In light of the recent discussion on this blog about Darwinism as a naturalistic mystery religion (go here), I decided to revise and update a piece I did a long time ago relating evolution and alchemy. I’ve titled it “Evolution as Alchemy” (go here for pdf, here for html). I’ve also included the text (minus two illustrations) for your convenience below: Read More ›

The October 30, 2005 issue of the Vital Theology newsletter (www.vitaltheology.com) summarizes an interview with Alan Padgett, whom I know from a Templeton funded Oxford seminar at which I spoke (on ID) in June 2001 and at which he was a participant (this was still in the days when I used to be invited to Templeton events). We had a whole week together, so I don’t see any excuse for the following remarks by him. Quoting from the newsletter: Current debates [over ID] center on two false assumptions. The first is that evolution must imply that God does not exist. The second is that there is something wrong with the theory of evolution, so it must be defeated to promote Read More ›

Having been a sounding board for Ann Coulter on chapters 8-10 of GODLESS, I’m happy to see the entire book now that it is out. Ann is taking Phillip Johnson’s message as developed in DARWIN ON TRIAL and REASON IN THE BALANCE and bringing it home to the masses. Critics will dismiss it for its hyperbole, lack of nuance, and in-your-face attitude. But she has the gist just right, which is that materialism (she calls it liberalism) dominates our culture despite being held by only a minority of the populace and has become an agenda among our elites (academy, scientists, media) for total worldview reprogramming. Close to half the book is devoted to science and evolution. I cannot help but Read More ›

This reply is too long to put in the comments section to the previous post, so I am making a new post.

Frank writes: “There is an important difference between believing things to be true a priori and having faith.”

BarryA replies: It depends on what you mean by “faith.” The first entry in the American Heritage Dictionary is what I mean: “Confident belief in the truth, value, or trustworthiness of a person, idea, or thing.”

Take your example. Yes, it is true that you don’t accept 2+2=4 on faith. But back up a couple of steps and you’ll find faith at a deeper level. You believe this mathematical formula is true, because you believe in the law of non-contradiction, which in turn means you believe we live in a non-chaotic universe in which there is meaning and in which logic prevails. You believe this not because you can demonstrate it to be true (Popper says, correctly I think, that universal statements can never be verified), but because you have a confident belief that it is true – i.e., you believe it on faith.

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[From a colleague:] Last night author Tom Wolfe gave the annual Jefferson Lecture sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities. His two hour long speech was entitled “The Human Beast.” In more words (sometimes explicitly stated) he said that determinism is true, there is no free will, there is no I , evolution is a fact, there is no nature to man, and God is dead. He spoke of Darwin, Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche as if speaking of a beloved children. The interesting part was that he slammed the neo-Darwinian synthesis. He said that it’s not all in the genes. According to Wolfe (paraphrasing from what I remember) “Evolution ended 11,000 years ago when man acquired language. Once man Read More ›

Question: What qualifications does one need to debunk ID? Here are Hunter Rawlings’s: “Born in Norfolk, Virginia, Rawlings was a 1966 graduate of Haverford College, with honors in classics, and received his Ph.D. degree from Princeton University in 1970. His scholarly publications include a book, The Structure of Thucydides’ History (Princeton University Press, 1981).” (ref)

Intelligent Design and the Place of Religiously-based Ideas in American Politics
By Hunter Rawlings III
Mr. Rawlings is the President of Cornell University. The following article was first delivered in the form of a lecture at the Woodrow Wilson Center, Tuesday, April 25, 2006.

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Evangelical Protestantism has in recent years become ever more potent in American public life, while the voices of secular humanists become ever more strident in their reaction to religious rhetoric. This is a badly polarized state of affairs, as we have recently seen in national debates over the case of Terry Schiavo, abortion, stem cell research, and the opposition of Darwinism and Intelligent Design. What is the right way out of this polarized situation?
—————–

On March 4, 1865, Abraham Lincoln delivered the most moving and probably the most significant speech in American history, his Second Inaugural Address. Lincoln used his presidential platform to give an anguished rumination on the purposes of the Almighty and the consequences for Americans, in both North and South, of practicing slavery. The Second Inaugural is, as many have pointed out, essentially a sermon. Its biblical, indeed prophetic rhetoric has had a powerful effect upon all subsequent Presidential speechmaking, which struggles, never successfully, to emulate it. In spite of our constitutional separation of church and state, America’s chief executives rarely deliver a major address without a direct appeal to God.

In that same epochal year of 1865, Ezra Cornell and A.D. White founded Cornell University as a new kind of American institution of higher learning. Unlike its predecessors like Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Columbia, Cornell was to be a nonsectarian university, “an asylum for Science,” as President White wrote, “where truth shall be sought for truth’s sake, where it shall not be the main purpose of the Faculty to stretch or cut science exactly to fit ‘Revealed Religion.. ..'” Read More ›

John Brockman, the literary agent par excellence for materialist scientists intent on making their materialism available to the wider public, has finally put together the anti-ID collection to best all anti-ID collections.

Intelligent Thought: Science Versus the Intelligent Design Movement
Edited by John Brockman

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/it06/it06_index.html.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction —John Brockman
Publisher & Editor, Edge; Editor, What We Believe but Cannot Prove

In some ways, the media chatter provoked by the intelligent-design movement has made collective fools of large segments of the American public. Educated Americans are dumbstruck by the attempt of the state of Kansas to officially redefine science to include the supernatural. Europeans cannot believe that such an argument should be raging in the twenty-first century—and in the United States, of all places, the seat of our most advanced technology and a leader in so many areas of scientific research.

Intelligent Design: The Faith the Dare Not Speak Its Name —Jerry Coyne
Evolutionary Biologist; Professor, Department of Ecology and Evolution, University of Chicago; Author (with H. Allen Orr), Speciation

Not only is ID markedly inferior to Darwinism at explaining and understanding nature but in many ways it does not even fulfill the requirements of a scientific theory.

The Good Fight — Leonard Susskind
Physicist, Stanford University; Author, The Cosmic Landscape

I suspect there is more at stake than biology textbooks in Kansas. As a longtime observer of the science-government-politics triangle, it looks to me as if there is another hidden agenda: to discredit the legitimate scientific community. A well-respected scientific community can be a major inconvenience if one is trying to ignore global warming, or build unworkable missile-defense systems, or construct multibillion-dollar lasers in the unlikely hope of initiating practicable nuclear fusion.

The Hoax of Intelligent Design and How it Was Perpetrated — Daniel C. Dennett
Philosopher; University Professor, Co-Director, Center for Cognitive Studies, Tufts University; Author, Breaking the Spell

Evolutionary biology certainly hasn’t explained everything that perplexes biologists, but intelligent design hasn’t yet tried to explain anything at all.

Consciousness: The Achilles Heel of Darwinism? Thank God, Not Quite — Nicholas Humphrey
Psychologist, London School of Economics; Author, Seeing Red

So, here’s the irony. Belief in special creation will very likely encourage believers to lead biologically fitter lives. Thus one of the particular ways in which consciousness could have won out in evolution by natural selection could have been precisely by encouraging us to believe that we have not evolved by natural selection….Anyone for “natural creationism”?

Human Evolution: The Evidence — Tim D. White
Paleontologist, and U.C. Berkeley Professor; Co-director, the Middle Awash project, the world’s largest and most successful scientific research effort into human origins and evolution.

A denial of evolution — however motivated — is a denial of evidence, a retreat from reason to ignorance.

The “Great” Transition — Neil H. Shubin
Evolutionary Biologist, University of Chicago; Specialist in the evolutionary synthesis of expeditionary paleontology, developmental genetics, and genomics

When we look back after 370 million years of evolution, the invasion of land by fish appears special. However, if we could transport ourselves by time machine to this early period, it isn’t clear whether we would notice anything extraordinary. We would see a lot of fish, some of them big and some of them small, all of them struggling to survive and reproduce. Only now, 370 million years later, do we see that one of those fish sat at the base of a huge branch of the tree of life — a branch that includes everything from salamanders to humans. (see excerpt below)

Intelligent Aliens — Richard Dawkins
Evolutionary Biologist, Charles Simonyi Professor For The Understanding Of Science, Oxford University; Author, The Ancestor’s Tale

Natural selection is not some desperate last resort of a theory. It is an idea whose plausibility and power hits you between the eyes with a stunning force, once you understand it in all its elegant simplicity. Read More ›

There is no conflict between institutionally objective science and religion.

Remarks of John H. Calvert, Esq.
Presented on April 29, 2006, at the Northern District of California Judicial Conference Litigating Morality

I wish to think the organizers for the invitation. But also I would like to applaud them for including this item on the agenda. In my view the decision tree about religion, ethics, morals and even government, starts with a very simple question: “Are we designs or occurrences?” The question we are addressing today is how should science and government respond to it? Should they deal with it objectively or should they prejudge the question and permit only one of the two competing possibilities? Along these lines this panel has been asked to address the current conflict between science and religion, particularly in the area of origins.

I don’t believe there is a conflict between institutionally objective origins science and religion. That kind of science objectively seeks an inference to the best current explanation using the scientific method. It is a quest for more reliable explanations, not pre-ordained ones. This kind of science should not conflict with any religion because it is the weight of the evidence, not bias, that drives explanation.

The conflict arises when science abandons this approach, particularly in an area of science that unavoidably impacts religion – science that seeks to investigate and explain the origin of life and its diversity. Where do we come from? As explained recently by Cardinal Christopher Schönborn, this question is key to the formation of our world views. This is because what we believe about where we come from is INSEPARABLE from what we believe about where we should be going.

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In the comments here someone tried to say that RM+NS only applies after DNA and ribosomes have already appeared on the scene. This is nonsense. Read More ›

This [quantum uncertainty] is something biologists, almost universally, have not yet come to grips with. And its consequences are enormous. It certainly means that we should wonder more than we currently do about the saying that life is made of “mere” matter….

This means that absolute materialism, a view that control and predictability and ultimate explanation are possible, breaks down in a way that is biologically significant. Read More ›

Notable Book Reviews (by Jason Rosenhouse) shows that attempts are being made to discredit Hubert Yockey’s work, particularly his last book on the origin of life published in 2004:

reviewer Chris Adami:

many derivations in this book (all of them already present in the 1992 version) are deeply flawed either mathematically, or by the use of inappropriate biological assumptions, or both.

What is most surprising is that such a volume could pass an impartial peer review process. Cambridge University Press would do well to examine the circumstances of this and the previous book’s approval and editing process.

Adami is recommeding an investigation into Yockey’s 1992 book, Information Theory and Molecular Biology? Come on guys, why wait this long? Read More ›

It’s with sadness I announce that Henry Morris died Saturday evening (2.25.06). Henry Morris was a great man, and all critics of Darwinian evolution are in his debt for maintaining pressure on this pseudoscience when so much of the Western world capitulated to it. As I wrote last year at this time (go here) in reference to a conversation with Michael Ruse about Henry Morris’s significance: During our conversation, Ruse commented that for all his disagreements with the young earth creationists, and Henry Morris in particular, he did give them credit for, as he put it, “keeping this issue alive.” The “issue” here was the debate over biological evolution and, in particular, the possibility of design providing a viable alternative Read More ›

Arguments we’ve heard many times before and don’t want to hear again. If you insist on boring us with them you won’t be with us for long. Many of these can be found in the Pandamonium game. If you want to wage battles with these arguments go there and fight the pandas instead of us. Who Designed the Designer This 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 ›

Here are a two letters seeking fairer treatment for ID from the Brazilian Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS): Read More ›