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Hypocrisy on Display at The Des Moines Register: Academic Freedom Protects Bullying Students about Religion, But Not Presenting Evidence for Intelligent Design
Academic freedom doesn’t protect a professor’s right to talk about the scientific evidence favoring intelligent design. But it does protect a professor’s right to belittle his students’ fundamentalist religious beliefs. That’s the hypocritical view being championed by Des Moines Register columnist Rekha Basu. Unfortunately, her mindset reflects the views of a lot of pro-Darwin apologists in the media. When astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez was being harassed and discriminated against at Iowa State University (ISU) because of his support for intelligent design, Basu actually cheered on the inquisitors. When atheist religion professor Hector Avalos spearheaded a campus petition against intelligent design in 2005, for example, Basu wrote that “it would be would be a serious breach of academic integrity” for universities to Read More ›
An “Ulnare” and an “Intermedium” a Wrist Do Not Make: A Response to Carl Zimmer
Over the past couple years, Tiktaalik, a fossil allegedly documenting parts of the transition from fish to tetrapods, has become a new celebrated icon of evolution. PBS’s “Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial” documentary featured Tiktaalik as their premier transitional fossil, an anachronism since it wasn’t even reported until months AFTER the Dover trial concluded. The NAS’s recent “Science, Evolution, and Creationism” booklet also prominently pushes Tiktaalik, calling it “a notable transitional form.” Darwinists have a lot of rhetorical capital invested in this fossil, and it thus comes as no surprise that they are quick to defend it with the “zero-concession policy” vehemence we’ve come to expect from internet Darwinists. As William Dembski writes regarding this policy: Our critics have, Read More ›
The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design: Evolution and Darwinism
Note: This is one of a series of posts adapted from my book, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design. Charles Darwin set out to explain the origin of not just one or a few species, but all species after the first — in short, all the diversity of life on Earth. The correct word for this is not evolution, but Darwinism. …living things may look as though they were designed, but if Darwinism is true then this is only an illusion. fundamental problem of evolution, the origin of species, remains unsolved. Despite centuries of artificial breeding and decades of laboratory experiments, no one has ever observed speciation through variation and selection.To order The Politically Incorrect Guide to Read More ›
The Implications of the Hypothetical Discovery of Martian Life for Intelligent Design
I recently received an e-mail asking about the most recent Mars lander (Phoenix) and the implications for intelligent design (ID) if amino acids, proteins, or life were found on Mars. The person asked, “would this not mean that Neo darwinism is correct and that life occurs if you ‘just add water’?” I’ve posted a modified version of my reply to this person’s question below: These are complex questions you ask, but a scientific “conclusion” is only as good as the starting assumptions that underlie the scientific reasoning involved in making that conclusion. Now I am all for searching out the universe to determine whether life exists outside of Earth. But at present, the research that searches for extra-terrestrial life — Read More ›
Darwinism and “Mass Men”
Joseph Bottum at First Things has an excellent essay on José Ortega y Gasset, the early 20th Century Spanish writer. In Ortega’s masterwork, The Revolt of the Masses, Ortega describes a new sociological phenomenon: the “mass man.” Bottum explains: Ortega’s accomplishment…was to identify a new sociological species: mass man. As The Revolt of the Masses explains, the mass man is not just an ordinary man, and he is not associated with any particular class. He is, rather, a product of European historical development, a kind of human being born for the first time in the nineteenth century…The description Ortega gives is not particularly enjoyable. The mass man lives without any discipline, and–as Ortega remembers from Goethe–“to live as one pleases Read More ›