Author: David Klinghoffer
Rediscovering Conservatism: The Evolutionary Heresy of Richard M. Weaver
Somewhat unlike its current form, conservatism in its modern-day inception was about ideas and their consequences. It was primarily a philosophical dissection of what ails our culture. So Richard M. Weaver put it in the famous title of his 1948 book, Ideas Have Consequences. A professor of English at the University of Chicago, a Southerner who looked back on the lost culture of the South as the Western world’s last surviving “non-materialist” civilization, Weaver was a Darwin critic. That fact comes out again and again in his books. In his view, Darwinism was among the chief ideas roiling the culture and with the most disastrous results. In this series, we are in the process of taking a glance back at Read More ›
Richard M. Weaver, Conservative Intellectual Icon and Darwin-Doubter
What has conservatism come to? John Derbyshire, an inveterate Darwin booster and atheist, has an online diary entry up at National Review Online trying to explain to himself why, since life develops so readily and spontaneously from non-life, the universe nevertheless seems so strangely silent. SETI detects no hint of communication floating to us through the vacuum of space from elsewhere. Derbyshire tries to set things right between reality and himself through a series of ad hoc solutions — the details of which don’t matter. What’s interesting is to observe that when conservative intellectuals talk about the Darwin problem, and that is rare, this is pretty much all you are likely to get. It didn’t use to be this way. Read More ›
At BioLogos, a Disregard for the Truth about David Coppedge
The BioLogos Foundation is a group of Christian theistic evolution advocates who published a distorting review of Stephen Meyer’s Signature in the Cell by “living legend” Dr. Francisco Ayala. Dr. Ayala patently hadn’t read the book, as president Dr. Darrel Falk was surely aware. Fresh from that unfortunate display, BioLogos now slurs David Coppedge of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory based on an article from a really sterling peer-reviewed journal, the Huffington Post. Whoever wrote the unsigned “news” item for BioLogos cites as his lone source the piece by Steven Newton, of the Darwinist lobby group National Center for Science Education. Newton’s reporting is none too accurate itself, but BioLogos improved on Newton by introducing falsehoods not even found in the Read More ›
Coppedge Meets Kafka
When I first read the complaint filed in the David Coppedge case against NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, I had a sense of déjà vu.
Why David Coppedge’s Story Isn’t Being Told
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” That’s the memorable opening line in Joan Didion’s essay “The White Album” and, in following the Darwin debate, I often think of it. Making sense of disparate personal experiences and bits of information gleaned from the news or other sources, we are powerfully moved to weave a narrative that makes sense of it all. Darwinians and creationists alike have complained precisely that intelligent design refuses to offer a tidy historical narrative of how a designer might have exercised “his” creative influence. This refusal annoys and confuses people beyond belief. Of course, some stories are true. Others are fabrications, maintained only by steadfastly turning your face away from contrary evidence. Either way, human Read More ›