Tag: Michael Ruse
Life: Explained. Oh, Now We Understand.
A biologist at Case Western Reserve demonstrates why peer-review really is the gold standard of scholarly credibility.
“People don’t know polar bears can swim!”
Camille Paglia has made interesting comments about global warming in the past that have made me think she might be a (very quiet) Darwin skeptic. Not the NCSE’s Josh Rosenau. His selective quote mining of her comments meant to imply the exact opposite is Orwellian. To make matters worse he really twists things up when attempts to paint those who champion critical thinking on evolution as postmodern Marxists. “Critical thinking” sounds great. But it’s a Marxist approach to culture. It’s just slapping a liberal leftist ideology on everything you do. You just find all the ways that power has defrauded or defamed or destroyed. It’s a pat formula that’s very thin. At the primary level, what kids need is facts. Read More ›
Why Does Ruse Act Like He’s an Expert on Theology?
Several months ago, I participated in a two-hour radio “debate” with Michael Ruse (along with Guillermo Gonzalez and Carlos Calle) about design in cosmology and astronomy. Several times, Michael Ruse lectured me about Christian theology. But it had a surreal quality to it, since he was talking about the theology he (as an agnostic) preferred, but he kept acting as if he was representing Christian theology accurately. I finally insisted that I actually did know a good bit about theology and that he was just making stuff up. Ruse’s responses to Stephen Fuller in the Guardian over ID have that same, surreal quality. For instance, here’s how he distinguishes the difference between the Protestant and Catholic views of justification:
The Darwinist “War” Upon Evolution-Skepticism
Are leading Darwinists succeeding in promoting a religion-friendly image? Prominent evolutionists have used warfare imagery to call upon people to “fight” against intelligent design and other forms of evolution-skepticism, including various religions. In a recent article about a talk on The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins told a crowd in Kansas, “I know you here are in the front-line trench against powerful forces of darkness… Fight the good fight” against the “the ‘rotten logic’ of intelligent design and creationism,” which he claims argue the religious viewpoint that “God did it.” (As noted yesterday, the article is factually challenged, as it repeatedly incorrectly calls Dawkins a “physicist,” when he is actually a zoologist and evolutionary biologist.) In a similar fashion, Gerald Weissmann, Read More ›
Will Robert Pennock Become the Next Michael Ruse?
If you’ll give me the Mic, I won’t Rob much of your time while Penning this short Ruse. In the Dover trial, Robert Pennock is the Plaintiffs’ expert on the philosophy of science, and Pennock pushed hard for a definition of science which is essentially “methodological naturalism.” This is eerily similar to the 1982 case, McLean v. Arkansas Board of Education, 529 F.Supp. 1255 (E.D. Ark) over the teaching of young earth creationism, where Darwinist Philosopher of Science Michael Ruse testified that science was defined as follows: (1) It is guided by natural law; (2) It has to be explanatory by reference to natural law; (3) It is testable against the empirical world; (4) Its conclusions are tentative, i.e., are Read More ›