Banned Book Week and Intelligent Design Part 3: Another Darwinist Law Professor Supports Censorship of Pro-ID Views (Updated)
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The Devil’s Delusion
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 October 6, 2008 Banned Book Week and Intelligent Design Part 3: Another Darwinist Law Professor Supports Censorship of Pro-ID Views (Updated)
October 5, 2008 Banned Book Week and Intelligent Design Part 2: Attempts to Ban ID from Public Schools
October 3, 2008 Banned Book Week and Intelligent Design Part 1: Darwinist Law Professor Supports Library Censorship of Pro-ID Books
"Consider the experience of two librarians who received copies of two intelligent design books, Darwin’s Black Box by Michael Behe and Darwin on Trial by Philip Johnson, as donations to their high school collections. When the librarians refused to put the books on the school library shelves, they were accused of censorship. In fact, exercising their professional judgment, they concluded that these books had 'little or no value to our students and come from those with ulterior motives.'""Accused of censorship"? I wonder why! Newman praises the librarians for using their "professional judgment"--but we will analyze his endorsement of their censorship in more detail below. October 2, 2008 Sacking Little Green Footballs' Outrageous Claim That "Discovery Institute Is in League With Islamist Creationists" (Updated)
Earlier this year, the popular blog Little Green Footballs (LGF) made an outrageous attempt to link Discovery Institute to the Muslim creationist Harun Yahya (a.k.a. Adnan Oktar). Their post claimed, “Discovery Institute is in league with Islamist creationists, a fact that is indisputably true,” specifically referring to Yahya / Oktar. Discovery Institute's president Bruce Chapman dignified their charges with a forceful refutation, but LGF’s reply to Mr. Chapman was basically a string of ad hominem attacks that relied on a tenuous chain of distorted and incomplete facts. If there was any doubt left that Discovery Institute and Islamic creationists are not "in league," consider a recent interview with Harun Yahya/Adnan Oktar in Der Spiegel where he expressed his strong dislike for intelligent design (ID): SPIEGEL ONLINE: To what extent were you influenced by the Christian fundamentalists from American and Europe, from the proponents of so-called Intelligent Design?That pretty much drives the last nail into the coffin holding LGF’s claim that Discovery Institute is "in league" with such "Islamist creationists.” Their claim is certainly not “indisputable,” and it is by no means true. October 1, 2008 Who in Texas Is Afraid of a Little Critical Analysis of Evolution?
Texas Darwinists are afraid of language in the Texas Science Standards that requires students to learn about the “strengths and weaknesses” of evolution, justifying their fear by claiming that when it comes to neo-Darwinian evolution, “[t]here may be some questions that may yet to be answered, but nothing that's to the level of a weakness.” Nothing that’s to the level of a weakness? That’s a pretty dogmatic and unscientific claim. If this Texas Darwinist is right, then I suppose that these comments by leading scientists must not show that there is anything that rises “to the level of a weakness” in neo-Darwinian evolution:
Continue reading "Who in Texas Is Afraid of a Little Critical Analysis of Evolution?" » AP Texas Spins Story About Scientists Uniting Against Teaching the Controversy
The latest from the Associated Press out in Texas (via Houston Chronicle) reports that "Scientists from Texas universities on Tuesday denounced what they called supernatural and religious teaching in public school science classrooms and voiced opposition to attempts to water down evolution instruction." We covered the Texas science standards last week, noting that Darwinists there oppose teaching the strengths and weaknesses of evolution. In the AP article, no explanation is given for their opposition to the "strengths and weaknesses" language except the unsupported claim that thoroughly examining Darwin's theory in the classroom is something only creationists do. Actually, AP reporter Kelley Shannon is pretty sure that the whole thing is a creationist ploy to teach religion in our schools. That's why she makes a point of giving credibility to the several Darwinists in the story before calling McLeroy a creationist, then discrediting the position she assigned him: Continue reading "AP Texas Spins Story About Scientists Uniting Against Teaching the Controversy" » September 30, 2008 On Non-Nihilistic "Scientific" Atheism
Nobel laureate in physics Steven Weinberg recently revamped his 2008 Phi Beta Kappa Oration at Harvard University for an essay entitled "Without God" in The New York Review of Books. As the essay moves toward a close, Weinberg tells us: the worldview of science is rather chilling. Not only do we not find any point to life laid out for us in nature, no objective basis for our moral principles, no correspondence between what we think is the moral law and the laws of nature, of the sort imagined by philosophers from Anaximander and Plato to Emerson. We even learn that the emotions that we most treasure, our love for our wives and husbands and children, are made possible by chemical processes in our brains that are what they are as a result of natural selection acting on chance mutations over millions of years. And yet we must not sink into nihilism or stifle our emotions. At our best we live on a knife-edge, between wishful thinking on one hand and, on the other, despair. Answering his own rhetorical question, Dr. Weinberg believes September 29, 2008 Anglican Spokesman Recommends Church Apology to Darwin Over Legendary Affairs
The media is abuzz about a suggestion made by a Church of England spokesman that it should apologize for initially opposing Darwinian evolution back in Darwin's day. An Associated Press article in the International Herald Tribune says that "[t]he church did not take an official stand against Darwin's theories, but many senior Anglicans reacted with hostility to his ideas, arguing against them at public debates." The example given is the account of Bishop Wilberforce: "At a University of Oxford debate in 1860, the bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce, famously asked scientist Thomas Huxley whether it was through his grandfather or his grandmother that he claimed to be descended from a monkey." According to the legend, Huxley reportedly replied that he would "rather have an ape for an ancestor than a bishop." This has led to claims that Huxley vanquished Wilberforce, who in legend is reported to have said, "The Lord hath delivered him into mine hands." But how much truth is in this legend? Continue reading "Anglican Spokesman Recommends Church Apology to Darwin Over Legendary Affairs" » September 27, 2008 Texas Darwinists Reject the Scientific Method of Analyzing “Strengths and Weaknesses” of Scientific Theories
Over the coming months, the Texas State Board of Education will be deciding whether to remove or bolster its requirement that students learn the "strengths and weaknesses" of scientific theories, "using scientific evidence and information." The pro-Darwin lobby group National Center for Science Education (NCSE) does not want that standard to be applied specifically to evolution. In fact, Texas Darwinists want that language completely removed from the Texas Science Standards. To reasonable people, it is apparent that investigating the “strengths and weaknesses [of scientific theories] using scientific evidence and information” is exactly what scientists do all the time. Discovery Institute believes that if scientists can dispute the core claims of neo-Darwinism (as these scientists do), then students can learn about those views: |
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Last week, I 
