Tag: york
The End of Morality
Recently, David Brooks published a column titled “The End of Philosophy” in The New York Times (April 7, 2009). Brooks, long one of the most thoughtful writers in public life, addresses an ages-old tension over whether reason controls our moral intuitions and passions, or whether moral intuition/feeling is king and reason is only rationalization. In the latter view, Brooks says,
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 ›
Behe Reviews Miller’s Latest Book, Only a Theory
Michael Behe has a brief review of Ken Miller’s new book up at his Amazon blog: Kenneth R. Miller, a professor of biology at Brown University, has written a new book Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America’s Soul, in which he defends Darwinism, attacks intelligent design, and makes a case for theistic evolution (defined as something like “God used Darwinian evolution to make life”). In all this, it’s pretty much a re-run of his previous book published over a decade ago, Finding Darwin’s God: A Scientist’s Search for Common Ground between God and Evolution. So if you read that book, you’ll have a very good idea of what 90% of the new book concerns. For people who Read More ›
Evolutionary Psychology
In case you missed this gem from The New York Times, you’re going to love the logic: Nonetheless, Dowd’s views do bring solace to some, going by reactions from parishioners who claim that a scientific perspective has helped them come to terms with their follies of the past. For some at least, the recognition of genetic and biochemical frailty is a healing act. Last fall, for example, after Bob Miller, an 81-year-old man, heard Dowd’s sermon at a Unitarian church in Pensacola, Fla., he felt his guilt over a string of affairs from four decades ago melting away. “I could never quite understand why I had behaved that way,” says Miller, who was climbing the corporate ladder when his infidelities Read More ›