Philosophy

At the Beyond Expelled worldview conference, Nancy Pearcey explored the impact of evolution vs ID. She describes skeptic Michael Shermer’s conversion to evolution & Scarlett Johansson’s acting on belief in evolution.
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The intelligent design of life

Nancy Pearcey tells crowd that Darwinism has evolved into more than just a theory (with VIDEO)
Rachel Kyler, Thursday May 8th, 2008

NICEVILLE — Not religion pitted against science, but philosophy against philosophy.

In a truly liberal education system, that’s how academic Nancy Pearcey says educators would approach intelligent design and the theory of evolution.
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This is cross posted from my own site, The Christian Watershed. To read the rest, please follow the link at the bottom.  Let me preface this by saying that even though I show how Christianity fits the criteria for warrant, I believe any theistic belief can fit this criteria. In other words, Christianity does not have an exclusive claim on this theory, but theism does. Furthermore, I am not saying one cannot be a naturalist in epistemology (that is, use evidence or believe in natural causes), but merely that one cannot even begin to acknowledge evidence as a form of truth until one is an external realist (i.e. a Theist in their metaphysic).  One of the biggest accusations levied against Read More ›

Robert Meyer provides thought provoking insight into the major issues surrounding Expelled.
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Ben Stein’s Dangerous Idea
Robert Meyer, May 6, 2008, New Media Alliance – Robert E. Meyer

Ben Stein has a dangerous idea. His idea is that professors and teachers who express skepticism about Darwinism are likely to find themselves not granted tenure, castigated and ridiculed, and disqualified from the opportunity to have research papers published.
. . .
Having reviewed the movie myself, it appeared that Stein was trying to make the case for academic freedom, not attempted to convert anyone to a particular ideological position.

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Another fascinating book I’m finding hard to put down is David Sedley’s masterful treatment of ancient Greek debates about intelligent design, Creationism and Its Critics in Antiquity (University of California Press, 2008). What Sedley means by “creationism” is not the Henry Morris / ICR / AIG variety, although philosophically of course there is conceptual overlap. Rather, as he puts it, What I intend by creationism is…the thesis that the world’s structure and contents can be adequately explained only by postulating at least one intelligent designer, a creator god. (p. xvii) The existence of such debates outside the historical sphere of biblical authority, Sedley argues, is of more than passing interest, and provides his main motive for writing the book. His Read More ›

Derbyshire continues to embarrass himself — it’s as though on the topic of ID and God his emotions take over and he can’t think straight. I’ll spare you his review and simply quote Berlinski’s response, which skillfully shuts him down with very few words: [From] David Berlinski: 1 If I remark that no sane man would hesitate to choose between A and B, it hardly follows that either A or B is insane. This is a point of logic. It is obvious. 2 To suggest that Mbombo or Unkulunkulu have an enduring claim on our attention is to ignore the striking insight achieved by the ancient Hebrews: That various scattered deities are nothing more than local manifestations of a single Read More ›

One of the worst things about one side making connections to Hitler is it invites return fire of the same kind. This should be filed under the category “People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones”.

How many of you knew that beloved evangelical Christian minister Jerry Falwell shared Adolf Hitler’s views about the importance of maintaining the purity of the white race?

I’m not saying “modern” evangelicals feel this way, any more than “modern” Darwinist are that way, but… as long as we’re dredging up the past of one side it’s only fair to dredge up the other’s too.

Addendum: No one seems to have picked up on the point that Falwell, as an evangelical Christian biblical literalist, did not believe in “Darwinism” yet he still shared his racial thinking with Hitler. Further proof that you don’t need Darwin to be a racist.

From The Nation “Agent of Intolerance”

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Please note this is categorized in off-topic philosophy. Does Darwinian Nobility, capitalized no less, sound like a contradiction in terms? Not really. In the Descent of Man, Darwin talks about the noble nature of man like it was a tangible thing. “Nor could we check our sympathy, even at the urging of hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature.” Who’s responsible for eugenics? Simple. People who don’t have the noble nature of man that Darwin mentions like a physical thing. If you don’t instinctively know that the right thing to do is help rather than harm those less fortunate in life than you are then you lack Darwinian Nobility. Is Darwinian Nobility due to nature or Read More ›

Richard Weikart summarizes his devastating research into the Darwinian foundations of Nazis – and the continuation of those themes by modern evolutionists.
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Darwin and the Nazis
By Richard Weikart Published 4/16/2008 12:07:03 AM American Spectator

Richard Dawkins, PZ Myers, and some other Darwinists are horrified that the forthcoming documentary, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, will promote Intelligent Design to a large audience when it opens at over a thousand theaters nationwide on April 18. Ironically, their campaign to discredit Ben Stein and the film confirms its main point, which is to expose the persecution meted out by Darwinists to those daring to criticize Darwinian theory.

One aspect of Expelled that troubles Dawkins and some of his colleagues is its treatment of the ethical implications of Darwinism, especially its discussion of the historical connections between Darwinism and Nazism. Isn’t this a bit over-the-top, suggesting that Darwinism has something to do with Nazism? After all, Darwinists today are not Nazis, and Darwinism has nothing to do with anti-Semitism. Read More ›

[[This blast from the past was originally published here at UD 25oct06. With EXPELLED coming out so soon and given Dawkins’s prominent role in it, I thought it worth moving to the top of the stack (blogs have the data structure of a push-down stack). –WmAD]] Last night Richard Dawkins did a reading from his new book, The God Delusion, at a bookstore in DC. After the reading he fielded questions. A friend of mine was in the front and got to be the first to go. He asked Dawkins if he thought he was being inconsistent by being a determinist while taking credit for writing his book. The answer so shocked my questioner friend that he typed out a Read More ›

Father Michal Heller, 72, a Polish priest-cosmologist and a onetime associate of Archbishop Karol Wojtyla, the future pope, was named March 12 as the winner of the Templeton Prize.

http://www.catholicnews.com/data/stories/cns/0801398.htm

In this recent interview came a critique of the intelligent design position as bad theology, akin to the Manichean heresy. Fr. Heller puts forth this rather strange argument as follows:

“They implicitly revive the old manicheistic error postulating the existence of two forces acting against each other: God and an inert matter; in this case, chance and intelligent design.”

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Are there parallels between the effects of “Big Science” Darwinism severe job discrimination against non-Darwinists as shown in Expelled, and recent terrorism by Jihadists?

The very controversial film Fitna offers a view on radical Islam and the Qur’an by by Dutch politician Geert Wilders, leader of the Party for Freedom (PVV). It was just released today March 27th on the Internet, and already has over one million downloads each in English and Dutch. Wilders alternates verses from the Qur’an with terrorist events and statements by radical jihadists. Blogpulse of Fitna already lists 2110 messages or 0.1% of messages, compared to 1618 for Blogpulse Expelled Stein.

Compare prominent Darwinist PZ Myers Insisting:

“Don’t tell me to be dispassionate or less unreasonable about it all because because 65% of the American population think creationism should be taught alongside evolution,. . .
I say, screw the polite words and careful rhetoric. It’s time for scientists to break out the steel-toed boots and brass knuckles, and get out there and hammer on the lunatics and idiots. If you don’t care enough for the truth to fight for it, then get out of the way.”

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While cleric Michael Heller disparages Intelligent Design, Chuck Colson observes: “John Scotus Eriugena is considered perhaps the first proponent of “intelligent design.” See: Learning from the Irish, Chuck Colson

“Observe the forms and beauties of sensible things,” he wrote, “and comprehend the Word of God in them. If you do so, the truth will reveal to you in all such things only He who made them.” . . .

See Colson’s full “Breakpoint” 3/17/2008
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  Former President Theodore Roosevelt, a man known for his typically frank-spoken style (a trait no doubt imbued from his Dutch Reformed roots) and who knew bad science as readily as he knew bad theology when he saw it, made bare the malignant social cancers of the modern age.  As the nation goes to select a new chief executive we should all look for the candor and insightfulness of the 26th President as shown below . . . __________ “There is superstition in science quite as much as there is superstition in theology, and it is all the more dangerous because those suffering from it are profoundly convinced that they are freeing themselves from all superstition.  No grotesque repulsiveness of medieval superstition, even as it survived into nineteenth-century Spain Read More ›

On  July 7, 2005 Cardinal Christoph Schönborn wrote an article Finding Design in Nature  that seemed to level serious criticism at Darwinism and neo-Darwinism.   “Now at the beginning of the 21st century, faced with scientific claims like neo-Darwinism and the multiverse hypothesis in cosmology invented to avoid the overwhelming evidence for purpose and design found in modern science,” wrote Schönborn, “the Catholic Church will again defend human reason by proclaiming that the immanent design evident in nature is real.”  More recently the Cardinal has elaborated upon his position in his latest book Chance or Purpose: Creation, Evolution, and a Rational Faith (Ignatius Press, 2007).  The work itself emanating as it does from such a well-positioned Catholic leader, one intimate with the Pope, is worthy of some extended comment.

 Schönborn’s book is in some senses confusing.  On the one hand the Viennese Cardinal has some harsh criticism for Darwinian evolution as a metaphysical worldview.  On the other hand Schönborn takes the reader on a much murkier journey in which he appears to defend Darwin’s Origin as a “stroke of genius.”  Freeing himself from the dogma of independent creations, Darwin developed a theory of natural selection and common descent that was, according to  Schönborn, a product of “honest and intense intellectual struggle” (p. 53).  The Cardinal essentially supports Darwin’s biological mechanisms as secondary causes, which “can thus perfectly well be reconciled with belief in creation.  The natural causes,” he writes, “are an expression of the activity of creation”  that occurs throughout all aspects of creation.   Schönborn has a purpose in mind here, namely, to make a distinction between the so-called science of Darwin and the metaphysics of Darwinism in an effort to make Darwin’s biological theory implicitly compatible with theism.  Here begins the Cardinal’s troubles. Read More ›

I live in Arvada, Colorado, and for many years I attended the church associated with the YWAM shooting on Sunday.  Earlier this year I befriended two of the young men going through the training program there, one from New Zealand and the other from England.  I am numb with sorrow, and my prayers go up for the families of the victims.  The media is reporting that Matthew Murray posted the following on the web:  “I’m coming for EVERYONE soon and I WILL be armed to the @#%$ teeth and I WILL shoot to kill. …God, I can’t wait till I can kill you people. Feel no remorse, no sense of shame, I don’t care if I live or die in the Read More ›