Culture Intelligent Design Religion Science theistic evolution

Francis Collins in the hot seat re COVID-19

Readers may know Collins from his role promoting theistic evolution and/or some ethical issues around accusations of the use of premature babies as guinea pigs. More recently, his recent and unexpected resignation from the directorship of National Institutes of Health has created expected questions around the Institute’s handling of COVID-19. … If Collins was confronted about that e-mail for the first time — after a year and a half — most U.S. media have way too cozy a relationship with science bureaucrats.

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A Muslim design advocate responds to efforts to “Islamize” Darwinism

Muzzafar Iqbal: After one hundred and seventy years of sound and fury surrounding “Darwin’s dangerous idea”,[1] one would expect everything has been said by all sides and there is no further need to write on the subject. Yet, what Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) once said seems to hold true: “Truth, Sir, is a cow that will yield such people no more milk, and so they are gone to milk the bull.”[2] “Such people”, for Samuel Johnson, were the skeptics of his time, but in our protean world, “such people” are people of faith who are keeping the Darwin industry afloat…

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More on Dr Kojonen’s Darwinist evolution is an expression of deeper design thesis,

as, it is worthy of further consideration (which is not the same as an endorsement). I headline a comment: [[Kojonen develops his case further: I will . . . argue in this book that the teleological order of biological organisms can still, in a rationally permissible way, be understood as a sign of the divine Read More…

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Christian Darwinists must now backtrack re Adam and Eve

Casey Luskin: “When I was reading the rhetoric used by evangelical elites who advocated abandoning a historical Adam and Eve, I was struck by how much of it seemed driven by fear — fear of looking foolish before the world because you challenged evolution and were shown to be wrong.” Maybe being right, sticking with their tradition, would have been a bigger problem for them.

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Evangelical scientists getting it wrong…

Casey Luskin: Craig continues to rely upon BioLogos arguments that pseudogenes are “broken” and non-functional junk DNA that we share with apes, thereby demonstrating our common ancestry. Those arguments are increasingly contradicted by evidence presented in highly authoritative scientific papers which find that pseudogenes are commonly functional, and they ought not be assumed to be genetic “junk.”

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John West on C.S. Lewis (who was not really a “theistic evolutionist” as the term is understood today)

West: “Indeed, [Ken] Miller insists that ‘mankind’s appearance on this planet was not preordained, that we are here… as an afterthought, a minor detail, a happenstance in a history that might just as well have left us out.'” Needless to say, Lewis did not subscribe to anything similar to this and might not have recognized it as Christian.

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At Evolution News and Science Today: The Appalling Moral Failure of Francis Collins

John G. West: The disclosures about the experiments followed Collins’s repeal earlier this year of restrictions on the use of aborted fetal tissue in NIH-funded research… researchers also sliced off skin from the scalp of the aborted babies and then grafted the fetal skin onto the mice. In the words of the scientists: “Full-thickness human fetal skin was processed via removal of excess fat tissues attached to the subcutaneous layer of the skin, then engrafted over the rib cage, where the mouse skin was previously excised.” The body parts used for these experiments were harvested from aborted human fetuses with a gestational age of 18-20 weeks. By that age, an unborn baby has brain waves and a beating heart. He can hear sounds and move his limbs and eyes …