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David Coppedge’s Critics Take “Ready, Fire, Aim” Approach
Critics of David Coppedge’s lawsuit against Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) alleging discrimination against his pro-intelligent design views have been repeatedly misrepresenting the facts of his case. The latest example is an attorney quoted in an article with Federal News Radio who makes a number of factual errors. According to the article, Bill Bransford, a partner at the Washington D.C.-based law firm Shaw, Bransford and Roth, stated, “Coppedge apparently ‘believed he was talking to willing people about his theories, but apparently some of these people complained.’” Bransford does not seem to be aware of the facts of Coppedge’s case, since Coppedge was specifically told by his supervisors that no one he’d spoken to about intelligent design (ID) had complained. Bransford goes Read More ›
Doug Axe Knows His Work Better Than Steve Matheson
When Stephen Meyer faced Steve Matheson and Art Hunt at Biola University last month, one scientist’s research was key in their debate: Doug Axe, Director of Biologic Institute. While there’s a good deal of back and forth on the subject, for the first time Dr. Axe has something of his own to say on the subject of his work. From Biologic Perspectives: The specific work to which Meyer, Matheson and Hunt referred [4] has added to the scientific case for functional protein sequences being extraordinarily rare within the whole space of possibilities. Matheson started off by arguing not that this deduction of extraordinary rarity is incorrect, but rather that it is irrelevant to the debate between Darwinism and Design. Axe Read More ›
National Legal Organization Backs Coppedge Lawsuit Over Jet Propulsion Lab Discrimination Against Intelligent Design
Alliance Defense Fund (ADF), a national legal organization whose allied attorneys have logged over 100 million dollars worth of pro bono hours of legal work, has issued a statement backing David Coppedge’s lawsuit against Jet Propulsion Laboratory. A recent article in the Christian Post reporting on the ADF news release summarizes Coppedge’s plight: Last March [2009], Coppedge was accused of “pushing religion” on his co-workers after he began engaging colleagues in conversations about intelligent design — a theory that life and the existence of the universe derive not from undirected material processes but from an intelligent cause — and offering DVDs on the subject when the co-worker expressed interest. His supervisor, Gregory Chin, allegedly received complaints from employees and threatened Read More ›
The Fact-Free “Science” of Matheson, Hunt and Moran: Ridicule Instead of Reason, Authority Instead of Evidence
I was not in Los Angeles on May 14, when Stephen Meyer debated Stephen Matheson and Arthur Hunt at Biola University. But I have followed some of the blog war that preceded and followed the debate–a blog war that now includes Richard Sternberg and Laurence Moran. Since Matheson, Hunt and Moran are all tenured professors at institutions of higher learning, one might have expected a discussion based on reason and conducted in a collegial spirit. And since the discussion is about science, one might have expected lots of references to evidence published in the scientific literature. But Matheson, Hunt and Moran have abandoned reason and resorted to ridicule; and instead of citing evidence they expect us to bow to their Read More ›
Guest Blogger James Le Fanu: The Last Days of the Façade of Knowing
The philosopher Thomas Nagel in a memorable phrase laments ‘the ludicrous overuse of evolutionary biology to explain everything about life’ — where there is nothing too sensational, extraordinary or bizarre about the living world that cannot be accounted for as having evolved to be that way over billions of years by the same known materialistic process of natural selection acting on random genetic mutation. This façade of knowing cannot last, of course, and 20 years or so hence historians and commentators will rightly wonder how science could conceivably have endorsed so simplistic a theory to explain the billion fold complexities of the living world — and for so long. The impetus for that disillusionment can only come from within science Read More ›