Edward Sisson

[Note: For a comprehensive defense of Ben Stein’s documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, please see: NCSE Exposed at NCSEExposed.org] Hmmm — a video comes out (Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, currently #11 at Amazon) saying that if you question Darwinism, you get trashed and denounced. And the mass response is to trash and denounce the video.Don’t the denouncers realize their own conduct proves the video is true? Do the denouncers not realize the irony of their own behavior?Or are they really taking the position that those who doubt Darwinism are typically free of being denounced? I reminds me of my C-SPAN experience with Barry Lynn — he denounced my doubting of Darwin, but then when I said that as a general Read More ›

Prof. Thomas Nagel, a self-declared atheist who earned his PhD. in philosophy at Harvard 45 years ago, who has been a professor at U.C. Berkeley, Princeton, and the last 28 years at New York University, and who has published ten books and more than 60 articles, has published an important essay, “Public Education and Intelligent Design,” in the Wiley InterScience Journal Philosophy & Public Affairs, Vol. 36, issue 2, on-line at http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/118493933/home (fee for access US $29.95).

Prof. Nagel’s paper is a significant and substantial opening, at America’s highest intellectual level, that encourages all intelligent, educated, informed individuals — particularly those whose interest in this issue derives from intellectual curiosity, not the emotional advocacy excitement for any side — that it is legitimate as a matter of data, science, and logic, divorced from all religious texts and doctrines, to consider that intelligent design may be a valid scientific approach to understanding how DNA and the complex chemical systems of life came to attain their present form. Prof. Nagel’s article is well worth the price to put it in the library of any inquiring mind.