Religion

THE SPECTATOR
Thursday 12 January 2006
Dawkins is wrong about God
Roger Scruton

http://www.spectator.co.uk/article_pfv.php?id=7185

Faced with the spectacle of the cruelties perpetrated in the name of faith, Voltaire famously cried ‘Ecrasez l’infâme!’ Scores of enlightened thinkers have followed him, declaring organised religion to be the enemy of mankind, the force that divides the believer from the infidel and thereby both excites and authorises murder. Richard Dawkins, whose TV series The Root of all Evil? concludes next Monday, is the most influential living example of this tradition. And he has embellished it with a striking theory of his own — the theory of the religious ‘meme’. A meme is a mental entity that colonises the brains of people, much as a virus colonises a cell. The meme exploits its host in order to reproduce itself, spreading from brain to brain like meningitis, and killing off the competing powers of rational argument. Like genes and species, memes are Darwinian individuals, whose success or failure depends upon their ability to find the ecological niche that enables reproduction. Such is the nature of ‘gerin oil’, as Dawkins contemptuously describes religion. Read More ›

Fairly balanced reporting of the recent conference Dr. Dembski attended:

On a recent Tuesday evening, Moshe Tendler, an influential Orthodox rabbi and Yeshiva University biology professor, ambled onto the stage at Kovens Conference Center in North Miami. A stately figure with a wispy white beard and heavy glasses, he surveyed the 300-strong crowd of scientists and intellectuals — most clad in yarmulkes and dark suits with tallith tassels dangling about their waists — and urged them to spread the word that Darwin was wrong. “It is our task to inform the world [about intelligent design],” he implored. “Or the child growing up will grow up with unintelligent design…. Unintelligent design is our ignorance, our stupidity.” Read More ›

Check this out!

http://www.metanexus.net/metanexus_online/show_article.asp?9385

I reported earlier on this blog that I was to be the only gentile speaker at an Orthodox Jewish (Lubavitcher) conference on Torah and science (go here, here, and here). That conference took place in Miami last week, and I gave a talk there on ID (December 14th). The talk was very well attended with several high school senior classes from the local Jewish schools attending along with a fair amount of press. I felt very much at home with the Lubavitchers, and I was extremely gratified by their receptivity to ID. These are well-educated thoughtful people with a great stake in not letting a materialistic view of science steamroller their religious faith. They will be significant allies in coming Read More ›

Simon Conway Morris is scheduled to do the 2006-07 Gifford Lectures on the topic “What organic evolution tells us about our place in the universe, not least in terms of religious perspectives and natural theology “: http://www.hss.ed.ac.uk/Admin/Gifford/

Go here for audio-on-demand and here for podcast. For the wave file of the debate, go here: http://www.audiomartini.com/Shermer_Dembski.wma

We must first look into the use of this term ‘fundamentalist’. On the most common contemporary academic use of the term, it is a term of abuse or disapprobation, rather like ‘son of a bitch’, more exactly ‘sonovabitch’, or perhaps still more exactly (at least according to those authorities who look to the Old West as normative on matters of pronunciation) ‘sumbitch’. When the term is used in this way, no definition of it is ordinarily given. (If you called someone a sumbitch, would you feel obliged first to define the term?) Still, there is a bit more to the meaning of ‘fundamentalist’ (in this widely current use): it isn’t simply a term of abuse. In addition to its emotive Read More ›

http://www.lubavitch.com/Article.asp?Section=10&Article=728 . . . Professor Dembski, considered by many to be the most articulate advocate of Intelligent Design, will address the place of intelligent design in the natural sciences, followed by an interactive question and answer period with the audience. . . .

Intelligent Design: Official statement on false and misleading information published in the Wall Street Journal today.*

By Charles L. Harper, Jr., Senior Vice President, John Templeton Foundation.

*[Monday November 14th, 2005. Article by Daniel Golden:
At Some Colleges, Classes Questioning Evolution Take Hold.]

Today the WSJ ran a front page story mentioning the John Templeton Foundation in a way suggesting that the Foundation has been a concerted patron and sponsor of the so-called Intelligent Design (“ID”) position (such as is associated with the Seattle-based Discovery Institute and the writers Philip Johnson, William Dembski, Michael Behe and others). This is false information. In fact, quite the opposite is true. The John Templeton Foundation has provided tens of millions of dollars in support to research academics who are critical of the anti-evolution ID position. Any careful and factual analysis of actual events will find that the John Templeton Foundation has been in fact the chief sponsor of university courses, lectures and academic research which variously have argued against the anti-evolution “ID” position. It is scandalous for a distinguished paper to misinform the public in this way. Read More ›

This question was posed in one of the earlier threads on this blog. According to the following article, “Scott describes herself as atheist but does not discount the importance of spirituality.” Scott never asked the San Francisco Chronicle to retract this designation of atheism.

EUGENIE SCOTT
Berkeley scientist leads fight to stop teaching of creationism
Monica Lam, Special to The Chronicle
Friday, February 7, 2003
©2003 San Francisco Chronicle | Feedback

URL: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2003/02/07/EB75914.DTL

One morning in September, Eugenie Scott of Berkeley got a long-distance phone call from an alarmed parent in Cobb County, Ga. The board of education there was considering allowing creationism to be taught side-by-side with evolution as an alternative, scientific theory on human origins. Read More ›

[From a colleague:] “Here’s a more complete summary of the Pope’s Wednesday audience. Note the clear emphasis on knowledge of God through reason prior to revelation: “Even before discovering the God who reveals himself in the history of a people, there is a cosmic revelation, open to all, offered to the whole of humanity by the Creator.” That view is both biblical and an important theme in the philosophies of Aristotle and Plato as synthesized by Thomas Aquinas. The Pope’s point becomes even clearer when he lays aside the prepared text and speaks extemporaneously to the assembled pilgrims — including Cardinal Schönborn, who was present.” Read More ›

http://www.dc-connect.org/s/117/index.aspx?pgid=13&cid=97&sid=117&gid=1&event_id=77

From “Science Versus Scientism” by John Silber (appeared in the Nov05 issue of The New Criterion):

The critical question posed for evolutionists is not about the survival of the fittest but about their arrival. Biologists arguing for evolution have been challenged by critics for more than a hundred years for their failure to offer any scientific explanation for the arrival of the fittest. Supporters of evolution have no explanation beyond their dogmatic assertion that all advances are explained by random mutations and environmental influences over millions of years. Read More ›

Pam Winnick’s new book, A Jealous God: Science’s Crusade Against Religion, is out in stores. It provides a nice counterblast to Chris Mooney’s diatribe about the Republican/conservative hijacking of science.