Tag: atheism
On Darwinian Atheists Lecturing Religious People on Proper Belief in God
I love watching atheists try to tell religious people what they should believe about God. I’m not talking about atheists trying to convince religious people not to believe in God. We expect that. I’m talking about atheists telling religious people how to continue properly believing in God. I find this incredibly amusing, because, you know, atheists are experts in things like keeping faith. Michael Ruse is a prime specimen. An atheist (he says “I find it a great relief no longer to believe in God”) and self-declared “ex-Christian,” a few years back Ruse wrote a book titled Can a Darwinian be a Christian? and answered “Absolutely!” (p. 217) Now, in a recent piece in the UK Guardian, Ruse lectures none Read More ›
“Free Thinkers” at the University of Arkansas Don’t Think You Should Be Free to Form Your Own Opinion on Evolution
Last Thursday night I spoke at the University of Arkansas for an Academic Freedom Day Event. The crowd was civil with a good mix of both ID-friendly folks and ID-skeptics. The Q & A was generally harmless but the most amusing question of all came from a very nice gentleman with a local “Free Thinkers” group who asked me a ‘how dare you’ type question, arguing that because the “consensus” or “thousands” of scientists oppose ID, so should I. Here’s a little snippet of what I said in reply: “ID is a minority scientific view. But you owe it to yourself to examine the issue for yourself and come up with your own viewpoint. And if the consensus is right, Read More ›
Jerry Coyne vs. NCSE, AAAS, & NAS
In a recent blog post titled “Truckling to the Faithful: A Spoonful of Jesus Helps Darwin Go Down,” University of Chicago biologist Jerry Coyne firmly and publicly rejects the attempts by Darwin-lobbying organizations like the National Center for Science Education (NCSE) to convince the American public that Darwinism and Christian faith are compatible. In case these organizations really want to know my opinion, I’m on Jerry’s side. Except that I’m only mostly on his side. You see Jerry is spot on when he writes But any injection of teleology into evolutionary biology violates precisely the great advance of Darwin’s theory: to explain the appearance of design by a purely materialistic process — no deity required. In a letter to his Read More ›
AP Texas Spins Story About Scientists Uniting Against Teaching the Controversy
The latest from the Associated Press out in Texas (via Houston Chronicle) reports that “Scientists from Texas universities on Tuesday denounced what they called supernatural and religious teaching in public school science classrooms and voiced opposition to attempts to water down evolution instruction.” We covered the Texas science standards last week, noting that Darwinists there oppose teaching the strengths and weaknesses of evolution. In the AP article, no explanation is given for their opposition to the “strengths and weaknesses” language except the unsupported claim that thoroughly examining Darwin’s theory in the classroom is something only creationists do. Actually, AP reporter Kelley Shannon is pretty sure that the whole thing is a creationist ploy to teach religion in our schools. That’s Read More ›
On Non-Nihilistic “Scientific” Atheism
Nobel laureate in physics Steven Weinberg recently revamped his 2008 Phi Beta Kappa Oration at Harvard University for an essay entitled “Without God” in The New York Review of Books. As the essay moves toward a close, Weinberg tells us: the worldview of science is rather chilling. Not only do we not find any point to life laid out for us in nature, no objective basis for our moral principles, no correspondence between what we think is the moral law and the laws of nature, of the sort imagined by philosophers from Anaximander and Plato to Emerson. We even learn that the emotions that we most treasure, our love for our wives and husbands and children, are made possible by Read More ›