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Religion

Alister McGrath Swept off the Cutting Room Floor

Early this year I described how Richard Dawkins interviewed Alister McGrath for the BBC production THE ROOT OF ALL EVIL and then decided to leave him on the cutting room floor (go here). That interview is available at Google Video here. In watching it, ask yourself if it would have made for a less biased program if Dawkins had dropped Ted Haggard and substituted Alister McGrath.

Improved symbol for the Clergy Letter Project

The NCSE is shamelessly pandering to religious interests to advance their cause, and because I really like the NCSE, I’d like to help them out in their recent campaign to support The Clergy Letter Project.

The Clergy Letter Project is an attempt to recruit religious groups to support Darwin. To that end, let me suggest a symbol which the Clergy Letter Project should adopt to set apart the churches which have formed an alliance with Charles Darwin.

It is the symbol which Darwin himself swore by, and what better way for churches who are part of the clergy project to honor Darwin than by adopting a symbol which Darwin himself was so fond of.

The symbol I suggest is Darwin’s walking stick. Here is what it looks like as reported by the BBC news:
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[Off Topic]Jesus desecrated in Malay newspaper. No riots in Kuala Lumpur?

Here’s an interesting but off-topic story. A newspaper in Kuala Lumpur ran a newspaper article showing a picture of Jesus smoking (a cigar or cigarette or something). The Malay Indians have expressed outrage and asked for apologies (which the newspaper has extended). The Malay Indian Congress has threatened to have the newspaper shut down but, thus far, there has been no hint of rioting in the streets, burning cars, etc. Hmmm… Read more…

Scientists should unite against threat from religion

Just when you thought things couldn’t get any sillier, now Sam Harris, author of “Letter to a Christian Nation” publishes a letter in Nature calling all good scientists to oppose religion at every turn. Unfortunately for Sam, the letter is frought with inaccuracies and mischaracterizations that would make PiZza Myers proud. He even goes so far as to scold Nature for not taking a hard enough line against this pernicious evil.

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The Open Society and Its Secular Enemies

The audacity of the secular humanists never ceases to amaze. Their upcoming conference titled “The Secular Society and Its Enemies” is an ill-conceived rip-off of Karl Popper’s THE OPEN SOCIETY AND ITS ENEMIES. Had they read and understood Popper, they would realize that they are the enemies to which he was referring. I encourage readers of this blog in the New York area to attend this conference — doing so will immeasurably enrich your education and show you what we’re up against:

David Klinghoffer Interview in NRO

David Klinghoffer, author of the new book Shattered Tablets: Why We Ignore the Ten Commandments at Our Peril (Doubleday), gives a disconcerting interview in National Review Online about life in Seattle. Here’s a sample: Lopez: What’s the point of a First Commandment protest rally? Klinghoffer: Oh, I attended one, though it wasn’t spoken of explicitly. It was a rally for Richard Dawkins, the atheist Darwinist bestseller guy, at Seattle’s town hall. The First Commandment — “I am the Lord your God…” — really sticks in the craw of materialists like Dawkins, much more so than any other of the Ten Commandments. Everyone was bundled in flannel and they were applauding him for applauding them for being such a bunch of Read More ›

“The New New Atheism” — by Peter Berkowitz

Berkowitz has an insightful piece on the new new atheists. Here is an excerpt: . . . But one stunning new development under the sun is that promulgating atheism has become a lucrative business. According to a recent article in The Wall Street Journal, in less than 12 months atheism’s newest champions have sold close to a million books. Some 500,000 hardcover copies are in print of Richard Dawkins’s “The God Delusion” (2006); 296,000 copies of Christopher Hitchens’s “God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything” (2007); 185,000 copies of Sam Harris’s “Letter to a Christian Nation” (2006); 64,100 copies of Daniel C. Dennett’s “Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon”; and 60,000 copies of Victor J. Stenger’s “God: Read More ›

Paper and Website: “The Jesus Tomb Math”

As I announced a few weeks ago on this blog, Robert Marks and I have been collaborating on some papers on the mathematical foundations of ID at the Evolutionary Informatics Lab (these papers are currently under review with mainstream peer-reviewed journals): ecs.baylor.edu/…/Research/EILab. We have also just finished a paper debunking the statistics of James Cameron et al. (go to www.jesusfamilytomb.org), who have claimed both in a documentary on the Discovery Channel and in a book titled The Jesus Family Tomb that the pattern of names in a tomb found outside Jerusalem matches names in Jesus’ family so closely that it is highly probable that this is in fact the family tomb of the New Testament Jesus. Since “Jesus son of Read More ›

The ICR’s continued misunderstandings about science

In Intelligent Design: Strengths, Weaknesses,
and the Differences
John Morris, president of ICR, writes:

The differences between Biblical creationism and the IDM should become clear. As an unashamedly Christian/creationist organization, ICR is concerned with the reputation of our God and desires to point all men back to Him. We are not in this work merely to do good science, although this is of great importance to us. We care that students and society are brainwashed away from a relationship with their Creator/Savior. While all creationists necessarily believe in intelligent design, not all ID proponents believe in God. ID is strictly a non-Christian movement, and while ICR values and supports their work, we cannot join them.

Good grief. Is thermodynamics or statistical mechanics Biblical or non-Biblical? If these disciplines can’t be shown to be Biblical, then is Morris suggesting these ideas can’t be defended or studied or promoted by the ICR? Given that Maxwell (a creationist) and Boltzmann (a Darwinist) were pioneers in the formulation of statistical mechanics and atomic theory, I suppose by John Morris’s standards, these great theories are non-Christian theories, therefore the ICR can’t join in their promotion and study.

I suppose the ICR would have issue with James Clerk Maxwell (likely a YEC himself), whose famous equations have ushered in the modern world. His famous equations require an old universe. Thus, if the ICR had it’s way, a great scientific discovery would be rejected on account that it was “unbiblical”.
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Have I been too hard on the NCSE?

Perhaps I’ve been too hard on the NCSE, always referring to the group as the National Center for Science Education Selling Evolution and questioning the organization’s integrity and purpose. So, to make amends, I’m helping to circulate this advertisement for a position they are trying to fill. Note the paragraph in bold. I expect many who read this blog would be qualified to fill this position. Help wanted The National Center for Science Education, a non-profit organization that defends the teaching of evolution in the public schools, seeks candidates for a position in its Public Information Project. Staff members in the Public Information Project provide advice and support to local activists faced with threats to evolution education in their communities. Read More ›

Point-Counterpoint: Steven Weinberg vs. Eugenie Scott

“The world needs to wake up from the long nightmare of religion. Anything we scientists can do to weaken the hold of religion should be done, and may in fact be our greatest contribution to civilisation.” –Steven Weinberg, NYT, 21nov06 “Scott describes herself as atheist but does not discount the importance of spirituality. . . . In her earnest, soft-spoken voice, she tried to explain to parents and teachers [in Kansas] that science and evolution are not anti-religion. ‘Students don’t have to accept evolution,’ Scott frequently has said. ‘But they should learn it — as it is understood by scientists.’” –Monica Lam, Profile of Eugenie Scott, SFC, 7feb03 Question: Whom do you prefer, the straightforward Weinberg or the smarmy Scott? Read More ›

“The Irrationality of Richard Dawkins” — by Frank Beckwith

This just appeared at FIRST THINGS: The Irrationality of Richard Dawkins By Francis J. Beckwith Wednesday, June 20, 2007, 6:47 AM In his 2006 book, The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins laments the career path of Kurt Wise, who has, since 2006, held the positions of professor of science and theology and director of the Center for Theology and Science at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. Prior to that, Wise had taught for many years at Bryan College, a small evangelical college in Dayton, Tennessee, named after William Jennings Bryan, three-time Democratic presidential candidate and associate counsel in the 1925 Scopes “Monkey Trial.” MORE: www.firstthings.com/onthesquare.

So many ID books, so little time! ID-sympathetic book by Gingerich (2006)

Biologist John Lynch seems to think there is surprising silence over Behe’s book. I speculated that his perception is due to the fact that there are so many pro-ID or ID-sympathetic books and activities out there now. In addition to the activities of the ID community, there is renewed activity in the creationist community. There are at least two creation museums opening in 2007 — one in the USA and one in Canada!

It was through Uncommon Descent that important pro-ID books have gotten some promotion like ReMine’s Biotic Message and Sanford’s Genetic Entropy, or Barrow and Tipler’s Anthropic Cosmological Principle. I will hopefully post in detail on ReMine’s Biotic Message and Davies The Mind of God. It should be noted Barrow and Davies won an almost combined 3 million dollars in the form of Templeton Prizes for their (perhaps unwitting) ID-sympathetic works. Some of the best ID literature is in places you’d least expect!

Uncommon Descent will from time to time point out other books like Tipler’s Physics of Christianity and now this (unwitting) ID-sympathetic book by renowned scientist Owen Gingerich: God’s Universe

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And Hector Avalos deserves tenure at ISU?

The tenure denial of Guillermo Gonzalez by Iowa State University has been much discussed on this blog of late. The tenure of Hector Avalos, religious studies professor and militant atheist at Iowa State University, however, has yet to be broached here. So let’s do it. Avalos conducted a witch hunt of Guillermo Gonzalez back in 2005 (go here). He just posted on PZ Myers’ blog a response to the Discovery Institute (go here). Here is an interesting quote from it: I may not be an astronomer, but my article, “Heavenly Conflicts: The Bible and Astronomy,” passed the editorial review of Mercury: The Journal of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific 27 no. 2 (March/April, 1998), pages 20-24. There, I critiqued Read More ›