At the Dangerous Idea site, a commenter called I’m Skeptical writes: In science, you have to be driven by the evidence. The folks from [Discovery Institute] are driven by their beliefs. They search for evidence to support what they already believe. That’s not scientific method, because it leads them to ignore evidence that doesn’t fit their objective. If you ignore evidence, you can’t hope to move scientific understanding forward. In this post I hope to disabuse Mr. Skeptical of his naïve assumption that “real scientists” (as opposed, in his view, to the researchers at DI) are always dispassionate, always objective, always striving for the truth even if the data are contrary to their cherished shibboleths (nay, especially if the data are Read More ›

This past month has been quite busy, and I have had but little time to respond to some questions on foundations of reality and modern theistic arguments from a budding young philosopher. (BTW, his 3 month post op check up has been positive I take occasion to publicly thank St. Georges Hospital, London and others.) One of the issues that has come up is the link between logic, mathematics, necessary truth and underlying designing mind as credible root of being. Where, we can draw a pivotal lesson from say a watch, which may be accurate but is not truthful, as it computes, but does not contemplate. Minds contemplate, machines only compute, blindly carrying out designed movements constrained by the GIGO Read More ›

Did Charles Darwin ever invoke his own theory in order to justify the extermination of one race by another? If the term “extermination” refers to systematic genocide, the answer is an emphatic “No”; but if “extermination” is defined more broadly to include the displacement and consequent extinction of one race by another, more technologically advanced race in the battle for scarce resources, then I would argue that the answer is “Yes.” I recently came across some highly revealing correspondence between the celebrated author and Anglican divine, Charles Kingsley (see here) and Charles Darwin, whom he greatly admired, (see here) indicating that Darwin, like Kingsley, looked forward to “the higher races of men, when high enough, replacing & clearing off the Read More ›