Author: David Klinghoffer
Berlinski, Wells & ID Take Los Angeles
After having the premier of Darwin’s Dilemma canceled by the California Science Center, Avi Davis’s American Freedom Alliance really pulled things together in heroic fashion in Los Angeles. The AFA found a new venue, hardly inferior, where academic freedom may be less endangered: the University of Southern California. The sizable crowd on Sunday night of about 230 people was appreciative and intelligent. There were university students representing both sides of the Darwin debate, high school students from a church school in Santa Monica on a field trip, and a mix of other folks from the community. The film is a powerful document. The word that came to my mind watching it was “spooky.” Besides very lucidly and compellingly laying out Read More ›
Genesis and the Scandal of Jewish Indifference
A couple of weeks ago I got an email from an editor at a Jewish publication soliciting from me an article “related to creationism.” He asked that it be pegged to the coming Sabbath when Jews across the spectrum of Judaism begin a new cycle of Torah readings. That cycle begins with the account of creation in Genesis. The editor seemingly wasn’t aware that I’m not a creationist (i.e., a naïve Biblical literalist), or he didn’t know what the word means, or who knows what. Anyway, I wrote and sent off to him the piece he seemed to urgently want, suspecting even as I did so that it would never run in this particular publication. The Jewish religious world — Read More ›
Richard Dawkins’s Jewish Problem
The Anti-Defamation League, the country’s leading group dedicated to fighting anti-Semitism, is rightly sensitive to the offense of trivializing the Holocaust. Why, then, has the ADL said nothing in protest against the Darwinian biologist and bestselling atheist author Richard Dawkins and his comparison of Darwin doubters to Holocaust deniers? The ADL has objected to attempts to inject Nazi imagery into the health-care reform debate (“Such statements only serve to diminish and trivialize the extent of the Nazi regime’s crimes against humanity”), the abortion debate (“Such analogies can only trivialize and diminish the horror”), the animal-rights debate (“the issue should stand on its own merits, rather than rely on inappropriate comparisons that only serve to trivialize the suffering of the six Read More ›
Irving Kristol, Darwin Doubter, RIP
If you’re ever given a choice between seeing one of two doctors about a health concern, with all else about them being apparently equal, you’d be well advised to choose the older one. Oh but won’t the young guy have all the latest techniques and therapies at his disposal, fresh from med school? Maybe or maybe not. What’s more likely, and more important, is that the seasoned practitioner will have wisdom and experience of the human condition. So too in the political world, where on the conservative side of the spectrum you have “neocons,” “paleocons,” and “theocons.” Those distinctions have always seemed a bit spurious, having to do more with preferences in personal style and social networking than anything else. Read More ›
At Bloggingheads, Fleeing the Ritual Contamination of “Creationism”
The imbroglio over editorial policy at Bloggingheads.tv would be of minor interest if it didn’t present such an evocative window on the psychology of the Darwin-believing community. Did you ever think about what actually drives these people? To recap: Robert Wright, the site’s editor-in-chief, was out of the shop when his staff pulled down an interview, six hours after it was put up, between linguist John McWhorter and biochemist Michael Behe. Somehow, pressure was applied to McWhorter resulting in his actually issuing a public apology. He was forced to cringe and beg forgiveness. Anyone could see the reason he had given offense: McWhorter in the interview expressed undisguised admiration for Behe’s specialty in the intelligent design field, irreducible complexity. When Read More ›