New Scientist and Jerry Coyne’s Responses to ID Advocate Thomas Jefferson: Cases of Necromancy and Alzheimer’s

Responses from the Darwin faithful to anything touching upon intelligent design are often so thoughtless it takes your breath away. I guess this is how they manage to stay impervious to the evidentiary challenge to their religion — they just don’t think it through, or even read it. A single article in a newspaper or journal taxes their ability simply to read what a person says and respond to that, rather than to what they imagine he would say. Consider the cases of Ewen Callaway and Jerry Coyne. When Stephen C. Meyer wrote an op-ed in the Boston Globe on Thomas Jefferson as a proto-ID supporter, outraged science journalist Callaway at the New Scientist couldn’t even mount an argument. He Read More ›

H.P. Lovecraft, Darwinism’s Visionary Storyteller

Picture a majestic T. rex receiving the tablets of the Ten Commandments in its undersized forelimbs, or an elegant octopus crucified on an old rugged cross with four crossbars instead of one. Such images are what Kenneth Miller presumably has in mind with his comforting Darwinist thought that intelligent creatures were guaranteed to pop up even in the course of an evolutionary process of purely unguided, purposeless churning. You see, he tells us, evolution was bound to “converge” (as theorized by Simon Conway Morris) not necessarily on a human being but on — well, as Miller has said, it could have been “a big-brained dinosaur, or… a mollusk with exceptional mental capabilities.” Just for fun, let’s grant the scientific merit Read More ›

Coyne’s Confusion: How a Prominent Scientific Atheist Can’t Agree With Himself About Metaphysical Naturalism

Advocates of Intelligent Design and others who practice skepticism toward the pomposities of much of modern Darwinism can be forgiven a little amusement when they see their detractors engaged in an internal squabble that highlights the philosophical absurdities of the scientistic rationalism that pervades much of modern Darwinism. Ever since the publication of Jerry Coyne’s New Republic article, “Seeing and Believing,” the Darwinists have been engaged in a three-way tug of war over the issue of “accommodationism.” The gnawing and snarling has pitted three camps against each other in a contest over the right way to wage the PR war against the Intelligent Design movement for the hearts and minds of the scientifically naive. The Three Non-Amigos There are, first, Read More ›

New Law Review Article Surveys Case Law on Teaching Evolution

In May, pro-Darwin-only education advocates issued a press release lamenting that “25 percent of biology teachers do not know it is unconstitutional to teach creationism.” Then last month the National Center for Science Education (NCSE) publicized its new “Creationism and the Law” web page, which states that “Since 1968…, U.S. courts have consistently held that ‘creationism’ is a particular religious viewpoint and that teaching it in public schools would violate the First Amendment of the Constitution.” While these statements are legally correct, they leave out a crucial point of law that the NCSE may not wish to publicize: “scientific critiques of prevailing scientific theories [may] be taught provided that such curricula are enacted with the clear secular intent of enhancing Read More ›

Clarity and Confusion: Stephen Barr Answers My Questions

Stephen Barr at First Things has responded to the three questions I posed to him in our online dialogue about evolution, God, Christianity, and intelligent design. Parts of Barr’s response are helpful in clarifying the points in contention; other parts continue to leave me perplexed. For those who have not been following our exchange, it began after Barr took issue with this article I wrote for The Washington Post criticizing proponents of theistic evolution such as Kenneth Miller and Francis Collins (who was just nominated by the Obama administration to be the head of the National Institutes of Health, and who was one of the notable supporters of President Obama’s repeal of the ban on federal funding of embryonic stem-cell Read More ›