Is Great Grandma Ida Getting More Accolades Than She Deserves?

Just as it seemed the hullaballoo about Great Grandma Ida might go on forever, there is just the hint of some perspective on what the fossil find really means. That the hype around Ida is more selling then compelling is beginning to become clear. The New York Time’s business page wrote about how it all seems nicely orchestrated to boost ratings of the History Channel’s accompanying documentary. A tongue in cheek report from a London science writer also helped to highlight the fact that the welcome for Ida has been more than just a little over the top. By the far the most insightful is this post from a science writer at the Smithsonian, offering some more tempered words than Read More ›

Responding to the Youtube Challenge to Discovery Institute: Does Any Critic Out There Understand Intelligent Design? Anyone? …Anyone?

Any critic making the inaccurate claim that Stephen C. Meyer is the “President of the Discovery Institute” is bound to be fairly uninformed about both intelligent design (ID) and the Discovery Institute.1 Thus, when I recently viewed a YouTube video making this very mistake while allegedly “Challenging the Discovery Institute to Discover,” I first thought: Why should I accept a challenge from someone who can’t even correctly “discover” the identity of our organization’s president? Regardless, this video was enlightening, but not in the way that its creators intended. Rather than posing any difficult challenge for ID, the video unwittingly exposes the unfortunate ignorance that apparently abounds regarding the nature of the theory of intelligent design and how we detect and Read More ›

Where Theistic Evolution Leads

Editor’s Note: This is crossposted at David Klinghoffer’s Beliefnet blog, Kingdom of Priests. Some readers thought I was unfair in a previous entry explaining the difference between my perspective on evolution and that of my fellow Beliefnet blogger Dr. Francis Collins over at Science and the Sacred. Am I really not being fair? Well, let’s test that hypothesis by picking out one idea from Dr. Collins’s book and from his website BioLogos. It’s his treatment of the idea that somehow a moral law in every heart points us to the existence of God.  Because BioLogos — or theistic evolution, however we may designate the general approach — surrenders so easily to naturalism, it must be willing to accommodate Darwinism’s explanation Read More ›

Lemur Monkey Falls From the Sky, Robbing Man of Sleep

If they weren’t atheists, you’d think the scientists raising the ballyhoo over Ida were hailing the second coming. Here is yet another icon of evolution. Every time one of these discoveries is made, there’s a huge PR snow job from the Darwin lobby to make it seem like it answers all the questions and objections. I thought Tiktaalik did that. Or maybe Archaeopteryx. It goes at least as far back as Proconsul. Each time the Darwinists seem to forget they already found the missing link — the one fossil to rule them all — and re-find it all over again. At least CBS News was a bit more

Alister McGrath on Augustine and Darwinism

Scientist and theologian Alister McGrath has a new essay over at Christianity Today, “Augustine’s Origin of Species.” Knowing how Augustine has often been co-opted by Darwinians as a proto-Darwinist, I came to this article rather skeptical. But I was delightfully surprised. McGrath notes that Augustine’s dominant image of the natural world’s relation to God is that of a “dormant seed.” As McGrath explains: God creates seeds, which will grow and develop at the right time. Using more technical language, Augustine asks his readers to think of the created order as containing divinely embedded causalities that emerge or evolve at a later stage. Yet Augustine has no time for any notion of random or arbitrary changes within creation. The development of Read More ›