Religion

Janna Levin, Columbia astrophysicist, gives us the cutting-edge science on the origin of the universe: there was nothing, really nothing, nothing at all … but the potential to exist. Was it Aristotle who said that nothing admits no predicates? So where did nothing get the potential to exist and then bring the universe into existence? Not to worry. Janna does give us this assurance: “We know that something happened.” Yes, this is science at its best. Let’s not bring God or design into this discussion — we wouldn’t want to be accused of “acting stupidly.” Oh, one more thing, she’s an assistant professor (go here). Want to bet that she doesn’t have problems getting tenure? Compare this to Guillermo Gonzalez Read More ›

Quest to find life beyond Earth gets technological boosts By Andrea Pitzer, Special for USA TODAY 8/19/09 The search for intelligent life in the universe is still on. Despite the absence of interstellar tourists to date, astronomers at the SETI Institute (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) are hoping that we are not alone. And with new spacecraft to locate planets circling nearby stars, as well as more effective listening devices here at home, scientists have more tools at their disposal to find Earth-like planets or signs of other life forms. But the possibility of intelligent life is what interests scientists at SETI. Using SETI’s 42-antenna Allen Telescope Array in Northern California, they can listen in many directions for unusual radio signals Read More ›

The prize?:  A free copy of Stephen Meyer’s Signature in the Cell (Harper One, 2009).

Judged: Go here for winner.

You may wish to note this discussion on the new atheists and the problem of evil.

Admin Note: Re contest 7: Endoplasmic Messenger needs to send me a real world address at oleary@sympatico.ca, in order to collect his prize. It will NOT be added to a database for any further purpose.

My own view – and not meant to prejudice yours: Read More ›

Investor’s Business Daily posted an article relating Obama’s Healthcare Bill to the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE), the technocrats responsible for the U.K.’s health care.  The article states:

This administration, pledging to cut medical costs and for which “cost-effectiveness” is a new mantra, knows that a quarter of Medicare spending is made in a patient’s final year of life. Certainly the British were aware when they nationalized their medical system.

The controlling of medical costs in countries such as Britain through rationing, and the health consequences thereof are legendary. The stories of people dying on a waiting list or being denied altogether read like a horror movie script.

The U.K.’s National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) basically figures out who deserves treatment by using a cost-utility analysis based on the “quality adjusted life year.”

One year in perfect health gets you one point. Deductions are taken for blindness, for being in a wheelchair and so on.

The more points you have, the more your life is considered worth saving, and the likelier you are to get care.

The British are praised for spending half as much per capita on medical care. How they do it is another matter. The NICE people say that Britain cannot afford to spend $20,000 to extend a life by six months. So if care will cost $1 more, you get to curl up in a corner and die.

These NICE people bring to mind another technocratic group I’ve read about called the “National Institute of Coordinated Experiments (NICE)” in C. S. Lewis’s 1945 novel That Hideous Strength: a Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-Ups.  Those NICE folks in Lewis’s novel were an institution which would decide who lived and who died in accordance to their agenda of control and advancement of the remaining people into a Utopian, omni-competent and global scientific technocracy. That Hideous Strength was the fictional representation of the governmental materialism and scientism philosophy of social control Lewis described in The Abolition of Man, in which Lewis explains:

It is the magician’s bargain: give up our soul, get power in return. But once our souls, that is, ourselves, have been given up, the power thus conferred will not belong to us. We shall in fact be the slaves and puppets of that to which we have given our souls. It is in Man’s power to treat himself as a mere `natural object’ and his own judgements of value as raw material for scientific manipulation to alter at will. The objection to his doing so does not lie in the fact that this point of view (like one’s first day in a dissecting room) is painful and shocking till we grow used to it. The pain and the shock are at most a warning and a symptom. The real objection is that if man chooses to treat himself as raw material, raw material he will be: not raw material to be manipulated, as he fondly imagined, by himself, but by mere appetite, that is, mere Nature, in the person of his de-humanized Conditioners.

The Investor’s Business Daily article continues: Read More ›

……..… For the podcast, go to: FIRST HOUR: http://salem/townhall/audio/hour_1…mp3 SECOND HOUR: http://salem/townhall/audio/hour_2…mp3 THIRD HOUR: http://salem/townhall/audio/hour_3…mp3 John Mark Reynolds is a long-time supporter of ID. He invented the title of a Biola conference that I helped organize (and for which I edited the proceedings): MERE CREATION.

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 ›

Yesterday 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:

Read More ›

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.

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 ›

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 ›

This just in from Walter Bradley, President of the ASA: Dear Friends, I wanted to bring to your attention a unique opportunity this summer. The annual meeting of the American Scientific Affiliation will be held at Baylor University July 31-August 3. The ASA is the world’s largest organization of evangelical Christians who work in science and engineering, and it provides a forum to discuss faith-science questions. The program this year is particularly exciting with a mini-symposium on string theory and the alleged multi-universe and another symposium on origins where theistic evolution and intelligent design will be discussed. Timely issues raised by the human genome and its interpretation by some to imply a non-historical Adam and Eve will be discussed by Read More ›

This book is based on THE NATURE OF NATURE conference that Bruce Gordon and I put together at Baylor back in 2000 (for the conference and the Polanyi Center that hosted it, go here). The book is now listed at Amazon. Note that it will be out February 2010 (not 2009 as listed) and will be over 1,000 pages (not 900 as listed). Product Description: The world’s leading authorities in the sciences and humanities—dozens of top scholars, including three Nobel laureates—join a cultural and intellectual battle that leaves no human life untouched. Is the universe self-existent, self-sufficient, and self-organizing, or is it grounded instead in a reality that transcends space, time, matter, and energy? Book Description: The cultural battles now Read More ›

Joseph Campbell died in 1987 but remains influential. In this revealing video, Campbell clarifies why he left the Roman Catholic faith of his youth — EVOLUTION: While many try to reconcile their faith with evolution, many find in evolution reason to leave the faith. Just because there’s no strict contradiction between the two doesn’t mean that the two aren’t in tension. Campbell felt the tension and left the faith. SOURCE: www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJmNBxbExuA Postscript [added 06.14.09, 7:40AM CST]: It’s interesting to see Campbell disparage the biblical cosmology for being several millennia old and thus out of touch with current cosmologies — myths that impact our lives being myths that are compatible with contemporary cosmologies, according to Campbell. But when I studied ancient Read More ›

Michael Ruse has a piece in Forbes magazine about the recent hype over the Darwinius masillae fossil. I’m not sure what a business magazine finds interesting about the 47-million-year-old primate fossil, but I’m sure it isn’t interested in promoting the religion that underwrites the theory of evolution. Like most evolutionists Ruse doesn’t hide his theological convictions. I once debated Ruse but it was hardly a debate. I explained that evolutionists mandate naturalism for religious reasons such as the problem of evil, and Ruse argued that evolution is mandated for religious reasons such as the problem of evil. Such convictions provide evolutionists with a metaphysical certainty that evolution is true. Read more here.

Listed below are some events with Dr. Stephen Meyer. I expect more to be forthcoming!

Those of us who are part of promoting ID know how hard it is to get churches to appreciate the importance of ID. Most of the biology teachers who opposed ID at Dover were professing Christians and Sunday School teachers. The unfortunate situation in Dover is not unique. Darwinism has remained in the culture because churches have allowed it to spread. Churches have allowed it to spread because they are unwilling to engage the facts but rather resort to theology.

I often get harsh reactions from fellow creationists when I tell them they have to stop arguing theology and start engaging the facts. Recall the words of the father of modern ID, Phil Johnson, “Get the Bible and the Book of Genesis out of the debate.”

Theistic evolution can be successfully opposed in the churches by arguing the facts. Maybe your experience is different than mine, but I’ve not known a single individual who was truly converted away from Darwinism by purely theological means or trying to pound them over the head with theology and the Bible…

With that in mind, I am happy to report the following ID events, two of which will be at churches, and one where I hope to be present (in McLean, Virginia, near Washington, DC):

Read More ›