, however, get in merely because they have written a popular or controversial book. In one of this year’s TED talks, Sam Harris demonstrated that he has no grasp on the basic concepts of either philosophy or ethics.
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The Templeton Prize used to encourage progress in religion. Truly impressive people like Mother Teresa, Billy Graham, Stanley Jaki, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn once received this prize (go here for past winners). In the last decade, however, the Prize has been continually given to people inhabiting the Templeton Foundation’s inner circle, who promise to keep contemporary science inviolate and make sure that religion keeps its hands off. With Francisco Ayala’s receipt of the prize yesterday, the pattern continues. Ayala is as thorough-going a Darwinist as one will find. According to him, science and religion reside in air-tight compartments. So much for a fruitful dialogue between science and religion. The New Scientist appreciates the point: Templeton prize is bad news for religion, not Read More ›

A debate which took place last month at the Imperial College of London concerning the documentary film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed (following a screening of the film) is available for your perusal here. Film Screening and Debate Details: “Unbelievable?”, a  Premier Christian Radio program (hosted by Justin Brierly), screened the film at Imperial College London, February, 2010. Participants: Against the film: Atheist Prof Susan Blackmore (Psychology, Plymouth) & Theistic evolutionist Prof Keith Fox (Biology, Southampton). For the film: Prof Steve Fuller (Sociology, Warwick) & Dr. Alastair Noble (Former Inspector of Schools). Panellists on both sides of the ID debate give their reactions to the film’s claims that scientists are not free to question Darwinian evolution and the link the film Read More ›