Category: Faith & Science
Hijacking Intelligent Design in Utah
While it’s frustrating when critics of intelligent design mischaracterize what ID is about, it’s even worse when people billing themselves as friends of ID do the same thing. As the term “intelligent design” has increasingly entered the public discourse, the number of people misusing the term to advance their own agendas by calling it “design” has increased. Take the recent proposal by a Utah legislator for something he calls “divine design,” by which he clearly seems to mean creationism. According to a recent article in the Salt Lake City Tribune: Evolution has not been a big issue in Utah until now. On June 3, Sen. Chris Buttars of West Jordan said he would propose giving equal time to what he Read More ›
Smithsonian Premiere of Privileged Planet Tonight; Seth’s Free Help for Critics
The long-awaited screening of The Privileged Planet documentary at the Smithsonian takes place this evening in Washington, D.C. Stay tuned for some first-hand reporting of the event later tonight and on Friday from Rob Crowther. In the meantime, I want to express my heartfelt appreciation to all of the Darwinists who provided free publicity for the screening by denouncing a film they had never even seen. (If they had seen the film, they would have known that it doesn’t deal with biological evolution. See Rob Crowther and Bruce Chapman’s prior posts, here and here, respectively.) After tonight’s screening, I’m sure we can look forward to still more encores from the pro-Darwin chorus. Keeping in mind that the most vocal critics Read More ›
Not The Flat Earth Myth Again!
CSC fellow Jonathan Wells wrote a short response taking a Nature letter writer to task for spreading the old flat-earth BS knee deep. The spherical shape of the Earth was known to the ancient Greeks, who even made some pretty good estimates of its circumference. Christian theologians likewise knew that the Earth was a sphere. The only two Christian writers who seem to have advocated a flat Earth were a 4th-century heretic, Lactantius, and an obscure 6th-century eccentric, Cosmas Indicopleustes. And he makes a couple of suggestions of how to keep your feet clean in those Darwinian pastures. For an objective and very readable account of the Flat Earth Myth, see Jeffrey Burton Russell, Inventing the Flat Earth (Praeger, 1991).
Nature Suffers the Wrath of Darwinists Scorned
There’s no doubt that Nature got an earful for publishing an article in which writer Geoff Brumfiel didn’t adaquately skewer the theory of intelligent design. Nor do the letter writers think he delivered a satisfactorily vicious enough savaging to the theory’s proponents. One letter writer proclaimed: ID creationism is not science, despite the editors’ suggestion that ID “tries to use scientific methods to find evidence of God in nature”. Rather, advocates of ID pretend to use scientific methods to support their religious preconceptions. Another was aghast that Nature published a short sidebar that actually verified some of the persecution scientists suffer for criticizing Darwinian evolution or even mentioning ID.
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.