Culture

I would like to encourage ID supporters that can attend a conference in Boston’s North Shore this summer to attend the following conference being offered by Biologos: BioLogos-Gordon College Conference 2010: “A Dialog on Creation” The BioLogos Foundation will offer summer courses in science-and-religion starting in the summer of 2010. These courses provide short 1–3 week overviews of the key ideas in developing a sophisticated and mature understanding of life’s origins in an explicitly Christian context. Participants will have the opportunity to interact with leaders in the field of science-and-religion who will lead discussions of these core concepts. The BioLogos-Gordon workshop provides a unique opportunity to explore questions at the intersection of science & faith. In this inaugural BioLogos workshop, Read More ›

Some say that journals should be more open to controversial subjects, while their peers disagree. If these two groups were to start a peer reviewed journal consisting of what ought to comprise the peer review process, it would never get off the ground, due entirely to peer disagreement. In this case it is two people and their respective advisory boards that disagree. The journal Medical Hypotheses has an editor named Bruce G. Charlton, who consults, on occasion, an editorial advisory board as to what should be published in the journal and what shouldn’t. His point of view is that he is a chooser, not a changer, as to what journal entries are to be published. He doesn’t re-write the song after it’s been recorded, he only decided whether it should be played on the air. This isn’t satisfactory to Elsevier, who has asked Charlton to either resign immediately or implement a series of changes, including a traditional peer-review system, according to this article at The Scientist.com.

In addition to instituting a peer-review system, an external advisory board assembled by Elsevier also recommends that articles on controversial subjects, such as any that support racism, not be considered for publication.

The journal’s editor-in-chief Bruce Charlton told The Scientist that such changes are “vehemently opposed” by the editorial advisory board, as well as at least 150 scientists who have published in the journal.

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[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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Will Provine is scheduled to do two debates at Grace Community Church. The first debate will be March 12th, and the second March 13th.

Description:

DEBATE 002: “Flight in birds and bats: Is evolution or creation the best guide?”

(Provine vs. McIntosh)

Birds and bats have very specialized characteristics that make the phenomena of flight possible. What is the ultimate source of those physical characteristics? Is naturalistic evolution the best guide for understanding flight, or does flight indicate the design of a Creator?

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Dr. Dawkins would be happy to debate a bishop, cardinal, Pope, but he won’t debate creationists. What does he think that bishops, cardinals, and Popes are? They are overwhelmingly creationists. And he does debate creation in his books, he just won’t do it in person with the object of his debate in the form of an actual person in William Lane Craig. His word processor doesn’t talk back when he debates creation in writing his books. But He did debate John Lennox, who is, at least, an advocate of Intelligent Design (which he considers to be another form of creation).
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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 ›

I’m trying to determine which Christian faculty would be regarded as absolutely tops in their respective disciplines but which would also be completely up front about their Christian worldview. Who would be on your top ten list? Of those on the list, how many would be supporters of or at least sympathetic to ID? Please think objectively about these questions. ID is a hot button topic. Leave aside UD’s bias in favor of ID. Please limit your candidates to English-speaking countries. Thanks.

Richard Dawkins, so he says, wants to improve the forums on his website by implementing some new changes. He wants to keep it “scientific” and “rational”. The forums had, apparently, become a safe haven for Darwinians and atheists to post whatever uninteresting and vile subject matter their atheistic and Darwinian philosophy saw fit. So Dawkins posted a letter announcing the changes to the forums:

Starting a new discussion will require approval, so we ask that you only submit new discussions that are truly relevant to reason and science. Subsequent responses on the thread will not need approval—however anything off topic or violating the new terms of service will be removed…We know some of you will be against this change. We ask that you respect our decision and help make this transition as smooth as possible.

The reaction he received from some of his own Darwinian and atheistic followers was heinous, so he responded:

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Jeffrey Dahmer: “If it all happens naturalistically, what’s the need for a God? Can’t I set my own rules? Who owns me? I own myself.” [Biography, “Jeffrey Dahmer: The Monster Within,” A&E, 1996.] Naturalists like to stress that you don’t need God or religion to be good. Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins even suggest that leaving God out of the equation actually allows one to be more moral because then our moral acts are authentic, motivated by deep conviction rather than by having a divine gun to our heads. Even so, Dahmer’s logic is compelling. We need some external reference point — God — to justify being good. And that justification is significant in its own right. Without it, we can still Read More ›

Michael Ruse is not happy with Jerry Fodor’s new book (described here at UD). As Ruse begins his review in the Boston Globe: “What Darwin Got Wrong is an intensely irritating book….” . Here is the conclusion of Ruse’s review: The Darwinian does not want to say that the world is designed. That is what the Intelligent Design crew argues. The Darwinian is using a metaphor to understand the material nonthinking world. We treat that world as if it were an object of design, because doing so is tremendously valuable heuristically. And the use of metaphor is a commonplace in science. Why then do we have these arguments? The clue is given at the end, when the authors start to Read More ›

Today is the closing day of “Evolution Weekend”. The weekend is promoted by The clergy letter project. This is a weekend dedicated to glorifying Darwinism in churches.

Curiously one of the scientists on call to help clergy and parishioners promote the glories of Darwinism was Amy Bishop, she is listed here:

Name: Amy Bishop, Ph.D.
Title: Associate Professor
Address: Department of Biological Sciences
University of Alabama in Huntsville
Huntsville, AL 35899
Areas of Expertise: neuroscience, molecular biology, genetics, evolution of the human brain
Email: ——-@uah.edu

Amy Bishop was charged in the murder of several people recently. Now, there are some very fine Darwinists like Francis Collins, and I don’t mean to say Amy Bishop is representative of all Darwinists. But I’d recommend that if the Clergy Letter Project wishes to put on a good face for Darwinism, they might consider disassociating themselves from Amy Bishop.

They may not want to promote “survival of the fittest” in their sermons today. That would be kind of poor taste in light of the fact a presumed societal degenerate (Bishop) is the “fittest” survivor while 3 (possibly 4) innocent victims are the “unfit” dead. Think I’m overstating the case against Darwinism? Consider what Evolutionary Psychologist David Buss argues in his book The Murderer Next Door: Why the Mind Is Designed to Kill

murder is the product of evolutionary forces and that the homicidal act, in evolutionary terms, conveys advantages to the killer.

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I’d like to critique Jason Rosenhouse’s critique of Stephen Barr’s critique of ID. I know, round and round we go, where we stop, no one knows. Rosenhouse appreciates the first paragraph of Barr’s analysis, but is disappointed with the rest. I am disappointed with it all. But Rosenhouse does make a few good points in taking stock of the ID movement’s influence with the public:

I hope he is right about no one being moved toward religious belief by ID writing, but I do not think he is. The ID folks are tapping into deep intuitions people have that complex, functioning structures do not arise from natural, non-intelligent causes. Many are already uncomfortable with the naturalism of modern science and see evolution as dehumanizing and implausible. They like the idea that modern science can provide some rational support for theism. My experiences at ID gatherings suggest to me that an awful lot of people are being led just where they want to go. Certainly the public opinion polls show a great deal of sympathy for ID, to the point of wanting it taught next to evolution in science classes.

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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 ›

Check it out here. Scientific hubris, especially with Climategate and evolution, has reached a breaking point. I expect the corruption of science will find increasing exposure in coming days. ———————————————- Issue highlights include: “What do scientists know?” by Joseph Farah, on the difference between a scientific consensus and a political one “History of climate gets ‘erased’ online” by Chelsea Schilling, exposing the scientist who has altered more than 5,000 Wikipedia entries to hype the global-warming agenda “Politicizing science” by Thomas Sowell, who warns that when government gets involved, “do not expect the disinterested search for truth” “Science bulletin: ‘Sun heats Earth!’” by Jerome R. Corsi, who profiles the Russian scientist whose research forecasts global cooling “We’ve been had!” by Walter Read More ›

Whenever I hear the phrase “overwhelming evidence” or “overwhelming scientific evidence,” my antennae go up and I know that someone is trying to sell me something. Last night, if you were watching the networks, you heard the following remark: I know that there are those who disagree with the overwhelming scientific evidence on climate change. But even if you doubt the evidence, providing incentives for energy efficiency and clean energy are the right thing to do for our future — because the nation that leads the clean energy economy will be the nation that leads the global economy. I’d like to encourage people to post in the comments to this thread other examples where the phrase “overwhelming [scientific] evidence” is Read More ›