Category: Faith & Science
Fodor on Darwinism: “One sees, even without God, how this Darwinian story could turn out to be radically wrong.”
Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini aren’t making many friends among evolutionists with their new book What Darwin Got Wrong. Salon magazine published an interview with Fodor today in which he has some interesting things to say about the attacks he’s received online, about whether he is providing aid and succor to the ID community, and what he thinks is wrong with modern evolutionary theory. As you explain in the book, one of the problems with Darwinism is that Darwin is inventing explanations for something that happened long ago, over a long period of time. Isn’t that similar to creationism? Creationism isn’t the only doctrine that’s heavily into post-hoc explanation. Darwinism is too. If a creature develops the capacity to spin Read More ›
How to Completely Misunderstand Intelligent Design: A Response to Stephen Barr
Intelligent design (ID) has attracted its fair share of critics. If it’s not the fulminations of New Atheists, it’s extremely uncharitable readings from some Catholic intellectuals who think they smell mechanism or interventionism. While the criticisms vary, they tend to have one thing in common: they’re based, not on actual ID arguments, but on stereotypes and misunderstandings of those arguments. It’s hard to find ID critics who actually describe an ID argument correctly before proceeding to refute it. Catholic physicist Stephen Barr is a constitutionally uncharitable critic of ID. It’s not clear that he has even read the books that he criticizes. But he criticizes them nonetheless. In a February 9 diatribe in First Things, he makes several complaints. For Read More ›
Primordial Soup? Would You Believe…
Life arose without design or direction from any intelligent agent. Would you believe it did so in a sun-warmed ocean surface? No? Would you believe an earth-heated vent at the bottom of the same ocean? Would you believe an office microwave that hasn’t been cleaned since the Bush Administration? The past week’s startling news of backpedaling from the “primordial soup” theory rang a bell, though I wasn’t instantly able to say whose comedy routine it put me in mind of. Hm, was it Monty Python? ScienceDaily carries the story: For 80 years it has been accepted that early life began in a “primordial soup” of organic molecules before evolving out of the oceans millions of years later. Today the “soup” Read More ›
Getting ID Right: More Response to the Beliefnet Review of Signature in the Cell
The second, third, and fourth installments of the review of Steve Meyer’s book Signature in the Cell are up over at Beliefnet. (I responded to the first installment here.) Although this series appears on Scot McKnight’s Jesus Creed blog, they’re written by anonymous blogger “RJS.” I’m guessing that RJS is a scientist, or is in a sensitive academic position, and doesn’t want to risk banishment for saying reasonable things about an ID argument. If so, that tells us something of the social pressures against writing publicly about this issue.
Just a Coincidence?
I admit to a fond wish to impute significance to coincidences. Cynics such as Matthew Cobb writing at Jerry Coyne’s blog, Why Evolution Is True, explain away such things, like they do absolutely everything, as a function of survival value tucked into our genome from ancient days. In some recent posts, Cobb was full of mockery for people like me: