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Philosophy

Freud down, Darwin next?

Sigmund Freud had immeasurable impact on modern culture.  Along with Marx and Darwin, he was one of the great modern thinkers, whose “science” of psychology and treatment, psychoanalysis, defined modern concepts of human nature for generations.  His theories (based largely on Darwinism) brought new words into popular vocabulary–id, ego, super-ego, the unconscious.  His ideas influenced education, law, religion and medicine.  People began to think about their actions being determined by dreams, sexual repression and mysterious forces deep in their unconscious minds.  They worried about Oedipus complexes, anal retention, penis envy and all kinds of causal concepts Freud introduced.  They spent fortunes lying on couches undergoing psychoanalysis by their shrinks, under the impression they were getting “scientific” treatment because, after all, Read More ›

O’Reilly: Dawkins’ evolution only is fascism

O’Reilly told Dawkins”

you insist you can’t even mention it, that is fascism, sir.

Was he right? Is it constitutional/scientific to insist that only materialistic evolution can be taught?
See: O’Reilly vs. Atheist Author Richard Dawkins

O’REILLY: . . . It’s not fair to leave it out of the science class if the science class is incomplete. And you, by your own admission, say we don’t know how it all began. So if the science class is going to say evolution only, but I really don’t know how it started, that gap has got to be explored. Read More ›

Materialism and Moral Clarity

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 ›

Are Falk and Ayala ID Supporters?

We’ve been discussing Falk and Ayala’s theological support for evolution. However, while reading Falk’s arguments, I came to the realization that the only way Falk’s arguments about evolution freeing God from responsibility for the created world make sense is if they assume Intelligent Design is true.
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Putting Peer Review in Its Place

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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William Lycan Defends Dualism

A new day is dawning when philosophers of William Lycan‘s stature start questioning materialism and making conceptual room for dualism: I mean to have shown here that although Cartesian dualism faces some serious objections, that does not distinguish it from other philosophical theories, and the objections are not an order of magnitude worse than those confronting materialism in particular. There remain the implausibilities required by the Cartesian view; but bare claim of implausibility is not argument. Nor have we seen any good argument for materialism. The dialectical upshot is that, on points, and going just by actual arguments as opposed to appeals to decency and what good guys believe, materialism is not significantly better supported than dualism…. Yet, I am Read More ›

The New Atheists and the Age Old Problem of Evil

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 ›

UPDATE: The End of Christianity

THE END OF CHRISTIANITYYesterday 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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I r edumakated

Science and scientists, especially in America, are wonderful. I am currently laying on my couch, playing music from my laptop, and will probably turn on my HDTV later on to just enjoy a nice relaxing evening. Without scientists none of this would be possible.

However, sometimes scientists need to “know their role.” What I mean by that is how whenever faced with a dissenting viewpoint, some scientists tend to produce massive arguments to discredit the dissenter; one of the problem with this, however, is their arguments are based upon logical fallacies. That might make for a good way to vent, but it doesn’t make it a good argument.

Take, for instance, Dawkins, Panda’s Thumb, et al, and their recent treatment of Dembski’s class curriculum. I could offer quotes, but I’m sure we’ve seen most of them. Rather, what I believe to be an adequate summary of the arguments against Dembski’s curriculum is as follows:

“Bill DUMzki r dum! LOL! Iz Xian + ID = soopid. Dawkins r in Demzkis boat, eatin all hiz cookies! LOL!!!!1111!!1!!11!!!1”

I wish I could say I were exaggerating, but unfortunately the only thing I changed was the composition of the words.

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Karen Armstrong’s Case for G_d

I have just posted my review of Karen Armstrong’s The Case for God on my university website. Although the book does not spend many pages on ID in name, she clearly objects to the broadly natural theological mentality that provides support for ID. Hers is a very consistently anti-rationalist case for religion.  I’m sure there are people attracted to the position but not me. You can respond to my review here or there.  No doubt I’m not alone in finding it more instructive to review books by those with whom I disagree.

Cambridge ‘Dissent over Descent’ Lecture

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 ›

God and Science Redux: Lawrence Krauss

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 ›

Quote of the day: Barbara Forrest on methodological naturalism

Every now and again it’s good to remind ourselves of just how misguided methodological naturalism is. It is a straitjacket whose donning we wisely decline. Yet many outfitters urge the contrary. Some, like Francis Collins, thinks that it’s de rigueur for science but that it poses no obstacle to religious belief. Barbara Forrest begs to differ: The relationship between methodological naturalism and philosophical [metaphysical] naturalism, although not that of logical entailment, is not such that philosophical naturalism is a mere logical possibility.” In “Methodological Naturalism and Philosophical Naturalism: Clarifying the Connection” Philo, Vol. 3, No. 2, 2000, p. 7. But if Forrest is correct, then methodological naturalism has religious implications (or anti-religious implications, which are the same thing), in which Read More ›

‘Did Darwin Kill God?’ BBC TV Programme

 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 ›