Steve Fuller Returns A.C. Grayling’s Favor

Those of you who read A.C. Grayling’s arrogant and intellectually vacuous thrashing of Steve Fuller’s new book, Dissent Over Descent: Evolution’s 500-Year War on Intelligent Design, will want to know that Fuller now has a reply available at the New Humanist. Grayling’s method is to simplify opponents’ arguments to the point of misrepresenting them. Just as bad, Grayling’s “review” reveals a woefully disappointing grasp of the the origins of modern science and the history of Christianity. One begins to wonder whether the days of truly intellectual atheists are over. Perhaps it is no longer possible for atheists, uneducated in the history of Christianity and its doctrines, to level serious, challenging criticisms of the faith. It seems they just have too Read More ›

Yogi Berra and the God-of-the-Gaps

“Predicting is very difficult, especially when it is about the future,” Yogi Berra is reported to have said. Phillip Johnson, writing in May’s Touchstone, says I think of the great Yogi’s maxim whenever I hear theistic evolutionists warn intelligent design theorists against committing what they call the “God of the gaps” fallacy. Their point is that it is futile to rely on “gaps” that the theory of evolution has not yet explained as places where divine acts might be necessary, because those gaps will inevitably be filled as science progresses. Eventually, God will be squeezed out of these spaces, with consequent embarrassment to the cause of religion. But why think that these “gaps” will ever be filled? As Johnson muses, Read More ›

The Love of the Flies

If you missed “Flies In Danger Escape With Safety Dance,” a story by NPR’s Joe Palca, give it a listen. And don’t forget to check out the videos which show how flies take off from a stationary position. This kind of story puts a damper on the kind of rhetorical jabs commonly heard from Darwinists, such as, “Do we really want to make God responsible for flies and mosquitoes?” Every time someone takes the time to study one of these creatures — in this instance, scientist Michael Michael Dickinson — they come away awestruck, saying things like: “When you see a fly flitting around your hair, or your potato salad, you might see an annoyance,” he [Dickinson] says. “But in Read More ›

A Good Book About Bad Books

If you’re looking for a summary of Benjamin Wiker’s 10 Books That Screwed Up the World: And 5 Others That Didn’t Help, I’ve tried to provide one below. The article was originally written for InsideCatholic.com. If ever there were a book designed specifically for the enjoyment of InsideCatholic readers, surely it is Benjamin Wiker’s new 10 Books that Screwed Up the World: And 5 Others that Didn’t Help. Wiker should be renowned (if he is not already) for Moral Darwinism: How We Became Hedonists–a book that at once exposes both the ancient philosophical antecedents and modern cultural consequences of Darwinism. In the present book, the professor of philosophy at Franciscan University of Steubenville proposes not a new era of book Read More ›

Anti-Evolution Atheists?

The Washington Post‘s Michael Gerson recently wrote: The latest findings of the Pew Forum’s massive and indispensable U.S. Religious Landscape Survey reveal some intriguing confusion among Americans on cosmic issues. About 13 percent of evangelicals, it turns out, don’t believe in a personal God, leading to a shameful waste of golf time on Sunday mornings. And 9 percent of atheists report that they are skeptical of evolution. Are there atheist creationists? Well, there probably aren’t any atheist creationists, although, if Richard Dawkins can be an “Atheist for Jesus,” anything is possible. Yes, these folks may be severely confused (“deluded,” if you prefer). However, perhaps many of these atheists, while not being creationists, are simply skeptical of the Darwinian mechanism. (Gerson Read More ›