Category: Culture
Did Judge Jones Get Anything Right in his Activist Ruling Against Intelligent Design?
David Opderbeck, Professor of law at Seton Hall University School of Law, has in the past offered some insightful criticisms of the Dover ruling, including the facts that Judge Jones: “misrepresents key ID arguments by stating that they are only negative arguments against evolution rather than positive evidence for design” “went far beyond the case / controversy at hand by giving his primer on whether ID is ‘science’” used “criteria for determining what constitutes ‘science’” that seemed “muddled and dangerous” “misrepresents the merits of key ID arguments, in particular irreducible complexity” Now over at the pro-Darwin BioLogos blog, Professor Opderbeck writes “In Defense of Dover.” Well, only sort of. Professor Opderbeck qualifies his post’s pro-Judge Jones title, stating: “I still Read More ›
Epperson v. Arkansas: It’s Illegal to Ban Evolution, How About Intelligent Design?
Epperson v. Arkansas was the first case regarding the teaching of evolution to reach the U.S. Supreme Court. The decision was handed down in 1968, where the Court effectively declared it illegal to ban the teaching of evolution. 1. Summary An Arkansas statute descended from the Tennessee “Monkey Law” made it a criminal misdemeanor for teachers in state-supported schools to teach evolution and to use textbooks that taught the theory.28 Despite this law, in 1965 the Little Rock, Arkansas School Board gave biology teacher Susan Epperson a new textbook containing material on evolution.29 To avoid criminal penalty and dismissal, she sought a declaration that the Arkansas statute was unconstitutional.30 The U.S. Supreme Court sided with Epperson and held that the Read More ›
More People Flock to Second Day of Colorado Conference to Hear Behe and Berlinski
More than a thousand people attended the second day of the Legacy of Darwin ID Conference this weekend in Castle Rock, Colorado. Saturday morning started off with a strong talk by Lehigh University biochemist Michael Behe, who synthesized the main points of his books Darwin’s Black Box and The Edge of Evolution. Behe, in his usual winsome and accessible style, drove home just how much empirical evidence has accumulated in recent years demonstrating the sharp limits to the Darwinian mechanism of natural selection and random mutations. During the question period that followed, two people offered long-winded “questions” to Behe that seemed to come straight from the talking points of the National Center for Science Education.
Free Speech Prevails as Stephen Meyer Speaks on Intelligent Design to Huge Crowd at Colorado Conference
Updated photo from Friday night: Castle Rock, Colorado — Despite the first major snowstorm of the season, and unrelenting efforts by malicious Darwinists to prevent people from registering, a huge crowd of around 1,000 people showed up Friday night to hear Dr. Stephen Meyer present the DNA evidence for intelligent design based on his new book Signature in the Cell. Meyer, Michael Behe, David Berlinski, and myself are in Colorado to speak at the Legacy of Darwin ID Conference sponsored by Shepherd Project Ministries. On Saturday, Michael Behe will present the evidence against modern Darwinism from his books Darwin’s Black Box and The Edge of Evolution; David Berlinski will talk about The Devil’s Delusion and The Deniable Darwin; and I Read More ›
Who are the real proponents of hate speech on campus?
Supporters of Darwin’s theory continue to distinguish themselves on America’s college campuses—not for their reason and logic, but for their incredible ill manners and an almost pathological inability to engage in civil discussion. Last week, a factually-challenged attack on intelligent design was published in The Nevada Sagebrush, the student newspaper at the University of Nevada, Reno. Nothing new in that; I see ill-informed articles on intelligent design all the time. But after my colleague Rob Crowther posted a short comment suggesting that readers might actually want to hear from intelligent design proponents themselves (imagine that!), the Darwinist thought-police came out in force. One writer who is so courageous that he hides behind the pseudonym “bobxxxx” fulminated: Robert Crowther… and the Read More ›