Category: Culture
Bruce Chapman on “Hide the Decline,” the Mantra of Corruption
Discovery Institute President Bruce Chapman has written an insightful essay examining the broader significance of the ClimateGate scandal, including its implications for the Darwin-ID debate. Noting that certain major media outlets have tried to spike the ClimateGate story, Chapman observes that “the story is just too compelling to suppress in other outlets and on the Internet.” But he goes on to ask: what will it take for the media to take up the exactly parallel case of scientists who question the ability of Darwinian natural selection to explain the origin of life and the development of species? In several instances (the Richard Sternberg case, the Guillermo Gonzalez case), email trails have shown a similar attitude of entitlement and coercion. And Read More ›
Wesley Smith on “The New Inquisition: Ideology’s Corruption of Science”
Wesley J. Smith has an excellent post at his First Things blog on how the recent ClimateGate scandal is just a symptom of a much broader problem involving the ideological corruption of science: Global warming isn’t the only field in which we have witnessed this kind of brazen ideological corruption of science in recent years. I have seen the same approach taken repeatedly against heterodox views in the human cloning/ESCR controversy, to the point that people have been driven off of faculties or denied tenure. My colleagues at the Discovery Institute face a similar buzz saw in their pursuit of intelligent design hypothesis, and then are taunted by the censors for not being published in peer reviewed journals. Indeed, when Read More ›
At Least The ClimateGate Scientists Didn’t Admit Going to Church
The silence of the ‘pro-science’ blogsphere on the ClimateGate scandal is remarkable.For years, readers of Pharyngula, Panda’s Thumb, Neurologica, WhyEvolutionIsTrue, Denialism, Respectful Insolence, and other militantly ‘pro-science’ blogs have been treated to rants about the need to protect the integrity of science from frauds and ideologically motivated practitioners. Of course, ‘protection of the integrity of science’ in the faux ‘pro-science’ blogsphere has generally meant suppression of skeptics who question so-called ‘consensus science’ on Darwinism and on Anthropogenic Global Warming. ‘Protection of science’ has more often that not entailed personal invective, recourse to ‘consensus’, advocacy of professional destruction of skeptics, deference to scientific authorities, censorship, and judicial coercion. The ClimateGate e-mails and data sets obtained from the Climate Research Unit in Read More ›
Unbelievers at the Holidays: Two Different Takes on Why There Are Still Doubts About Darwin
It’s the question that bothers many Darwinists: why doesn’t everyone believe us? This is compounded of course by the fact that most of the people Darwinists interact with in the mainstream media believe everything anyone in the scientific establishment tells them (see: ClimateGate) as if it were gospel truth, causing them to wonder why a solid year of attention paid to Charles Darwin and his 150-year-old book isn’t convincing anyone. As John West explains at ID the Future podcast, people have good reasons for rejecting Darwinian evolution, based on both the scientific evidence and the way it purports to overthrow long-cherished ideas about human dignity, morality, and God. Click here to listen. This is a hard pill for many Darwinists Read More ›
Signature in the Cell Named One of Top Books of the Year by Times Literary Supplement
Stephen Meyer’s Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design is being named one of the top books of 2009 in the prestigious Times Literary Supplement (TLS) annual “Books of the Year” issue, officially due out later this week. The selection was made by prominent philosopher (and noted atheist) Thomas Nagel at New York University. The books issue is not online yet, but the TLS website has posted a preview of Nagel’s endorsement of the book: Stephen C. Meyer’s Signature in the Cell: DNA and the evidence for Intelligent Design (HarperCollins) is a detailed account of the problem of how life came into existence from lifeless matter — something that had to happen before the process of Read More ›