Category: Faith & Science
On Darwinian Atheists Lecturing Religious People on Proper Belief in God
I love watching atheists try to tell religious people what they should believe about God. I’m not talking about atheists trying to convince religious people not to believe in God. We expect that. I’m talking about atheists telling religious people how to continue properly believing in God. I find this incredibly amusing, because, you know, atheists are experts in things like keeping faith. Michael Ruse is a prime specimen. An atheist (he says “I find it a great relief no longer to believe in God”) and self-declared “ex-Christian,” a few years back Ruse wrote a book titled Can a Darwinian be a Christian? and answered “Absolutely!” (p. 217) Now, in a recent piece in the UK Guardian, Ruse lectures none Read More ›
Did Zimmerman Argument Crash And Burn By Design Or By Chance?
Responding to Zimmerman’s latest blog is almost too easy. All a response to this really requires is to post a few photos of clearly designed items that have had amazing, spectacularly bad problems. (The Hindenberg for instance. Or any Toyota apparently.) How stupid, yes I said stupid, do you have to be to equate bad design with no design? How is it that if the body is poorly designed, humans have risen to the pinnacle of life? If we were blind as bats say, would we have been better off? Would we have stumbled over the secret of time-travel by now? Zimmerman’s argument is so weak as to be laughable. In fact, I had to stop my inelegant laughing so Read More ›
Why Does Ruse Act Like He’s an Expert on Theology?
Several months ago, I participated in a two-hour radio “debate” with Michael Ruse (along with Guillermo Gonzalez and Carlos Calle) about design in cosmology and astronomy. Several times, Michael Ruse lectured me about Christian theology. But it had a surreal quality to it, since he was talking about the theology he (as an agnostic) preferred, but he kept acting as if he was representing Christian theology accurately. I finally insisted that I actually did know a good bit about theology and that he was just making stuff up. Ruse’s responses to Stephen Fuller in the Guardian over ID have that same, surreal quality. For instance, here’s how he distinguishes the difference between the Protestant and Catholic views of justification:
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 ›
Response to Michael Tkacz’s Critique of ID
In my previous installment, I discussed St. Thomas’s views of creation and his understanding of how God interacts with the world. The subject could easily fill a long book, of course, but I hope to have provided enough to serve adequately as background for evaluating the criticisms of ID from a few Thomists. One such Thomist is Gonzaga University philosopher Michael Tkacz, who wrote an article criticizing ID in This Rock magazine, published by Catholic Answers, back in 2008. I read both This Rock and the Catholic Answers website frequently. Both are generally very reliable, orthodox sources of information. So the piece would never have seen the light of day if it had been called: “Why God Is Only Allowed Read More ›