Keith Pennock

Kudos to Richard Gallagher & Alison McCook from The Scientist for being gutsy enough to do an even-handed piece on President Bush’s record on science, and for asking the question in Gallagher’s editorial, “Is Bush Science’s Nemesis?” in more than the conventional rhetorical fashion. McCook’s piece “Sizing Up Bush on Science” answers with a resounding “no,” or at least no more than past presidents, including Bill Clinton.

A recent article in the Richmond Times-Dispatch notes that a Virginia Commonwealth University biology professor Jim Sparks complained that a biology textbook by Sylvia Mader, “Essentials of Biology (McGraw Hill, 2007) “had leanings toward creationism and short-changed evolution.” Another article described Sparks’ view as claiming the Mader textbook was “biased toward creationism and intelligent design.” But how accurate was Dr. Sparks’ description of the textbook? Consider what the textbook actually says about intelligent design: No wonder most scientists in our country are dismayed when state legislatures or school boards rule that teachers must put forward a variety or “theories” on the origin of life, including one that runs contrary to the mass of data that supports the theory of evolution. Read More ›

We have made it well known that we wish the Dover Area School Board in Pennsylvania had taken our advice. This has been reiterated countless times — before, during and after the litigation and decision. (WE even recently published an entire book about the Dover decision, Traipsing Into Evolution.) Our long-standing policy has been to urge a more robust treatment of evolution in public schools, so that students might learn both the scientific weaknesses and strength’s of neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory and chemical origin-of-life scenarios. But this is NOT the path that was taken in Dover. This too has been communicated all throughout the Kitzmiller saga. But an article from two weeks ago in the York Daily Record shows that some folks. Just. Don’t. Get. It.

In 1897 Mark Twain reportedly sent a cable from London to the Associated Press in New York, saying “Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.” after a mistaken obituary announcement appeared in a newspaper. The mistaken announcement is not unlike Robert Pennock’s article of March 6th in Science & Theology News which also greatly exaggerates the significance of Dover for the ID movment.

Robert Pennock has made a career of critiquing ID; thus it comes as no surprise that he is now trumpeting the Dover decision. But Ph.D. though he may be, there are so many logical fallacies in his article that it is ripe fodder for Irving Copi’s Introduction to Logic. Robert Pennock may be a third, or perhaps a fourth rate philosopher, but a first rate critique of his kind of reasoning along with Judge Jones’s by a top tier philosopher is available on the very same website by no less than Alvin Plantinga. Rather than repeat Plantinga’s devastating riposte, allow me to critique Robert Pennock and by extension Jones on slightly different grounds.

It is true that Judge Jones said:

Editor’s Note: This was sent to us from a former Discovery policy analyst.

Martha Wise is a member of the Ohio Board of Education. She cannot stand anything that is not conclusively and absolutely pro-Darwinian in science education. She is also the chief censor of any scientific criticisms of neo-Darwinian theory. Martha helped to oust the Ohio Critical Analysis of Evolution lesson plan.

Her op-ed in the Cincinnati Enquirer is a wonderful celebration of Orwellian double-speak in the service of Darwin-only science indoctrination: She’s insists she is a creationist, but she opposes creationism. The science standards explicitly disclaim the mandating of ID, but the standards (she claims) mandate ID. In Dover everyone acknowledged they were teaching ID but in OH they are not–except that Martha says that in Ohio they somehow were by stealth, even though the NCSE originally proclaimed victory with the passage of the critical analysis benchmark. “Critical analysis” doesn’t mean “critical analysis.” People with religious motivations are barred from proposing the lesson plan, but Wise’s religious motivations for stopping the lesson plan are in bounds. And feminist philosophers of science count as “evolutionary biologists.”

In the January 16 edition of the Weekly Standard in an article titled “Survival of the Evolution Debate” Adam Wolfson recites the long debunked mantra of Darwinists accusing ID of merely residing on Paleyian analogical reasoning and therefore being subject to Hume’s critique. In Wolfson’s own words:

In making such claims the IDers are putting old wine in a new bottle. Some version of the design thesis is to be found in the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas and, perhaps most famously, in the writings of William Paley. The 18th-century English theologian argued that when we find a watch we infer a watchmaker; so too when we discover evidence of design in nature we properly infer a Maker or Creator.

In the November-December edition of Harvard Magazine in an article titled “Forum: Intelligent Evolution” E.O. Wilson recites the long debunked mantra of Darwinists accusing ID of merely being “God-of-the-Gaps”. In Wilson’s own words:

Many who accept the fact of evolution cannot, however, on religious grounds, accept the operation of blind chance and the absence of divine purpose implicit in natural selection. They support the alternative explanation of intelligent design. The reasoning they offer is not based on evidence but on the lack of it. The formulation of intelligent design is a default argument advanced in support of a non sequitur. It is in essence the following: There are some phenomena that have not yet been explained and that (and most importantly) the critics personally cannot imagine being explained; therefore there must be a supernatural designer at work.

This statement is pretty ironic given the prefatory statement to the piece which said:

At a moment when discussion of evolution and “intelligent design” preoccupies American political discourse to a surprising degree, shedding more heat than light on the nature of life and life science, Wilson invites the serious public to do what far too few of us have done: to read what Darwin wrote.

Lately there have been a lot of people resurrecting a long debunked charge against ID of merely being “God-of-the-Gaps”. One such person was Slate Senior Editor Dahlia Lithwick.

Never one to let the facts of what ID proponents actually propose get in the way of a vacuous potshot Ms. Lithwick says:

But the critics are missing the beauty of this new theory. Because the really great thing about intelligent design is that it takes all the awkward uncertainty out of science. It says, “You know those damn theoretical gaps and conundrums that send microbiology graduate students into dank basement laboratories at 3 a.m.? They don’t need to be resolved at all. Go back to bed, sleepy little grad students. God fills those gaps.”

I’ll give Ms. Lithwick points for creativity in conjuring the image of a tired grad student but her paper gets an “F” in substantive research as she cites an objection that ID theorists dealt with decisively over 5 years ago.

I would personally like to thank Washington Post reporter Peter Slevin for highlighting the deeply held convictions of the new branch campus of the Darwin-only lobby in Fairfax Virginia. Like the cause-heads of PCU this group of freeze dried protestors “led mostly by Vietnam-era protesters” who “came together in frustration after the November elections, have little political experience, apart from hoisting Kerry-Edwards signs.”

Said Richard Lawrence, 63:

‘”We’re just a small group, maybe with a powerful idea. We don’t have a clue, but we’re not letting go.”‘