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Terry Scambray

Why Darwinism can be taught in schools but not ID

Terry Scambray: Ah, the mantra that Americans are addicted to sugary noble lies about their biological and cultural uniqueness is itself a noble lie that the intelligentsia continually uses against their fellow Americans.  It is repeated, for example, when dreadful events occur like the Kennedy assassination or 9/11, the epithet suggesting that Americans can’t stand the truth so they conjure up fantasies which declutter a complicated, messy world full of loose ends.   Read More ›

A Review of Steve Meyer’s The Return of the God Hypothesis

Scambray: Meyer summarizes his thesis early on when he points to three 20th century mutually supporting scientific discoveries that provide strong evidence for belief in the God of Judaism and Christianity. (from review) Read More ›

How Darwinism wound its way into various schemes for improving American society

Scambray: Hofstadter softened Darwin, making his a “conservative” force, supporting the laissez-faire status quo. Others classified Darwin as a change agent, a precursor to social planning. These intermural quarrels aside, Watson demonstrates that progressivism “aimed a dagger at the heart of the Constitution.” … Read More ›

Darwin Devolves: Darwinists see evolution as bottom up; Michael Behe sees it as top down

Scambray: "the polar bear, Behe writes, “adjusted to its harsh environment mainly by degrading its genes that its ancestors already possessed. Despite its impressive abilities, rather than evolving, it has adapted predominately by devolving.” Read More ›

Terry Scambray: A review of Mike Flannery’s book, Nature’s Prophet, on Alfred Russel Wallace

(Wallace, Darwin-s co-theorist, was a working-class stiff whom Darwin’s set elbowed out. He was not a materialist (naturalist) and he thought evolution could be consistent with meaning and spirituality. Darwin abhorred such ideas. This review was originally published at New Oxford Review.) Read More ›

Rodney Stark: A social scientist who begged to differ with the “distinguished bigots” on faith and science

Social scientist Rodney Stark offers an alternative to the Sunday magazine truisms about the relationship between Christianity and science: The basis for much of the antipathy toward Christianity is the image of the medieval Catholic Church fostered by “distinguished bigots,” as Stark calls Edward Gibbon and Voltaire among other Enlightenment notables. Stark, relying on primary source historians like the renowned Marc Bloch, shows, on the contrary, that medieval Catholicism was the breeding ground for modernity. Most, if not all, ancient societies believed in fate. However, Yahweh gave humans the wondrous and terrifying attribute of free will, freedom. Individual freedom in the West then merged with the legacy of Athenian democracy and the Roman republican tradition to form “the new democratic Read More ›