December 2, 2005, the day after Eugenie Scott gave a talk Why Scientists Reject ID at GMU under the Provost’s sponsorship, I was providently invited to have tea with the Provost and had the opportunity to give him the pro-ID side of the story before a public gathering of Asian students. I presented a copy of Privileged Planet to him.
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Access Research Network (ARN) reports: The Case for a Creator DVD Available
It was in a high school science classroom that Lee Strobel became an atheist. A lecture on the Miller-Urey experiment convinced him that the origin of life, and all life for that matter, could be explained by purely naturalistic processes. Only the hard, empirical evidence of science could be trustedâ€â€and it appeared to point to a universe created by purely naturalist processes: time, chance, and Darwinian evolution.
Although science led Strobel away from a belief in a Creator, it was science that led him back. The atheistic worldview deeply influenced Strobel’s academic years and early career as an award-winning journalist for the Chicago Tribune. Then, in 1980, his wife’s conversion to Christianity led him on an intensive search for the truth about God and our beginnings. Not surprisingly, it began with science.
The Case for a Creator is the third in a series of top quality, block-buster documentaries on Intelligent Design by Illustra Media that started with Unlocking the Mystery of Life and The Privileged Planet. Based on Strobel’s popular book by the same title, the documentary leads you through one man’s journey to grapple with the scientific evidence regarding one of life’s greatest questions: How did we get here? Along the way he interviews many of the leading scientists and scholars for the intelligent design theory including Stephen C. Meyer, Michael Behe, Jay Richards, Jonathan Wells, Robin Collins, William Lane Craig, Guillermo Gonzalez, and Scott Minnich. The major topic areas of the documentary cover the fossil evidence, cosmology, astronomy, physics, biological machines and biological information. The bonus material includes additional interviews with the scientists, and special units on the origin of life and the machinery of life.
As with previous Illustra Media documentaries, this one is chock full of stunning graphics, amazing animations, and a theater-worthy soundtrack. The focus of this documentary is the scientific and philosophical evidence for design and a theistic worldview, and is suitable for use in public schools, especially when shown to balance the atheistic Darwinian worldview found in many educational scientific documentaries on the topic.
Yes, this is the same Chris Mooney who attacks ID and has written THE REPUBLICAN WAR ON SCIENCE: Chris Mooney ’99 recently spoke at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., on behalf of the Campus Freethought Alliance (CFA). Mooney, who is copresident and a founding member of the Yale College Society for Humanists, Atheists and Agnostics, addressed the issue of discrimination against those who don’t believe in God. Mooney interned with the CFA over the summer, where he helped draft the organization’s “Bill of Rights for Unbelievers.” Source: http://www.yale.edu/opa/ybc/campusnotes.html.
ID is quietly advancing in the mother state of one-fourth of the American Presidents. I do not know if the advance of ID in Virginia means anything to Richard Dawkins, but 4 of his 17 scheduled stops in his God Delusion world-wide book tour will be in the Virginia/DC area! Coincidence?
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The latest Newsweek gives a sympathetic portrait of Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris. The article closes with the following sentence: If Dawkins, Dennett and Harris are right, the five-century-long competition between science and religion is sharpening. People are choosing sides. And when that happens, people get hurt. Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14638243/site/newsweek.
Lauren Sandler’s new provocative book Righteous: Dispatches from the Evangelical Youth Movement is out in a bookstore near you (released September 7, 2006). I will comment some more on it since an entire chapter was devoted to Intelligent Design (entitled “Evolutionary Wars”) and quite a bit of that chapter was written about me. Her book will sell to the pro-Darwin crowd who think people like me are part of “a great national ill”.
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In response to Bill’s earlier thread Who said evolution wasn’t progressive, to say nothing of warm and fuzzy?, Rob Crowther posted a followup here: Beasts in the Forest.
Crowther points out Discovery Institute CSC Fellow Wesley Smith has a quote appearing on Starbuck’s coffee cups. Read More ›
Right now this is how Darwinists are selling their product:
Watch this video:
http://www.accolo.com/Accolo-Rethink-Recruiting.wmv
This is how they need to sell their product:
Go here: http://www.spicyparis.com/index.html.
Here’s what recruiting the right people means to an ad campaign (which is what Darwinism has become): Read More ›
I take a very low view of “climates of opinion.” In his own subject every man knows that all discoveries are made and all errors corrected by those who ignore the “clmate of opinion.” –C. S. Lewis, THE PROBLEM OF PAIN
You may recall that summer of 2003 Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett proposed a new “happy” designation for themselves as atheists — a term that does for atheism what “gay” does for homosexuality (the comparison is theirs!). They decided on the word “bright.” For Dawkins’s and Dennett’s opeds, where they originally made this proposal, go here: www.edge.org/3rd_culture/bright/bright_index.html. A band of D&D devotees ran with their idea of recasting atheism’s image to form www.the-brights.net. Nonetheless, some D&D supporters thought this was a bit much (see, for instance, Chris Mooney’s piece at CSICOP: www.csicop.org/doubtandabout/brights). All in all, I would say Dawkins’s and Dennett’s proposal of “the brights” never really took off — until now. It appears there is a quasi-secret society inspired Read More ›
Feature: The Intelligent Design Controversy in Higher Education
This week on The Coral Ridge Hour we look at Intelligent Design, a movement which is gaining adherents at colleges and universities around the world. But what about professors who dare to challenge evolution by presenting alternatives to students? As you are about to see, the consequences can be severe.
Dear Members of SSE [Society for the Study of Evolution], The Joint Council of SSE, ASN and SSB has recently appointed a committee to deal with the issues of creationism and intelligent design to the teaching and funding of evolutionary biology in the U.S. The goals of the committee are spelled out in a document available at http://www.evolutionsociety.org/download/anti-wedge.pdf, and this message is to let the membership know of the existence of the committee, as well as to ask for suggestions and help from the membership. The committee will work together with the education section of SSE, which is already working in this area, as well as with the nonprofit National Center for Science Education (http://www.ncseweb.org/default.asp) which promotes education about evolution Read More ›
Check out this forthcoming book, in which I understand that our very own Sal Cordova is featured. Note especially Sam Harris’s blurb — with people like Harris expressing such foreboding, one has to wonder how close we are to seeing the Darwinian house of cards collapse under the weight of its self-delusion.ÂÂ
Book Description
There’s a new youth movement afoot in this country. It’s a counterculture fusion of politics and pop, and it’s taking over a high school near you. Like the waves that came before it, it’s got passion, music, and anti-authority posturing, but more than anything else, this one has God. So what does it mean when today’s youth counterculture has a mindset more akin to Jerry Falwell’s than Abbie Hoffman’s?In RIGHTEOUS: Dispatches from the Evangelical Youth Movement, Lauren Sandler, a dynamic young journalist, reports from this junction of Evangelicalism and youth culture, traveling across the country to investigate the alternative Christian explosion. Using the grassroots modus operandi of the 1960s, these religious kids – part of the “Disciple Generation†as Sandler calls it – turn an antiauthoritarian sneer toward liberalism, feminism, pacifism, and every other hallmark of that era’s counterculture. And they’re engaging their peers with startling success, fusing pop culture, politics, and religion as they preach from the pulpit of the skate park, bar, and rock concert. Secular, liberal, and practically the embodiment of everything Evangelicalism deems unholy, Sandler travels with skateboard missionaries, hangs out with the tattooed members of a postpunk Seattle megachurch that has evolved into a self-sufficient community, camps out with a rock’n’roll antiabortion group, and gets to know the rap preachers who are merging hip-hop’s love of money with old-fashioned bible-beating fundamentalism. Much more than a mere observer, she connects with these young people on an intimate level, and the candor with which they reveal themselves to her is truly astonishing.
Illuminating, often troubling, and unapologetically frank, RIGHTEOUS introduces a bold new voice into the ongoing debate over religion in American life. And it is the first in-depth front-line exploration of the country’s new moral majority – dressed up in punk-rock garb – and what its influence could mean for the future of America.
BACKCOVER: Advanced Praise:
“Lauren Sandler obliterates the naïve and complacent hope that keeps most secularists and religious moderates sleeping peacefully each night-the hope that, in 21st century America, the young know better than to adopt the lunatic religious certainties of a prior age. The young do not know better. In their schools, skate-parks, rock concerts, and in the ranks of our nation’s military, our children are gleefully preparing a bright future of ignorance and religious fascism for us all. If you have any doubt that there is a culture war that must be waged and won by secularists in America, read this book.â€Â
â€â€Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation Read More ›
