Apparently round two of the controversy over the California’s Science Center’s cancellation of Darwin’s Dilemma is getting ready to take place. This was reported and discussed here back in October, as well as here and here in December.
Now, a California State Senator is calling the constitutionality of the censorship into question. Read More ›
Peter J. Bowler published an article in Science (Jan. 9, 2009) titled “Darwin’s Originality.” While much of Bowler’s analysis is just plain wrong (e.g., Darwin’s theory being already “in the air” is NOT accurately premised largely upon Wallace co-discovery of natural selection as Bowler suggests but upon much deeper secularizing processes coextensive with skeptics like David Hume and positivists like Auguste Comte, both of whom deeply influenced Darwin, and ideas even predating them), but another of his comments is just plain frightening. Toward the end of his essay Bowler distances Darwinism from the racial hygiene of the Nazis but then writes the following: “But by proposing that evolution worked primarily through the elimination of useless variants, Darwin created an image that could all Read More ›
It is almost axiomatic in our culture that the pronouncements of Science are synonymous with Truth. This received wisdom is so prevalent that whenever media reports begin with the words “Scientists have found that…[fill in the blank]”, whatever follows is widely believed by the public to be unassailable fact. So revered is Science and so respected its methods, that the mere suggestion that something might be amiss is considered ignorance or heresy. And so the statements of Science are defended vigorously while the critics are dismissed as quacks and uninformed idiots. The prevailing attitude seems to be (to slightly bend the well-known quote from Richard Dawkins) “It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in the findings of Science [emphasis and edit mine], that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I’d rather not consider that).”
For those of us who have long been engaged in the ongoing Evolution/Intelligent Design debate, we know that Read More ›
| 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 ›
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.
Its been fascinating to read the discussion started by Barry Arrington that seems to expose some critical holes in the moral thinking of materialism. The discussion seems to range from justifying the existence of pornography to denigrating religious organizations that proselytize as they offer help and assistance to those in need. And, as Barry pointed out, the discussion is 41 posts in (actually as of now 53 posts), and still no materialist has condemned the views of the poster called Seversky on moral grounds. Perhaps having to decide between helping women in poverty by buying pornography or by funding a religious charity is too morally complex a choice for clarity for a materialist, so I want to offer an alternative. Read More ›
Why People Believe What They Do
Scientific American April 10, 2009
On Scientific American’s Science Talk, Steve Mirsky interviews cognitive psychologist Tania Lombrozo from the University of California, Berkeley detailing some surprising data on understanding of vs belief in evolution. Particularly amazing is Steve’s positing: “So it may be justifiable to say, “Here’s what we understand about evolution as a science. We don’t care whether you accept it; we just want you to understand it.””
. . .Lombrozo: Sure. So I think one of the most surprising findings has to do with the relationship between understanding the basics of evolutionary theory and accepting it as our best account of the origins of human life. So most people, I think, [or] in particular scientists, tend to think that if people reject evolution and in particular evolution by natural selection, it’s because they don’t understand it very well; they don’t really understand what the theory is telling us. But in fact, if you look at the data from psychology and education, what you find is either no correlation between accepting evolution and understanding it or very, very small correlation between those two factors, and I think that’s surprising to a lot of people and in particular to educators and scientists. 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 ›
This should be interesting: Book Description In this book, Weikart helps unlock the mystery of Hitler’s evil by vividly demonstrating the surprising conclusion that Hitler’s immorality flowed from a coherent ethic. Hitler was inspired by evolutionary ethics to pursue the utopian project of biologically improving the human race. This ethic underlay or influenced almost every major feature of Nazi policy: eugenics (i.e., measures to improve human heredity, including compulsory sterilization), euthanasia, racism, population expansion, offensive warfare, and racial extermination. More…
I have often been wearied by legends in their own lunchroom huffing that science differs from other endeavours because it is “self-correcting.”
To which I reply: Aw come off it, fellas. Any system that does not go extinct is self-correcting – after it collapses on its hind end. This is true of governments, businesses, churches, and not-for-profit organizations. I’ve seen enough of life to know.
Here’s a classic: At The Scientist’s NewsBlog, Bob Grant reveals (May 7, 2009) that
Scientific publishing giant Elsevier put out a total of six publications between 2000 and 2005 that were sponsored by unnamed pharmaceutical companies and looked like peer reviewed medical journals, but did not disclose sponsorship, the company has admitted. Read More ›