Recently, kairosfocus posted some thoughts on quoting materialists saying what they actually think when they talk to each other or what they assume are sympathetic audiences (“quote mining”), a practice they very much dislike. After all, when kairosfocus quotes them to people for whose ears the frank admissions were not intended, he is necessarily quoting them “out of context.” That the materialists mean it and that the rest of us might be best off to know that they mean it is beside the point, of course.

He has also asked why the Darwin vs. design debate has become so poisonous and polarized. A critical factor is the easy money tied up in Darwinism – well-paid lecture room mediocrities fronting unsubstantiated ideas to a captive audience until retirement.

Darwinists may not think they’re well-paid but if viewpoint productivity mattered, Read More ›

It wasn’t like this years ago. I remember Rick Sternberg writing to me mid-decade, about how the Smithsonian honchoes were, at that time, holding meetings to decide his fate. The problem was: They had to get rid of him because he doubted the Darwin lobby’ theories, but had broken no rules. They did, of course, get rid of him, and that time with impunity.  When a film, Expelled, was made, pulling a number of such incidents together, some of the very people who helped engineer the witch hunts loudly denied that they had taken place.

I remember the gifted young astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez, a specialist in habitable planetary zones, denied tenure at Iowa State. It was probably due  in large part to the attacks of an atheist religion prof. Gonzalez just couldn’t believe what had happened to him.

So, when I was talking to Granville Sewell recently, and saw that he  was radiantly confident that he would receive an apology, because there was a legal agreement, I was a bit concerned. Having – from years of covering this beat – much more experience than hope, I warned him: The Masters of the Universe are “science,” and as such, are above the law and exempt from common decency. Read More ›

Fight card here.

Basically, as David Anderson at creation.com tells it – and we did notice (April 25) the frequent fruit splats here too …,

Recently, a public dispute broke out between two different ‘camps’ of atheists on the Internet. It was not very edifying, but it was illuminating. It illustrated some of the ‘fault-lines’ that run through today’s atheist movements.

Fault between Read More ›

Let us imagine a strange alien race that sets out to learn about humanity. By chance they have encountered a single Scrabble tile imprinted with the letter “e”. Because these aliens are extremely thorough materialists, they undertake to study the tile as deeply as possible. Not only do they subject it to chemical analysis but, due to their superior technology, they are able to map out the exact position of every wood fiber and ink particle of the tile. After years of effort they create a three dimensional model of the Scrabble tile larger than a football field with all this nano information precisely reproduced and annotated. Read More ›

Why are they

?? fronting Darwinism to Christians “You can have Jesus and Darwin too”, apparently unaware of the fact that many once-virtuous, still faithful evolutionists  are checking out of Darwinism into the great unknown, due to evidence? Why doesn’t the evidence that Darwinian mechanism probably doesn’t work as  advertised mean anything?

= Why do Christians need to be the last people on the planet to believe in and defend the big Darwindunit? Read More ›

Yes, Nancy, fishing for a reaction here: I hope your book does well, but feel continually frustrated by the shallowness of current Christian culture. I didn’t think it was possible to be shallower than secular pop psychology, but Christian bookstores prove me wrong, time and again. I kid you not, I can’t stand even going into a Christian bookstore, even on business. Rows of books on Christian weight loss … I mean, we used to have a discipline called fasting, which is why people didn’t bother with Christian weight loss. Yes, there are a few thoughtful books like yours, but I find it a trial foraging my way through the Christian bookstore to find them.

A more sinister aspect to all this is that “new atheist” books are bestsellers, while the Christian is reading … Armageddon fantasies? Why is that sinister? Because, so far as I can see, the new atheists are a highly illiberal movement, and they tend to regard tolerance as the Islamist does: not as a solution but a problem. Look at Dawkins’s simple inability to understand that astronomer Martin Gaskell had been, put plainly, wronged. Because new atheists hate Christians more than they hate anyone else, the Christian may wake up from his potboiler to discover an actual Armageddon, perpetrated through the political and justice systems. Indeed, in some places it’s starting to happen now: It’s one thing Islamists and new atheists can agree on.

But don’t we sort of have it coming, when we choose escape into shallowness? Will any remedy actually work? Over to you: Read More ›

Recently, Bantay, a commenter on a post addressing the origin of language, quoted

…because Darwinists need to chase their tails by denying precisely what language itself affirms (meaning, order, and purpose)”

and asked

Does that mean that when Dawkins speaks, it is meaningless, orderless and purposeless?

Well, let me try to unpack that a bit.

Conversation with friend

Recently, I was on a road trip with a friend who wanted me to listen to this wow! CD by a dynamite Catholic preacher, who was into Thomism. (Thomism, sometimes neo-Thomism, is an attempt to use the teachings of medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas to counter materialism, Darwinism, etc.)

He made clear he was not talking about (nonsense like) intelligent design or creationism when he offered “proofs for God” going back to ancient times. I listened carefully, and then my friend asked me what I thought.

I sensed I’d better not just make social noise (= Isn’t he wonderful! Isn’t he profound! Take that,atheists!). So I thought about it, then said,

He is a good preacher, but I believe his arguments will have no impact whatever today, and at present are merely a distraction. Here is what I learned, writing The Spiritual Brain:

The Darwinist does not believe in the reality of the mind, and as a result, arguments from reason and logic are dismissible, because they are simply the natural selection of your successful genes operating on your neurons to produce delusions that cause you to pass on your genes. Tht is why people continue, through the generations, to find them persuasive. As materialist cognitive psychologist Steve Pinker, has said, “Our brains are shaped for fitness, not for truth.”

To get some sense of how this plays out, Read More ›

Reading further into Suzan Mazur’s Altenberg 16: An Expose of the Evolution Industry, I learned something interesting: Scientists and philosophers who explore self-organization in evolution  also battle the armies of Fortress Tenure (trolls commanded by tax burdens). Mazur notes that zoologist and natural philosopher Stan Salthe, visiting scholar at Binghamton University says “his skepticism about natural selection has made him “poison” in some science circles.” He’s not by any means the only one whose name comes up. Materialist atheist philosopher Jerry Fodor (MIT) joked that he was in the Witness Protection Program for his skepticism of evolutionary psychology.[!] Meanwhile, Stuart Newman of New York Medical College warns, Unless the discourse around evolution is opened up to scientific perspectives beyond Darwinism, the Read More ›

I commend to all DonaldM’s backgrounder on this news, which broke last night, about the journal Synthese disowning the attack on Christian scholar* Frank Beckwith published in its pages by one of Darwin’s familiar broomsticks . If someone has to put a stopper in, Synthese might as well be first. It’s their journal, after all. But let’s not lose sight of two critical facts: First, the only real reason Synthese had to disown Forrest’s attack is that Beckwith is not an ID sympathizer, and Forrest had assumed he was. That is the substance of his rebuttal, and the true reason the journal had to act. Forrest would likely have been free to publish any factual inaccuracy she pleased about an ID Read More ›

In part 1 of this series, I laid out what I see as some key differences between Thomism and ID. In this post I want to focus on why Thomists should nevertheless support ID – even while granting some or all of the most common criticisms Thomists have of ID.

In order to do that, though, I’m going to have to be a little hair-splitting – particularly, I want to explain just what I mean by “support ID”. I think there’s a few ways this “support” can manifest – some easier to achieve than others, and some harder.

Read More ›

Canada’s National Post tears into the Canadian Association of University Teachers’ “investigations” of Christian universities: The Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) — which describes itself as Canada’s “national voice for academic staff” — says it has investigated four small Christian colleges and universities in the past 18 months because it wants parents to know what kind of institutions their sons and daughters might attend. In other words, we are told, there is nothing nefarious in the 65,000-member union’s action. It is merely performing a valuable public service.This is disingenuous nonsense. The CAUT is on a thinly disguised anti-Christian witch hunt. There is no other way to describe it. [ … ] The investigations were instigated entirely by CAUT executive Read More ›

Here’s a good one: NCSE’s Eugenie Scott Serves as Chief of Darwinian Thought Police for University of Kentucky Faculty Casey Luskin February 11, 2011 9:29 AM As reported on ID the Future interview, Martin Gaskell’s attorney Frank Manion stated that during the course of Gaskell’s lawsuit, it became clear that Eugenie Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education (NCSE), consulted University of Kentucky (UK) faculty about whether UK should hire Gaskell. She gave Gaskell a clean bill of health–not because she endorsed hiring Darwin-skeptics, but because at the time she believed Gaskell was a died-in-the-wool evolutionist–“accepting of evolution.” According to her e-mail, Eugenie Scott wrote: Gaskell hasn’t popped onto our radar as an antievolution activist. Checking his Read More ›

He notes, regarding scientists who mysteriously disappear after they start muttering that Darwinism is bullshot or something similar,

The University of Kentucky chose to pay a $125,000 settlement to Gaskell, now at the University of Texas, after Gaskell’s attorneys released records of e-mail traffic among the faculty hiring committee. Seeking a scientist to head UK’s observatory, professors complained that Gaskell was “potentially Evangelical,” while a lone astrophysicist on the committee protested that Gaskell stood to be rejected “despite his qualifications that stand far above those of any other applicant.”This is no isolated incident. An enormous, largely hidden transformation has taken place in what we mean when we speak of “science.” For centuries, the free and unfettered scientific enterprise was fueled by a desire to know the mind of God. “The success of the West,” writes historian Rodney Stark in his important book The Victory of Reason, “including the rise of science, rested entirely on religious foundations, and the people who brought it about were devout Christians.” Now, increasingly, voicing such a desire is likely to get you excluded from the guild of professional scientists.

For years, I’ve tracked the stories that come out regularly about scientists of impeccable credentials whose religion-friendly beliefs proved injurious to their career. In some fields, notably biology and cosmology, Christians who voice doubts about Darwinian theory pay a particularly high price.

That’s because other Christians have bought into big ticket irrelevance and don’t care.

If that ever changes, here’s how you will know: Read More ›

Nathan Black reports for Christian Post “Intelligent Design Proponent Fired from NASA Lab” (Jan. 26 2011).

David Coppedge is an information technology specialist and system administrator on JPL’s international Cassini mission to Saturn, the most ambitious interplanetary exploration ever launched. A division of California Institute of Technology, JPL operates under a contract with the federal space agency. Coppedge held the title of “Team Lead” System Administrator on the mission until his supervisors demoted and humiliated him for advancing ideas that superiors labeled “unwelcome” and “disruptive.”

He favoured intelligent design and talked about it, and one superior didn’t like that.

There was no workplace policy that forbid discussing private opinions at work, and claims that Coppedge harassed fellow employees proved unsubstantiated.

Here’s columnist David Klinghoffer on the case:

What did Coppedge do to get himself in trouble? He occasionally chatted with interested colleagues about the scientific case for intelligent design, he passed around a couple of pro-ID DVDs, which made good sense since JPL’s officially defined mission includes the exploration of questions relating to the origin and development of life on earth and elsewhere. His supervisor severely chastised him for this, humiliated and demoted him.

Now he’s been fired. JPL claims it was a cost-cutting measure. … The truth will emerge when Coppedge’s lawsuit comes to trial, but the appearance here certainly suggests a final strike at Mr. Coppedge for his offense of introducing fresh ideas to co-workers.

In the light of this case and the recent, similar Martin Gaskell case, one hardly knows what to make of doubt that Ben Stein was right. There is an Expelled factor. Today, you can doubt anything except Darwin, and you must contrive not to know about or speak of the growing mass of evidence that contradicts the stuff government forces students to learn in tax-funded schools.

But there is no freedom for adults either, it turns out. Darwinism today has nothing to do with the science and everything to do with protecting the cultural status of an icon that has given government everything from compulsory sterilization to scientific racism to … the right of tax-funded institutions like JPL to run inquisitions powered by devotion to that icon.

Sadly, Klinghoffer writes,

It’s bad enough when private universities clamp down on the free exchange of ideas. But public institutions have often seemed to be the worst offenders of all in this respect, and that is something taxpayers have every right to protest.

Klinghoffer suggests that Americans phone: 202-358-1010 or e-mail Charles Bolden, charles.bolden@nasa.gov Yet will they?

I’ve covered ID stories for about a decade now, and on the way, I learned something interesting: What is keeping Darwinism alive right now is not evidence; the evidence is leaning sharply against Darwin’s “information for free” mechanism.

What keeps Darwinism alive is the awful passivity of the taxpayers who doubt it, yet continue to fund its long, persecutory march through the institutions.

Christians are the worst, incidentally.
Read More ›

The friend who sent me the link notes that the article is “only mildly biased”:

Both sides agree that Dr. Gaskell, 57, was invited to the university, in Lexington, for a job interview. In his lawsuit, he says that at the end of the interview, Michael Cavagnero, the chairman of the physics and astronomy department, asked about his religious beliefs.“Cavagnero stated that he had personally researched Gaskell’s religious beliefs,” the lawsuit says. According to Dr. Gaskell, the chairman said Dr. Gaskell’s religious beliefs and his “expression of them would be a matter of concern” to the dean.

Federal law prohibits discrimination on the basis of religion, so interviewers typically do not ask about an applicant’s faith. Depositions and e-mails submitted as evidence suggest why Dr. Cavagnero may have raised the issue with Dr. Gaskell.

For the plaintiff, the smoking gun is an e-mail dated Sept. 21, 2007, from a department staff member, Sally A. Shafer, to Dr. Cavagnero and another colleague. Ms. Shafer wrote that she did an Internet search on Dr. Gaskell and found links to his notes for a lecture that explores, among other topics, how the Bible could relate to contemporary astronomy.

“Clearly this man is complex and likely fascinating to talk with,” Ms. Shafer wrote, “but potentially evangelical. If we hire him, we should expect similar content to be posted on or directly linked from the department Web site.”

[ … ]

Referring to Ms. Shafer’s concern that Dr. Gaskell was “potentially evangelical,” Francis J. Manion, Dr. Gaskell’s lawyer, said: “I couldn’t have made up a better quote. ‘We like this guy, but he is potentially Jewish’? ‘Potentially Muslim’?”

– Mark Oppenheimer, “Astronomer Sues the University of Kentucky, Claiming His Faith Cost Him a Job” New York Times (December 18, 2010).

Oh, do let’s have some fun with the idea: Read More ›