Category: Culture
Warren Reports Blog: Judge Jones Said It, I Believe It, That Settles It (Part I)
Last year, a post from Michael Francisco presented the “Judge Jones Said It, I Believe It, That Settles It” bumper sticker. A recent blog post at Warren Reports Blog employs so much uncritical acceptance of Judge Jones’ ruling (calling it a “scathing decision” and a “hard blow”), gets so many facts wrong, and is so full of contradictions that its author, Devin James Carpenter, deserves to have the bumper sticker awarded to him. This 2-part series will respond to some of Carpenter’s statements. The “Main Issues”Carpenter states: “The main issues in Kitzmiller v. Dover were: the soundness of evolution and ‘intelligent design’ as science, the separation of church and state, and the philosophy of science itself.” Actually, that’s not true. Read More ›
BreakPoint on Dover
Chuck Colson dedicated a recent BreakPoint commentary to Discovery Institute’s report on Judge Jones’s ruling in the Kitzmiller v. Dover case, which found that Judge Jones copied more than 90% of his ruling on whether intelligent design is science from the ACLU. He writes, Thus, as the Discovery Institute notes, the central part of the ruling reflects no original, deliberative activity or independent examination of the record on the judge’s part. And that’s not all. The problem when you let somebody else write your decision is that they may make a mistake. And you, then, look silly. This is the point of why Judge Jones’ copying of the ACLU brief undermines the credibility of his decision in Dover. Colson’s response Read More ›
Does George Smoot, Nobel Laureate, See Evidence of Design in the Cosmos?
The most recent Nobel prize for physics recently was awarded to John Mather and George Smoot for their contribution to the big bang theory of the origin of the universe. Smoot is a physicist at the University of California at Berkeley. He has no ties that I’m aware of to the Intelligent Design community, and I know that he doesn’t have ties to Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture. However, like several other prominent contemporary physicists (e.g., Arno Penzias, Owen Gingerich, and Paul Davies), Smoot has made remarks that suggest he considers the best explanation for certain features of the natural world to be a teleological or purposeful cause–what we in the ID community refer to as intelligent design Read More ›
Darwinists Begin Their Attacks on New Mexico Academic Freedom Bill
I recently predicted that Darwinists in New Mexico would oppose an innocuous academic freedom bill which protects the teaching of science, and science only, in the science classroom, even if the science challenges neo-Darwinism. As the bill states, “‘Scientific information’ does not include information derived from religious or philosophical writings, beliefs or doctrines,” but teachers will be given “the right and freedom, when a theory of biological origins is taught, to objectively inform students of scientific information relevant to the strengths and weaknesses of that theory.” How could this bill possibly allow the teaching of anything but science in the science classroom? Darwinists’ attacks upon the bill have already begun, as Marshall Berman presented a talk at Los Alamos National Read More ›
“The evolutionary puzzle becomes more complex at a higher level of cellular organization.” No kidding.
The January 25th issue of Nature carries a “Progress” paper by Poelwijk et al that’s touted on the cover as “Plugging Darwin’s Gaps,” and cited by its authors as addressing concerns raised by proponents of intelligent design. The gist of the paper is that some amino acid residues of several proteins can be altered in the lab to produce proteins with properties slightly different from those they started with. A major example the authors cite is the work of Bridgham et al (2006) altering hormone receptors, which I blogged on last year. That very modest paper was puffed not only in Science, but in the New York Times, too. It seems some scientists have discovered that one way to hype Read More ›