Has anyone provided a proof of God’s inexistence?
Not even close.Has quantum cosmology explained the emergence of the universe or why it is here?
Not even close.Have the sciences explained why our universe seems to be fine-tuned to allow for the existence of life?
Not even close.Are physicists and biologists willing to believe in anything so long as it is not religious thought?
Close enough.
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David Berlinski is my favorite secular Jew and quintessential iconoclast. How could one not adore a guy who is a mathematician, no advocate of any religion, a Darwin skeptic, and phenomenally eloquent in both English and French, with a great penchant for ironic humor?
His latest opus is The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions, due out in April.
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La Mirada, Calif. — Ben Stein, known for his lead role in the film Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and his Comedy Central show Win Ben Stein’s Money, believes in liberty and truth. In recognition of this, Biola University’s masters in science and religion program will present him with the 2008 Phillip E. Johnson Award for Liberty and Truth on March 27, a month before the release of his major controversial motion picture, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. In his new movie Expelled, Stein wonders whether humans were designed by an intelligent being or whether we were simply the result of an ancient natural accident. In his search for an answer, he discovers an elitist scientific establishment that punishes the scientific proponents Read More ›
The modern method [of argumentation] is to assume without discussion that [your opponent] is wrong and then distract his attention from this (the only real issue) by busily explaining how he became so silly. In the course of the last fifteen years I have found this vice so common that I have had to invent a name for it. I call it Bulverism. Some day I am going to write the biography of its imaginary inventor, Ezekiel Bulver, whose destiny was determined at the age of five when he heard his mother say to his father — who had been maintaining that two sides of a triangle were together greater than the third — ‘Oh you say that because you Read More ›
Dennis Wagner posted the following at ARN (go here). I post it at UD with his permission. He offers useful advice on how to get EXPELLED (www.expelledthemovie.com) into the local theaters this April. Get Expelled Now!!! The Expelled Challenge By Dennis Wagner ARN Executive Director Several of you have inquired if Expelled will be showing at your local theater when it is released in April. The answer is only YOU can know for sure. The producers don’t have a lot of say about which theaters pick up their movie. Theaters chains and local theater managers schedule their movies based on perceived demand and interest in their community. So if you want to see this powerful documentary in your favorite theater, Read More ›
Two interesting articles in the Southern Baptist Texan about Ben Stein’s EXPELLED:
Baptist Professors Featured in New Film
Written by Jerry Pierce | Managing Editor
Posted Monday, January 28, 2008DALLAS — Two professors with ties to Baptist higher education are featured in an upcoming big-screen documentary that aims to expose the scientific establishment’s scorn toward academics who question Darwinian evolution.
“Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed” is scheduled for theaters in April and stars comedic actor and conservative activist Ben Stein as he travels the world interviewing intelligent design (ID) proponents whose careers have been threatened, as well as prominent neo-Darwinists who hold ID in contempt, including Richard Dawkins, author of the best-selling book “The God Delusion.”
A rough cut of the film, screened Jan. 10 in Dallas, featured interviews with William Dembski, a research professor of philosophy at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and a leading ID proponent whose books include “The Design Inference” and “No Free Lunch,” and Robert Marks, who holds the title of distinguished professor of engineering at Baylor University.
Marks is a co-laborer of Dembski’s whose ID research raised the ire of Baylor’s administration last year.
Dembski’s trials at Baylor from 1999-2005 are not documented in the filmamong other things, he drew the wrath of the science, philosophy and religion departments early in his tenure there when it was learned that he was heading up an ID think tank on campusbut Dembski appears several times on screen as an ID apologist.
Dembski told the Southern Baptist TEXAN that those who most need to see the movie are “parents of children in high school or college, as well as those children themselves, who may think that the biological sciences are a dispassionate search for truth about life but many of whose practitioners see biology, especially evolutionary biology, as an ideological weapon to destroy faith in God.” Read More ›
Do our beliefs about free will change our behavior? It seems they do. Here researchers primed some subjects to believe that our behavior is wholly determined by environment and genes, and that free will is a myth. (This is a theme of Dawkins who says that punishing a criminal is like kicking your car when it breaks down) Those subjects acted less ethically than those not primed. Beliefs influence behavior. What would a similar experiment show if the belief challenged was that there is Design behind the universe and life? Do people act the same after reading and believing “The God Delusion”? None of this addresses the actual truth of the belief, just whether believing it changes behavior. Fascinating!
DEBATE: Atheism vs. Theism and The Scientific Evidence of Intelligent Design Sunday, January 27th at 4pm PST, Stanford University WHAT: Stanford University will play host to a debate entitled Atheism vs. Theism & the Scientific Evidence for Intelligent Design. This debate is being organized by student groups at Stanford: IDEA Club at Stanford,The Stanford Review and Vox Clara: A Journal of Christian Thought at Stanford. WHO: Chirstopher Hitchens vs. Jay Richards Christopher Hitchens — Contributing editor to Vanity Fair; visiting professor, New School in New York; author of God is Not Great. VS. Jay W. Richards — Research Fellow and Director of Acton Media at the Acton Institute; co-author, with astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez, of The Privileged Planet: How Our Place Read More ›
Ron Reagan (son of Ronald) called it “The greatest breakthrough in our or any lifetime.”
John Edwards, 2004 US vice-presidential hopeful and part time prophet, predicted that Christopher “Superman” Reeve would arise and walk —provided that religious fanatics did not stop the progress of science.
And when Bush nixed new funding in 2001, Newsweek’s science correspondent Sharon Begley suggested that his compromise might be “a cruel blow to millions of patients.”
Whatever were they all talking about? The fabled fountain of youth? Well, more or less. Actually, they were talking about processing frozen human embryos abandoned at fertility clinics, to use in stem cell research (ESCR). Read More ›
The real nutters are the fanatics who despise religious belief by Melanie Phillips 26th November 2007 . . . the antipathy to religious faith goes far wider and deeper than fear of terrorism. It is the outcome of a dominant secularism which claims that faith and reason are irreconcilable, and that belief in a supernatural creator is the equivalent to believing in fairies at the bottom of the garden. Though most people still say they believe in some kind of God, religious faith has become progressively more enfeebled and unable to resist the secular onslaught. . . . MORE
Discovery Press Release: Discovery Institute Names National Talk Show Host Michael Medved as Senior Fellow SEATTLE — Michael Medved, nationally syndicated talk radio host and bestselling author, has joined the Discovery Institute in the role of senior fellow. The position cements a longstanding friendship and recognizes a commonality of values and projects across a spectrum of issues. “Michael Medved is an intellectual entrepreneur, a political and cultural polymath with great insights, judgment and wit. We are delighted to have this new relationship with him,” said Discovery Institute president Bruce Chapman. The sixth largest talk radio audience in the country, 3.7 million listeners, hears Medved’s daily three-hour radio program, The Michael Medved Show. Michael’s show is carried on more than 200 Read More ›
Philosopher Antony Flew used to be the most prominent atheist in the English-speaking world. In the last decade, however, that has changed. Unlike Flew, who has always been civil and insightful, a new breed of atheists, who are crass and unruly, has supplanted him, notably, Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins. Also, Flew is no longer an atheist. Flew’s newfound belief in God and his assessment of today’s neo-atheism are both described in his delightful new book (coauthored with Roy Varghese), There Is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind. Throughout his philosophical career (going back to the late 1940s, when he rubbed shoulders with C. S. Lewis), Flew was committed to following evidence wherever it leads. Late Read More ›
In Kitzmiller et al vs Dover, the issue over whether or not Darwinian Evolution could be allowed critical evaluation by students, rather than be presented as established fact, was settled once and for all. Furthermore, any consideration of an alternate theory was off the table. All across the land, scientists cheered, since at least for now, science had been saved from an ‘assault by religion’. Just after the decision was handed down, Ohio’s State Board of Education in a 9 to 8 vote kept with their lesson plan, saying in effect, “go ahead and sue us” [Toledo Blade Op Ed 1/14/06]. Although many school districts had been considering broadening their standards to allow a more open discourse, many shelved their Read More ›
Anybody willing to offer predictions about when Darwinists will be getting back big time into the eugenics business? Africans are less intelligent than Westerners, says DNA pioneer SOURCE: news.independent.co.uk . . . His views are also reflected in a book published next week, in which he writes: “There is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so.”