A Fog Over the Intelligent Design Debate

Editor’s Note: This is crossposted at David Klinghoffer’s Beliefnet blog, Kingdom of Priests. A pair of dueling websites, one that just went live, are engaged in an important argument over whether religious believers should continue to be fed the “opium of the people.” That’s the famous phrase Marx Karl used to deride all of religion. One kind of faith actually deserves the description, however. It’s called theistic evolution, a convoluted justification for thinking that belief in God and belief in Darwin’s mechanism of blind, churning, unguided, and purposeless evolution can be meaningfully reconciled. The new website is Faith and Evolution, from the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture. It features all kinds of resources — writing and video, debates, Read More ›

Texas Evolution Lobby Making Power Grabs to Promote Their Censorship Agenda

A Wall Street Journal (WSJ) article from last month, “Education Board in Texas Faces Curbs,” revealed how the Texas evolution-lobby has been seeking to use both censorship and power grabs to promote their agenda.  First, they sought to censor from Texas students any instruction on scientific weaknesses in evolution. Having lost that fight before the Texas State Board of Education (TSBOE), they have tried to use other tactics to punish the board for adopting science standards that teach evolution objectively, or to grab power away from the democratically elected board. In a move that can only be attributed to political retribution, today Texas evolutionists successfully blocked the reappointment of Dr. Don McLeroy as chair of the TSBOE.  Practically speaking, this Read More ›

New Book, Probability’s Nature and Nature’s Probability, Provides Accessible Introduction to Technical Aspects of Intelligent Design

Since the beginning of 2008, we’ve seen the publication of some excellent popular books introducing the topic of intelligent design (ID), including Intelligent Design 101 (with contributions by Phillip Johnson, Michael Behe, J.P. Moreland, William Dembski, and Jay Wesley Richards) and William Dembski’s Understanding Intelligent Design. Another book just out is a small self-published book that is a gem, titled Probability’s Nature and Nature’s Probability, by Donald E. Johnson. Johnson holds two Ph.D.’s — one Ph.D. in Computer & Information Sciences from the University of Minnesota and another Ph.D. in Chemistry from Michigan State University. Given Johnson’s background, it was unsurprising that he has a good grasp of the issues. What was pleasantly surprising was Johnson’s ability to communicate some Read More ›

New Atheists, New Theistic Evolutionists, and FaithandEvolution.org: Who Is Right?

ID The Future podcast features a special interview worth highlighting to ENV readers: Click here to listen. This episode of ID the Future features CSC associate director John West interviewed by Anika Smith on the launch of the new website, FaithandEvolution.org, bringing clarity to the conversation between the new atheists such as Richard Dawkins and the new theistic evolutionists like Francis Collins. Is faith in God compatible with Darwinian evolution? Who is right, and why does it matter? Listen in, and learn more at FaithandEvolution.org.

Behe’s Back: The Letters Science and Trends in Microbiology Won’t Print

It must be hard to be the Darwinist editor of a major science journal, to have to constantly maintain the party line that there is no scientific debate between intelligent design and evolution while publishing articles whose authors seem haunted by design arguments, often taking it upon themselves to stick up a straw man of ID to knock down with a puff of hot air. It must be especially hard when a scientist like Michael Behe bothers you, thinking it his duty to advance the debate by correcting the Darwinists’ mistaken views of irreducible complexity which you published, hoping that maybe he would go away. Alas, for the editors of Science and Trends in Microbiology, Michael Behe has not gone Read More ›