Culture

The title of this post is also the title of a recent book by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein. According to the website for The Edge Foundation,

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, known to Edge readers as a philosopher who has interesting things to say about Gödel and Spinoza, among others, enters into this conversation, taking on these and wider themes, and pushing the envelope by crossing over into the realm of fiction.

Goldstein isn’t the first novelist to appear on Edge, nor the first to discuss religion. In October 1989, the novelist Ken Kesey came to New York spoke to The Reality Club. “As I’ve often told Ginsberg,” he began, “you can’t blame the President for the state of the country, it’s always the poets’ fault. You can’t expect politicians to come up with a vision, they don’t have it in them. Poets have to come up with the vision and they have to turn it on so it sparks and catches hold.”

It’s in this spirit that Edge presents a brief excerpt from the first chapter, and the nonfiction appendix from 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein.

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There’s breaking news today about the Hadley CRU in England which had its emails and data banks hacked into. CRU is the acronym for ‘Climate Research Unit’. Seems that some of the emails show some possible collusion when it came to producing and supporting data that didn’t fit into GW science. Some interesting quotes. How about this one: “This was the danger of always criticising the skeptics for not publishing in the “peer-reviewed literature”. Obviously, they found a solution to that–take over a journal! So what do we do about this? I think we have to stop considering “Climate Research” as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit Read More ›

The phrase “Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement” sounds innocent enough. Who could be against such an agreement? But in fact it appears to be a pretext for a massive invasion of privacy, motivated in part by the entertainment industry seeking to maintain copyrights. But once unleashed, such an assault on freedom will know no bounds. What if Big Brother finds on your laptop that you think ID supports certain traditional moral views, and what if any articulation of such views comes to be regarded as a hate crime?

Jason Rosenhouse has written a blog about Michael Ruse and William Dembski. His complaint against Ruse, among other things, is that Ruse is too cordial, too civil with ID supporters, Dembski especially.

And while I may dislike and disagree with Ruse’s thinking, it is his actions over the last several years that I loathe and detest. I hate the way he has been doing everything in his power to prop up the ID folks. I hate that he persuaded a presitgious university press to publish a book co-edited by William Dembski, which featured four essays defending “Darwinism” that seemed tailor made to make evolution look bad. I hate that he contributes essays to anthologies designed to celebrate ID promoters and that he tells debate audiences that Dembski has made valuable contributions to science. Go here for relevant links and further details.

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| In THE DESIGN OF LIFE, Jonathan Wells and I describe E. O. Wilson’s attack on Mother Teresa as follows (the context of the discussion is that whereas traditional morality must come to terms with the problem of evil, evolutionary morality must come to terms with the problem of good): For E. O. Wilson, goodness depends on “lying, pretense, and deceit, including self-deceit, because the actor is most convincing who believes that his performance is real.” Accordingly, Wilson attributes Mother Teresa’s acts of goodness to her belief that she will be richly rewarded for them in heaven. In other words, she was simply looking out for number one, acting selfishly in her own self-interest, looking to cash in on the Read More ›

November 9, 2009 9:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. St. Pius V University (Rome) In Response to Pope Benedict XVI’s Call for Both Sides to be Heard The 150th anniversary of Darwin’s “Origin of the Species” in November 2009 will be the occasion for a unique conference at Pope Pius V University in Rome presenting a scientific refutation of evolution theory. According to Russian sedimentologist Alexander Lalamov, “Everything contained in Darwin’s Origin of Species depends upon rocks forming slowly over enormous periods of time. The November conference demonstrates with empirical data that such geological time is not available for evolution.” Recently returned from a ground-breaking geological conference in Kazan, sedimentologist Guy Berthault will present the findings of several sedimentological studies conducted Read More ›

Paul L. Williams is a name I first heard two years ago when I saw him interviewed on television about terrorist ambitions to create havoc in the United States. I hoped that he was exaggerating the threats, but after following some of his leads and reading two of his books I concluded that he was at least 90 percent correct and needed to be taken seriously. Nuclear-Biological-Chemical terrorism has been an interest of mine over the years. The first book I read that addressed this topic was TERRORISM: HOW THE WEST CAN WIN (1986), edited by then Israeli representative to the U.N. Benjamin Netanyahu (it seems I’ve heard his name since then). The essay by Alan Cranston in it, “The Nuclear Terrorist State,” still sounds surprisingly relevant to our present situation: “Does anyone doubt that if the Shah of Iran had succeeded in developing a full-fledged nuclear program in Iran, the Ayatollah Khomeini would have used a nuclear weapon against Iraq? Does anyone now doubt that if Iraq had been permitted to make swift progress toward a nuclear-weapons capability, Saddam Hussein would have used a nuclear bomb against Iran? Or that either of them might have resorted subsequently to a nuclear strike in a jihad, a ‘holy war,’ against Israel?” (pp. 177-78)

Williams’ interview and books were in this vein, sounding a warning siren, along with many others, that the terrorist threats likely to materialize in the future promise to dwarf anything we’ve seen in the past. It’s one reason that, last I checked, survivalist James Wesley Rawles’ HOW TO SURVIVE THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT: TACTICS, TECHNIQUES AND TECHNOLOGIES FOR UNCERTAIN TIMES was doing better on Amazon.com than Richard Dawkins’ THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH: THE EVIDENCE FOR EVOLUTION (other reasons no doubt include that Dawkins’ book is sheer dreck from the standpoint of current evolutionary theory — see here). In any case, after a brief email exchange with Williams two years ago, I didn’t expect to hear much about him again except as a modern-day Cassandra, whose predictions would be ignored until too late. It was therefore with some dismay that I saw him appear in the press on a matter at once related and yet quite different.

Williams works as a journalist and it’s in this capacity that he is being forced, as an American citizen, to submit to a lawsuit in Canada. Specifically, for charging McMaster University with abetting terrorists and allowing radioactive materials to be stolen, McMaster is suing him for millions of dollars. How could he be tried in a Canadian court given that he broke no U.S. law and did everything that McMaster University is upset about on U.S. soil? Read More ›

This book retails for $79.95 and Amazon sells it for $57.78. But the best price online to purchase it is at the Human Events Book Service (go here), where you can get it for $34.95. I highly recommend Weikart’s latest. Darwinists continually try to deny or change the subject that Darwin’s theory deeply influenced the Nazis. Accordingly, what the Nazis did is supposed to constitute a profanation of tried-and-true pure Darwinism. But the flow of ideas from one to the other is clear. To be sure, Darwinism is not a sufficient condition for Nazism, but it certainly was a necessary one.

I was just listening to Rush Limbaugh (I trust this radio preference of mine will make it quickly into my Wikipedia entry but that my work with the Evolutionary Informatics Lab will continue to be ignored there; by the way, I also enjoy reading Camille Paglia). In any case, Rush read portions of an article at The American Thinker by fellow mathematician Ron Lipsman, who has given up his senior deanship at the big University of Maryland campus so that he can speak his mind more fully. He remains on as a professor there. The article speaks at many levels to the opposition that ID faces from the cultural elite. Here’s a sample: …The liberal hegemony exists in many quarters Read More ›

You’ve got to wonder what an organization that touts itself for critical thinking is thinking when it sponsors a BLASPHEMY CONTEST: Since Darwin is their god, it would be interesting to submit to this contest true statements about Darwin’s less than divine attributes.

In light of Judge Jones coming to Southern Methodist University today and tomorrow, for what seems to be an unbalanced discussion of ID, I thought I would add some clarity to the affair with these remarks by Nick Smyth  from the blog 3quarksdaily pertaining to Jones’s poor reasoning in his 2005 Kitzmiller decision as to what constitutes science: For any formal definition of science, it either excludes too much, or includes too much, or both. It is enough to say that today, even those writing anti-pseudoscience manifestos concede that it is not possible to give a complete definition of what constitutes science or pseudoscience. Rather, they tend to revert to weak, vague and totally indefensible “ballpark” definitions that are designed Read More ›

Norman Borlaug, an American hero, died this past Saturday at the age of 95. The Wall Street Journal has an article giving some light on his illustrious and incredible life: Born in 1914 in rural Cresco, Iowa, where he was educated in a one-room schoolhouse, Borlaug won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for his work ending the India-Pakistan food shortage of the mid-1960s. He spent most of his life in impoverished nations, patiently teaching poor farmers in India, Mexico, South America, Africa and elsewhere the Green Revolution agricultural techniques that have prevented the global famines widely predicted when the world population began to skyrocket following World War II. In 1999, the Atlantic Monthly estimated that Borlaug’s efforts combined with Read More ›

In the Darwinism debates, ‘peer review’ is often invoked as a panacea – quite mistakenly, since these debates presuppose a much more free-ranging intellectual universe than the one in which peer review is effective. By ‘peer review’ I mean the process by which colleagues in the field to which one aspires to contribute vet articles before they are published. To be sure, peer review has its uses. It catches obvious errors of fact, curbs overstretched inferences and enables an author to phrase things so that the intended message is received properly.

In other words, peer review is a kind of specialist editing – full stop. It is not the mechanism by which disputes concerning overarching explanatory frameworks are usefully settled, since these typically involve judgements about the relative weighting given to various bodies of evidence that one would explain in a common fashion. Substantial disagreements over such judgements typically have less to do with factual issues than deeper, philosophical ones about what a field is ultimately about.

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Every Friday, the BBC-TV’s flagship public affairs programme, Newsnight, broadcasts ‘Newsnight Review’, which covers the week’s worth of cultural events. This week’s was devoted to Things Darwin-ish. The panel consisted of Richard Dawkins, the Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood (whose latest book, The Year of the Flood, is about an Ultra-Green cult that, amongst other things, turns the sociobiologist and biodiversity guru E.O. Wilson into a saint), the poet Ruth Padel (who happens to be a descendant of Darwin’s) and the writer on religious and cultural affairs, the Rev. Richard Coles (who was half of the 1980s synth-pop group, Communards). As I’m writing this, I realize just how ‘postmodern’ Britain must seem to people who don’t live in this country. To me, this line-up looks pretty normal.

I want simply to highlight some remarks that were made on this programme because it gives you a sense of how well-behaved cultured liberals understand Darwin’s significance.

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