Tag: science and religion
Lewontin and Numbers: Day One of Darwin 2009 at the University of Chicago
“Go to hell!” said Ron Numbers cheerfully to me, as we greeted each other at the front of Rockefeller Chapel last night. “Hey, did I say that loud enough?” he asked, looking around at the various evolutionary biology and history and philosophy of science worthies — Lewontin, Kitcher, Sober, Ruse, Dennett, Richards, and so on — milling about. Ron’s smiling insult was a mocking attempt to redress the widespread criticism that he had let me off easy in our notorious Bloggingheads conversation. A spirit of raillery was in the air, given a vigorous kick at the beginning of the evening by Harvard geneticist Richard Lewontin. Little of the secular sanctimony of the 1959 Darwin centennial (see below) was in evidence. Read More ›
Ayala Plays Both Sides
Many readers of Scientific American Magazine have recently written me about the new article, “The Christian Man’s Evolution: How Darwinism and Faith Can Coexist.” Most have pointed out how fatuous Ayala’s view of God comes across. As author Sally Lehrman writes, seeming to think this very clever, Ayala (and “science-savvy Christian theologians”) “present a God that is continuously engaged in the creative process through undirected natural selection.” (bolding added)This line, of course, prompted much talk of square circles and Christian atheists, as well it should. Writes one reader, “You mean: ‘a God who is continuously engaged’ by being completely unengaged?” But apart from the clear contradiction in this thinking, Ayala demonstrates an inconsistency we find repeatedly from Darwinists who are Read More ›
When the Non-religious Tell the Religious to Accept Evolution
I don’t necessarily believe that religion has to always be incompatible with evolution, but it’s always amusing when unreligious people try to convince the religious that Darwinism is highly compatible with religion. The famous example is of course Eugenie Scott, a signatory of the Third Humanist Manifesto, who recommends that biology teachers discuss pro-evolution theological viewpoints in public schools. This past week has revealed two more examples of attempts by unreligious scholars telling the public that religion and evolution are compatible: H. Allen Orr In an article in the latest issue of New York Review of Books, evolutionary biologist H. Allen Orr attacks Dawkins for fighting against religion and says, “it’s far from certain that there is an ineluctable conflict Read More ›
New York Times Story About God and Science
The New York Times has another front page story about the origins debate, “Scientists Speak Up on Mix of God and Science.” The reporter, Cornelia Dean, does a good job of interviewing both theists and atheists, but she leaves out of the picture scientists like Michael Behe, who has made it clear that his religious background left him perfectly open to the possibility that God had front-loaded design into the fine-tuned laws of nature at the instant of the Big Bang, allowing it to evolve from there all the way to our living earth. Behe and other Darwin-doubters, like quantum chemist Henry F. Schaefer III and evolutionary biologist and textbook author Dr. Stanley Salthe, reject the Darwinian story simply because Read More ›