Category: Faith & Science
Evolution: A Word We Can All Love
According to Neo-Darwinism, once the first lusty cell leapt onto the stage of the world, purely impersonal, material processes reigned — a blind watchmaker and less than blind. It was a mindless mechanism. This is quite different from the teleological evolution that some, including the Catholic Church, have considered a possibility. Darwininian evolution possesses no distant goal nor is man the twinkle in the eye of any god.
“We Are Not Some…Meaningless Product of Evolution,” New Pope Says
In a homily at his installation on Sunday, Pope Benedict XVI made his first comment on evolution: We are not some casual and meaningless product of evolution. Each of us is the result of a thought of God. Each of us is willed, each of us is loved, each of us is necessary. It will be interesting to see if the news media will report about this, given their interest in the last Pope’s statement on evolution.
Darwinist Op-Ed in NYT Peddles Theology and Misrepresents the Pope
To the Editor: Jim Holt’s piece “Unintelligent Design” is filled with the usual Darwinist canards about how various designs found in living things are suboptimal according to the writer’s undefined and untested opinions on optimality. That’s all standard fare — chock full of unexamined theological presuppositions (of the “God wouldn’t have done it that way” variety) and not worth a response. Holt also trots out the usual nonsense about Pope John Paul II somehow accepting Darwinian evolution. The Pope’s 1996 message on evolution simply states that evolution (in the sense of common descent, not the materialist Darwinian mechanism) is “more than an hypothesis,” which is certainly a true statement about modern biology. Yet in the same message the Pope explicitly Read More ›
Darwin, Derbyshire and the Dogma of the Gaps
John Derbyshire of The Corner, and Darwinists on every street corner, insist that we should never cram God into the gaps of our scientific knowledge. As if detecting design meant cramming the designer into the work itself: Imagine Leonardo da Vinci trapped inside the Mona Lisa. Derbyshire proceeds apace: “History shows that these puzzles always get resolved sooner or later in a natural way, … sending the ‘God of the Gaps’ traipsing off to find a new place where he can hang his starry cloak for a while.” Bracket off for the moment that this particular history of modern science is an urban legend. Derbyshire’s argument falls apart all by itself, apart from the historical record. Because more and more Read More ›
Derbyshire II: Of Bones and Beads
John Derbyshire recently rebutted a series of objections against Darwinism and, in the process, leveled a series of objections against intelligent design. He dismisses design by ignoring the actual arguments of its theorists and shadowboxing with letter writers instead. He shows, thereby, a lack of seriousness on his own part by trivializing and demeaning scholars whose views he apparently has not really bothered to understand. One problem is that Derbyshire’s objections against design theory often state the positions of leading design theorists–in other words, he agrees with leading design proponents without even realizing it. For instance, one of his blog visitors tried to refute Darwinism by asserting, “The fossil record is incomplete.” Derbyshire responded, “Well, duh. Fossilization only happens under Read More ›