Yesterday, ENV interviewed molecular biophysicist and Discovery Institute fellow Cornelius Hunter on his new web-book Darwin’s Predictions. Our conversation continued: ENV: A typical instance of a failed prediction would be that Darwin himself expected the geology and paleontology would confirm that the earth is at least 400 million years old, because that’s how long he thought it must need to evolve its repertoire of species. We now know that while the earth and life are much older than that, the time frame for the development of most animal body plans or phyla in the Cambrian explosion occurred in a geological flash of probably of less than 10 million years. What do you think is the most devastating failed prediction you Read More ›

The testability of scientific ideas by making predictions about reality is a favorite theme with Darwinists and the atheists who love them. In The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins endorses a new atheist Ten Commandments, whose seventh commandment reads: “Test all things; always check your ideas against the facts, and be read to discard even a cherished belief it if does not conform to them.” Incidentally, that would replace the old seventh commandment, “Thou shalt not commit adultery.” Dawkins hails evolution’s “strong prediction that if a single fossil turned up in the wrong geological stratrum, the theory would be blown out of the water.” He contrasts this with the Bible’s record of predictions. In another New Atheist tract, God: The Failed Read More ›

Is it somehow petty, offensive, exploitative, and beyond the pale to point out how the Holocaust Memorial Museum shooter, who murdered a guard on Wednesday, writes about evolution in his sick manifesto? Should it be considered beneath one’s dignity to quote the man and let his words speak for themselves? James von Brunn, the suspect in question, is a white supremacist, a bitter anti-Semite, a Holocaust-denier, a wacked out conspiracy theorist, who served more than 6 years in a federal prison for attempted kidnapping. All this is fair game to report. Everyone agrees to that. But the fact that he writes of “Natural Law: the species are improved through in-breeding, natural selection and mutation. Only the strong survive. Cross-breeding Whites Read More ›

Editor’s Note: This is crossposted at David Klinghoffer’s Beliefnet blog, Kingdom of Priests. I’m a big fan of Rod Dreher. His Crunchy Con blog rarely fails to enlighten me, so I’ve been looking forward to his reflections on faith and science, generated by his current visit to Cambridge University as a Cambridge-Templeton fellow. Rod blogged today in response to a lecture and discussion in which evolution came up. He writes that “Darwinism wasn’t initially opposed by Christians” and credits William Jennings Bryan with rallying the faithful against evolution. This is worth some further elaboration. How soon did opposition to Darwinism develop? Among whom, and why? The question matters because if anti-Darwin sentiment only developed 60 years after the Origin of Read More ›

Editor’s Note: This is crossposted at David Klinghoffer’s Beliefnet blog, Kingdom of Priests. A pair of dueling websites, one that just went live, are engaged in an important argument over whether religious believers should continue to be fed the “opium of the people.” That’s the famous phrase Marx Karl used to deride all of religion. One kind of faith actually deserves the description, however. It’s called theistic evolution, a convoluted justification for thinking that belief in God and belief in Darwin’s mechanism of blind, churning, unguided, and purposeless evolution can be meaningfully reconciled. The new website is Faith and Evolution, from the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture. It features all kinds of resources — writing and video, debates, Read More ›