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Video: Are all Darwin Skeptics Religious Fundamentalists?
The Incorrigible Dr. Berlinski answers:
Meet the Materialists, part 3: Frankenstein, Giovanni Aldini, and the Reanimation of the Dead
Note: This is one of a series of posts adapted from my new book, Darwin Day in America. You can find other posts in the series here. This week’s installment of “Meet the Materialists” is particularly fitting for the week of Halloween. By the turn of the nineteenth century, Italian scientist Giovanni Aldini was performing macabre experiments on decapitated oxes, horses, lambs… and humans. “The unenlightened part of mankind are apt to entertain a prejudice against those… who attempt to perform experiments on dead subjects,” Aldini later acknowledged, but he maintained that such experiments were justified because the object was to improve human welfare. “It is… an incontrovertible fact, that such researches in modern times have proved a source of Read More ›
PBS and NOVA Set to Spin Their Wheels in Dramatization of Dover ID Trial
In 2001 an internal PBS memo titled The Evolution Controversy, Use It or Lose It: Evolution Project/WGBH Boston, revealed an improper political agenda behind PBS’s miniseries “Evolution.” The memo made very clear how “Evolution” would be used to influence government officials and marketed to the public in an effort to exercise control over how evolution is taught in public schools. Here they go again. November 13th, PBS’s NOVA will air Judgment Day, which PBS describes as “recreations based on court transcripts, NOVA presents the arguments by lawyers and expert witnesses in riveting detail and provides an eye-opening crash course on questions such as ‘What is evolution?’ and ‘Does intelligent design qualify as science?’” You can bet there won’t be any Read More ›
Principled (not Rhetorical) Reasons Why ID Doesn’t Identify the Designer (Part 2)
[Read the full article, “Principled (not Rhetorical) Reasons Why Intelligent Design Doesn’t Identify the Designer,” here.] In Part 1 I discussed the principled reasons that ID proponents offer to explain why ID does not identify the designer: “while biological structures may be scientifically explained via intelligent design, the structures themselves have no way of directly telling us whether the designer is Yahweh, Buddha, Yoda, or some other type of intelligent agency.” Unfortunately, some critics have misunderstood this point as implying that ID proponents are completely silent about who they believe the designer is, or that ID proponents deny the possibility that the designer could be God. This very misconception was printed in an article co-authored by Barbara Forrest that was Read More ›
One Of The World’s Most Famous Atheists Changes His Mind
CSC senior fellow Benjamin Wiker has had an opportunity to interview Oxford philosopher Antony Flew. Flew, an Oxford educated philosopher, held a number of distinguished teaching posts at British universities and had been a prominent atheist throughout the second half of the 20th century. Indeed, he was sort of Richard Dawkins before Dawkins, his name synonymous with staunchly materialistic beliefs. Another CSC senior fellow, Jonathan Witt, first wrote on Flew abandoning his adherence to atheism back in 2004 in the Seattle Times. So this isn’t exactly new news. However, Flew has now published a book explaining in more details his change of mind titled, “There Is A God.” In it he explains his change as a journey into reason.Flew told Read More ›