Culture

Congressman Pete Stark is an MIT and Berkeley graduate as well as a former banker. He regards himself as an expert on economics and is one of the main guiding forces behind ObamaCare. This interview demonstrates the perverse effect on one’s thinking of residing too long in a fevered swamp, in this case, Washington DC. His unbridled contempt for Jan Helfeld reminds me of the Darwinists’ contempt for lay people when they ask simple probing questions about their theory. Darwinism has a similar addling effect on even the best-educated minds. It too is a fevered swamp. SOURCE

Hunter Baker, formerly a colleague of mine at Baylor and now associate provost at Houston Baptist University, has just published a book with Crossway titled THE END OF SECULARISM (go here for the Amazon.com listing). It provides a far-sweeping historical analysis of secularism within western culture. His critique of secularism is solid: Secularism is not neutral, nor is it something that simply happened thanks to the growing maturity and rationality of human beings. It is an understandable reaction to the various tragedies of church-state alliances in Western history. It is not, however, necessarily more rational nor more harmonious than any number of alternatives. It cannot claim the authority of science. It cannot escape the need to look beyond materialism in Read More ›

Investor’s Business Daily posted an article relating Obama’s Healthcare Bill to the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE), the technocrats responsible for the U.K.’s health care.  The article states:

This administration, pledging to cut medical costs and for which “cost-effectiveness” is a new mantra, knows that a quarter of Medicare spending is made in a patient’s final year of life. Certainly the British were aware when they nationalized their medical system.

The controlling of medical costs in countries such as Britain through rationing, and the health consequences thereof are legendary. The stories of people dying on a waiting list or being denied altogether read like a horror movie script.

The U.K.’s National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) basically figures out who deserves treatment by using a cost-utility analysis based on the “quality adjusted life year.”

One year in perfect health gets you one point. Deductions are taken for blindness, for being in a wheelchair and so on.

The more points you have, the more your life is considered worth saving, and the likelier you are to get care.

The British are praised for spending half as much per capita on medical care. How they do it is another matter. The NICE people say that Britain cannot afford to spend $20,000 to extend a life by six months. So if care will cost $1 more, you get to curl up in a corner and die.

These NICE people bring to mind another technocratic group I’ve read about called the “National Institute of Coordinated Experiments (NICE)” in C. S. Lewis’s 1945 novel That Hideous Strength: a Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-Ups.  Those NICE folks in Lewis’s novel were an institution which would decide who lived and who died in accordance to their agenda of control and advancement of the remaining people into a Utopian, omni-competent and global scientific technocracy. That Hideous Strength was the fictional representation of the governmental materialism and scientism philosophy of social control Lewis described in The Abolition of Man, in which Lewis explains:

It is the magician’s bargain: give up our soul, get power in return. But once our souls, that is, ourselves, have been given up, the power thus conferred will not belong to us. We shall in fact be the slaves and puppets of that to which we have given our souls. It is in Man’s power to treat himself as a mere `natural object’ and his own judgements of value as raw material for scientific manipulation to alter at will. The objection to his doing so does not lie in the fact that this point of view (like one’s first day in a dissecting room) is painful and shocking till we grow used to it. The pain and the shock are at most a warning and a symptom. The real objection is that if man chooses to treat himself as raw material, raw material he will be: not raw material to be manipulated, as he fondly imagined, by himself, but by mere appetite, that is, mere Nature, in the person of his de-humanized Conditioners.

The Investor’s Business Daily article continues: Read More ›

By now, most readers here are familiar with Richard Dawkins’s view of God as expressed in The God Delusion where Dawkins writes that God is “the most unpleasant character in all fiction … a misogynist, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.” The last time a literary character was described in such despicable terms was probably Charles Dickens’s description of Ebeneezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol. “Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge!” writes Dickens, “a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster.” I’ll let you decide which character is worse.

Let’s lay aside for the moment that Dawkins considers God fictional, that is to say (in Dawkins’s words) “almost certainly does not exist.” (even that betrays some slight doubt on Dawkins’s part). The real Read More ›

Yesterday I met with the literary publicist hired by Broadman & Holman to promote The End of Christianity when it is released November 1st (for the Amazon.com listing, go here). This book will do much to create further conceptual room for ID. It is also being positioned to go face-to-face with the neo-atheist literature.

The initial print-run and expectations for The End of Christianity far exceed anything for my previous books (even for my best-selling book to date, Intelligent Design: The Bridge Between Science and Theology, which has sold about 80,000 copies). I learned yesterday that Costco and Wal-Mart have placed orders for over 10,000 copies. An immediate Spanish translation will have an initial print-run of 15,000. Paternoster will be handling printing and distribution in the UK. Preorders at Amazon.com have been doing great.

The official launch begins soon and the literary publicist has some exciting ideas for promoting the book online (stay tuned!). For an overview of the book, along with the introductory material and first chapter, go to www.designinference.com. Below are the endorsements:

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Barrett Clown, oh pardon me, Barrett Brown, thinks he makes an argument against ID by humor and satire alone here at The Huffington Post. He is, after all, to be taken deadly seriously, he’s written for National Lampoon for goodness sakes and written a book about Dodo birds. Not really, Dodo birds were really just straw men, or, more accurately, scare crows. If satire counts for argument, then my blog post has done the same job that Barrett’s has. Revel in the irony that Barret would write about “bits of information” to prove his point; Bits of information are no longer compartmentalized like so many scattered VHS tapes and gothic rock album liner notes, which is why Dembski and company Read More ›

On May 26, 2009 Reverend Barry Lynn offered his characterization of infidels who refuse to venerate Darwinius. His tirade (supported by Eugenie Scott) can be found here: Show #1415 Eugenie Scott, Susan Russell.

Some excerpts:

Reverend Barry Lynn :
The more new evidence that develops the more some people dig in to their erroneous earlier beliefs
…..
I am still flabbergasted by the notion that no matter what you show some people and say…”this why I believe what I believe” some people say, “nope not enough”….

….the religious right is already saying….”it [Ida (Darwinius)] could be a fake”

What’s wrong with people that they can’t look at evidence and say, “Ok, I didn’t see it before I’m going to re-evaluate based on what I do see.”

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My apologies for not posting more here recently. I now have a blog on my university’s website dedicated to the future of the university, where I have done a bit of posting.  But mostly I have been trying to finish a new book on science as an ‘art of living’ for new series by the UK philosophy publisher, Acumen.  ID followers should find it of interest. I have been also travelling and lecturing. On my audio lecture page, scroll to 28 at the bottom, and you’ll find a talk and the Q&A given at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, sponsored by Genesis Agendum on my recent book Dissent over Descent. You’ll hear from the Q&A that I was by no Read More ›

A friend alerted me to this piece by Lawrence Krauss from the Wall Street Journal.

Krauss writes:

“J.B.S. Haldane, an evolutionary biologist and a founder of population genetics, understood that science is by necessity an atheistic discipline. As Haldane so aptly described it, one cannot proceed with the process of scientific discovery if one assumes a “god, angel, or devil” will interfere with one’s experiments. God is, of necessity, irrelevant in science.

Faced with the remarkable success of science to explain the workings of the physical world, many, indeed probably most, scientists understandably react as Haldane did. Namely, they extrapolate the atheism of science to a more general atheism.”

No surprise here. But he concludes with

“Finally, it is worth pointing out that these issues are not purely academic. The current crisis in Iran has laid bare the striking inconsistency between a world built on reason and a world built on religious dogma.”

Perhaps the most important contribution an honest assessment of the incompatibility between science and religious doctrine can provide is to make it starkly clear that in human affairs — as well as in the rest of the physical world — reason is the better guide.”

Reason is a better guide than what? Religion? Which religion? All religions? What empircal data does Read More ›

Listed below are some events with Dr. Stephen Meyer. I expect more to be forthcoming!

Those of us who are part of promoting ID know how hard it is to get churches to appreciate the importance of ID. Most of the biology teachers who opposed ID at Dover were professing Christians and Sunday School teachers. The unfortunate situation in Dover is not unique. Darwinism has remained in the culture because churches have allowed it to spread. Churches have allowed it to spread because they are unwilling to engage the facts but rather resort to theology.

I often get harsh reactions from fellow creationists when I tell them they have to stop arguing theology and start engaging the facts. Recall the words of the father of modern ID, Phil Johnson, “Get the Bible and the Book of Genesis out of the debate.”

Theistic evolution can be successfully opposed in the churches by arguing the facts. Maybe your experience is different than mine, but I’ve not known a single individual who was truly converted away from Darwinism by purely theological means or trying to pound them over the head with theology and the Bible…

With that in mind, I am happy to report the following ID events, two of which will be at churches, and one where I hope to be present (in McLean, Virginia, near Washington, DC):

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Recall this post by Bill Dembski, August 31, 2006 where Bill pointed out how A.N. Wilson railed against the ID proponents in Kansas and labeled them Morons.

A.N. Wilson Skewered — it couldn’t happen to a nicer credulous moron!

A. N. Wilson, the epitomy of English snootiness, recently fell for an elaborate prank that he could have avoided if he had drawn a design inference. Note that Eve de Harben doesn’t exist either, and the letters in “her” name are an anagram for “Ever been had?”

Why am I being so hard on Wilson? Here’s what he wrote back in 1999 about the good people of Kansas: “Their simple, idiotic credulity as a populace would have been the envy of Lenin. That is the tragic paradox. The Land of the Free, telly and burgerfed, has become the Land of the Credulous Moron.” (go here and scroll down) What goes around comes around.

–Bill Dembski

But what now, April 2, 2009, Can you love god and agree with Darwin?

The Descent of Man, with its talk of savages, its belief that black people are more primitive than white people, and much nonsense besides, is an offence to the intelligence – and is obviously incompatible with Christianity.

I think the jury is out about whether the theory of Natural selection, as defined by neo-Darwinians is true, and whether serious scientific doubts, as expressed in a new book Why Us by James Lefanu, deserve to be taken seriously. For example, does the discovery of the complex structure of DNA and the growth in knowledge in genetics require a rethink of Darwinian “gradualism”. But these are scientific rather than religious questions.

–A.N. Wilson

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In “A Spoonful of Jesus Helps Darwin Go Down”, Coyne criticizes the NCSE:

The pro-religion stance of the NCSE is offensive and unnecessary

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 On 31 March, I gave one of the keynote addresses at the annual meeting of the British Sociological Association’s Religion Study Group in Durham. This meant that I could not watch the first airing of ‘Did Darwin Kill God?’ on BBC2.  I recommend that you watch this show over the next couple of days, while it’s still available on-line at the BBC website. It may be the most sophisticated treatment of this general topic on television, though as you’ll see from my comments below I found it profoundly unsatisfying. The person who scripted and presents the programme is Conor Cunningham, an academic theologian, about whom more below. Even those who disagree with his take on things – as I do – should welcome what he has done here. The challenge is to do better. Read More ›

A short article in the popular press reports that certain sauropods with long necks could not have held those necks upright. I read the article, leaned back in my chair and did a lot of serious thinking. . .
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