Religion

Check out his forthcoming documentary RELIGULOUS (click here for the trailer).

Antony Flew, formerly the most prominent atheist in the English speaking world, goes after Dawkins, his successor as head atheist: The God Delusion by the atheist writer Richard Dawkins, is remarkable in the first place for having achieved some sort of record by selling over a million copies. But what is much more remarkable than that economic achievement is that the contents – or rather lack of contents – of this book show Dawkins himself to have become what he and his fellow secularists typically believe to be an impossibility: namely, a secularist bigot. (Helpfully, my copy of The Oxford Dictionary defines a bigot as ‘an obstinate or intolerant adherent of a point of view’). MORE

To look at this account of the religious fervour surrounding Barack Obama by Michael Medved, one would think so. Consider

Author Garen Thomas makes similar observations in “Yes We Can: A Biography of Barack Obama”, a newly published book for children. “There has emerged a new leader who seems to be granting Americans a renewed license to dream. Barack Obama has proven repeatedly that he can touch people from all genders,” (not just both of them, you’ll note, but all of ‘em), “political affiliations, and across racial divides. There are few times in your life when you have a real opportunity to alter the course of history and put civilization back on a course toward prosperity and unity for all races and genders.” All of them—again. “If you were to look at dates in your history books, you might see centuries pass before something remarkable and worth noting occurred, when one person or a group of people stood up for change, making an enlightened leap in the evolution of the human story.”

It goes on. Take your anti-nausea prescription before you follow it up.

Now, some, including Logan Gage at the Discovery Institute, think that innate religiosity proves that religion is an innate human impulse. I have never agreed with that, and in The Spiritual Brain neuroscientist Mario Beauregard and I made clear that there is no innate religious impulse.  Here’s the skinny:

If you have a human mind, you naturally wonder about stuff like

– Are there laws that govern the universe? Can I influence them in any way?

– Could beings greater than myself be in charge of what happens? Can I contact them?

– I know I will die, but what will happen then? What happened to my parents and grandparents?

– Does it matter how I live? Can I change anything by thinking or praying about it?

– Why do bad things happen to good people?

And so forth.

I am not convinced that we need anything more than a human mind to ask these questions because the mind will generate them when in contact with reality, for the same reasons as mathematics works.

If I am wrong, I would like to hear a reasonable explanation why that is so.

Also, at the Post-Darwinist:<< Read More ›

Published online 9 July 2008 | Nature 454, 150 (2008) A former Texas official is suing the state’s education agency, saying that its policies passively endorse creationism. In a complaint filed with a district court on 1 July, Christina Comer, a former director of state science education, alleged that officials tacitly condone the teaching of creationism through a policy of neutrality. Comer oversaw Texas’s science curriculum until last November, when she was forced to resign for circulating a notice of a talk entitled “Inside Creationism’s Trojan Horse”. In her termination notice, Comer was told that the education agency endeavoured to “remain neutral” on the issue of creationism. Comer’s complaint argues that board neutrality violates the separation of church and state. Read More ›

This one, published by New Scientist, really takes the cake. From the article:

God may work in mysterious ways, but a simple computer program may explain how religion evolved.

By distilling religious belief into a genetic predisposition to pass along unverifiable information, the program predicts that religion will flourish… The model assumes… that a small number of people have a genetic predisposition to communicate unverifiable information to others. They passed on that trait to their children…

The model looks at the reproductive success of the two sorts of people — those who pass on real information, and those who pass on unreal information.

It would be a colossal understatement to call this utter silliness, and it stuns me that anyone would take this seriously, much less allow it to be published as a “scientific” study by “The World’s No.1 Science and Technology News Service.”
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In this essay Richard Dawkins proposes the following:

In fact, natural selection is the very opposite of a chance process, and it is the only ultimate explanation we know for complex, improbable things… We need a better explanation [than design by space aliens], such as evolution by natural selection or an equally workable account of the painstaking R&D that must underlie complex, statistically improbable things.

An equally workable account? An “ultimate explanation”? R&D? R&D is research and development. R&D is design. The logic and terminology of design is inescapable, even by those who deny that design exists.

Richard Dawkins is certainly not a stupid person, but I find it amazing that he cannot see the obvious problem here. Natural selection is not random, but it does not create anything; it only throws stuff out.

The F-35 fighter aircraft (for which our company is designing a new pilot ejection parachute), did not come about by throwing out the Wright Flyer biplane, and then throwing out the Piper Cub, and then throwing out the F-16. The impotence of natural selection as a creative force is transparently and logically evident.
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Richard Pearcey traces how a Darwinian worldview leads to “delegated fascism”. These are critical issues in debating the societal CONSEQUENCES of Evolution vs Intelligent Design, (as distinct from the scientific origin theories themselves.) ———————————

Abortofascism and Free-Market Homicide

By Rick Pearcey, Pro-Existance, May 12, 2008
In a column titled “Atheism and Child Murder,” Dinesh D’Souza comments on his recent debate with Princeton ethicist and atheist Peter Singer:

Some of Singer’s critics call him a Nazi and compare his proposals to Hitler’s schemes for eliminating the unwanted, the unfit and the disabled. But as I note in the debate, Singer is no Hitler. He doesn’t want state-sponsored killings. Rather, he wants the decision to kill to be made by you and me. Instead of government-conducted genocide, Singer favors free-market homicide. Read More ›

Alex Harris and Brett Harris are challenging the status quo with: Do Hard Things: A Teenage Rebellion Against Low Expectations, garnering a Foreward by Chuck Norris, 2008, Multnomah Books ISBN-10: 1601421125. What might the prospects be for a hard cover manifesto challenging teenagers to work hard by two 18 year olds? Astonishingly it reached #5 on Amazon on March 25th.The Harris’ launched TheRebelution.com. It has already received 16 million hits. They just finished a Rebelution conference for youth attended by 2,200 at one stop of a seven stop tour. Read More ›

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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 ›

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 ›

[[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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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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