Here’s how Cambridge’s Jim Enderby’s review of some recent Darwin books begins: On the morning of November 24, 1859, Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species made its first appearance and the world changed forever. An age of faith was plunged into profound religious doubt, and believers of every kind rose to pronounce anathema on Darwin’s godless tract, sparking a fresh battle in the long-running war between science and religion. But while the reactionaries raged, the scientific community soon came to accept natural selection, and the rediscovery of Gregor Mendel’s work in 1900 (which marked the founding of modern genetics) set the seal on Darwin’s triumph by providing the missing piece to his puzzle – a scientific understanding of just Read More ›

In a recent article in the New York Times magazine, by Richard Panek, we read a very well written but surprisingly pessimistic assumption about what physicists can learn about the universe: If so, such a development would presumably not be without philosophical consequences of the civilization-altering variety. Cosmologists often refer to this possibility as “the ultimate Copernican revolution”: not only are we not at the center of anything; we’re not even made of the same stuff as most of the rest of everything. “We’re just a bit of pollution,” Lawrence M. Krauss, a theorist at Case Western Reserve, said not long ago at a public panel on cosmology in Chicago. “If you got rid of us, and all the stars Read More ›

Computer simulations of global warming and Darwinian mechanisms in biology should not be trusted, because they can’t be subjected to empirical verification. In these two areas, computer simulations and models can degenerate into nothing more than digital just-so stories — in one category about the future, and in the other about the past. The programmer can produce whatever outcome he desires, by choosing initial assumptions and algorithms, and weighting various factors to produce a desired output.

Unfortunately, when those in the general public hear the words “scientific” and “computer model,” they often assume that unassailable truth has been established.

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Physicist John Baez has some interesting observations about string theorists who become defensive when their theory is questioned that’s relevant to our debate: . . . [S]ome people have tried to refute the claim that string theory makes no testable predictions by arguing that it predicts the existence of gravity! This is better known as a “retrodiction”. Others say that since string theory requires extra assumptions to make definite predictions about our universe, we should – instead of making some assumptions and using them to predict something – study the space of all possible extra assumptions. For example, there are lots of Calabi-Yau manifolds that could serve as the little curled-up dimensions of spacetime, and lots of ways we could Read More ›

British journalist Melanie Phillips has an interesting item on “post-normal” science: The ‘post-normal’ science of climate change From the horse’s mouth — climate change theory has nothing to do with the truth. In a remarkable column in today’s Guardian Mike Hulme, professor in the school of environmental sciences at the University of East Anglia and the founding director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research — a key figure in the promulgation of climate change theory but who a short while ago warned that exaggerated forecasts of global apocalypse were in danger of destroying the case altogether — writes that scientific truth is the wrong tool to establish the, er, truth of global warming. Instead, we need a perspective Read More ›

Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor has won the Templeton Prize: Taylor has long objected to what many social scientists take for granted, namely that the rational movement that began in the Enlightenment renders such notions as morality and spirituality as simply quaint anachronisms in the age of reason. That narrow, reductive sociological approach, he says, wrongly denies the full account of how and why humans strive for meaning which, in turn, makes it impossible to solve the world’s most intractable problems ranging from mob violence to racism to war. “The deafness of many philosophers, social scientists and historians to the spiritual dimensions can be remarkable,” Taylor said in remarks prepared for the news conference. “This is the more damaging in that Read More ›

Actually, we’re already there. Many Darwinists critical of ID no longer reside in the culture of rational discourse. They know they are right as much as any religious dogmatist. But the alarmism takes this one step further. Because denial poses a danger to the body politic, deniers must to rooted out. Moreover, those who root them out, as the defenders of virtue against evil, thus require additional powers to root them out. After that, persecution Soviet-style is not far away. “A former professor of climatology at the University of Winnipeg has received multiple death threats for questioning the extent to which human activities are driving global warming. ‘”Western governments have pumped billions of dollars into careers and institutes and they Read More ›

From Dr. Michael Egnor: No Nobel prize in medicine has ever been awarded for work in evolutionary biology. In fact, I think it’s safe to say that the only contribution evolution has made to modern medicine is to take it down the horrific road of eugenics, which brought forced sterilization and bodily harm to many thousands of Americans in the early 1900s. That’s a contribution which has brought shame — not advance — to the medical field. So ‘Why would I want my doctor to have studied evolution?’ I wouldn’t. Evolutionary biology isn’t important to modern medicine. That answer won’t win the ‘Alliance for Science’ prize. It’s just the truth. MORE

Over a year ago I urged readers of UD to provide me with behind-the-scenes correspondence showing that the NCSE (National Center for Science Education) and others had attempted to derail Richard Sternberg’s career after The Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington published an article on intelligent design by Stephen Meyer while Sternberg was still its managing editor (go here and here). I was finally sent that information. The following link takes you to the Congressional Report on the Sternberg Affair along with that correspondence, which is given in the appendix (the file is 3Mbytes): www.uncommondescent…/Sternberg_Cong_Rep_App.pdf Note especially Eugenie Scott’s role in this affair.

Saint Thomas Aquinas was not content to rest upon received wisdom.  He questioned everything, and at the end of his questioning he came back around to Christian orthodoxy.  In his questioning Aquinas took great pains to examine his opponents’ arguments on their own terms.  He did not, as most of us are inclined to do, attack a straw man caricature of his opponent’s position.  In his magisterial Summa Theologiae Aquinas employed a dialectical approach.  He set out the arguments for his opponents’ position; then he set out the arguments for the orthodox position.  Only then did he draw a conclusion.  Importantly, it has been said that not only did he take his opponent’s arguments on their own terms, but perhaps Read More ›

William Crawley, with whom I attended Princeton Theological Seminary in the mid-90s, did a bang-up job interviewing Richard Dawkins for the BBC earlier this year. Crawley probes Dawkins’s views on religion as well as his religious background:

Ken Miller continues to tour the U.S. giving his lecture “The Collapse of Intelligent Design.” Moreover, the bicentennial of Darwin’s birth and the sesequicentennial of his ORIGIN OF SPECIES is coming up in 2009. Together these have convinced me it’s best that all of us here at UD hone our skills at sucking up to “The Big D.” Here’s my ode to the man. I encourage others to try their hand at this in the comments of this thread (if I really like what you’ve written, I’ll send you one of my books as a prize): Dembski’s Entry in the “Suck up to Darwin” Contest There are rare times and places, in the illustrious history of science, when outbursts of Read More ›

I’m currently working through Robustness and Evolvability in Living Systems, and came across the following information which seems to be right in line with Denton’s evolution by natural law ideas: A final, especially counterintuitive feature of RNA sequence space is that all frequent structures are near each other in sequence space. Consider a randomly chosen sequence that folds into a frequent structure and ask how far one has to step away from the original sequence to find a sequence that folds into this second structure…For instance, for RNAs of length n = 100 nucleotides, a sphere of r = 15 mutational steps contains with probability one a sequence for any common structure. This implies that one has to search a Read More ›

This is the first article I’ve authored for this site; I apologize in advance if I format wrong or make some other mistake.

As is so often the case, I ran across the most interesting material while looking for something else, and thought others might be interested as well.

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) was an important 19th-Century philosopher. He was also an obnoxious curmudgeon. He wrote an essay: “38 Ways to Win an Argument,” which details all the unfair, manipulative, and downright mean tactics which can be employed to win an argument, especially a public one, whether or not the truth is on your side. Reading through these techniques it struck me how many of them are employed by the Materialist/Darwinist side against ID and other positions critical of their claims.

I have picked out a few examples, with their original numberings from his essay (quotes from Schopenhauer are in italics if I’ve figured out this formatting system right). These were taken from a translation of Shopenhauer by T. Bailey Saunders: The Art of Controversy, and Other Posthumous Papers, London: Sonnenshein/New York: Macmillan, 1896.
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