Faith & Science

This past Thursday, October 26, Dr. Leon Kass, learned intellectual and former Chairman of the President’s Council on Bioethics, presented a paper before an excellent group of intellectuals at the American Enterprise Institute (Stephen Barr, Eric Cohen, Joseph Bottum, Charles Murray, and Marcello Pera, among others). Dr. Kass had many good things to say about the false nature of scientific reductionism and how it goes against everything we know about reality from everyday life. He also denied that random mutations and natural selection were the whole story to life’s evolution. That said, I took umbrage with one major point Kass made.

The NCSE’s Nicholas Matzke wrote last summer, “We don’t need the anti-creationists going and mixing their views on religion into their science. In fact, this is probably the surest path to disaster politically and in the courts. Anyone who wants to do this has the right to do it, but it ain’t helpful or particularly smart.” Richard Dawkins apparently didn’t get Nick’s memo. In a recent BBC News interview, Dawkins said that “America is ready for an attack on religion. … Britain always has been.” He explained that he wrote his book The God Delusion to convince “vaguely religious people” that “[t]he religion of their upbringing is probably nonsense” and explained to viewers that “the living world … comes about Read More ›

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.

The Darwinists continue to promote theology (as long as it is pro-Darwin-only): The book, “The Evolution Dialogues,” was written with the input of both scientists and theologians. Meant specifically for use in Christian adult education programs, it offers a concise description of the natural world, as explained by evolution, and the Christian response, both in Charles Darwin’s time and in contemporary America. It has a glossary of terms from both science and religion, with “bacteria” and “Biblical infallibility” defined on the same page. (Press release on The Evolution Dialogues, emphasis added) The AAAS’s attempt to tell religious people how to view evolution reminds me of quotes from famous Darwinists about “true religion:” Of course there are some beliefs still current, Read More ›

If you want to watch John West and I speaking about the Kitzmiller decision on C-SPAN-2’s Book-TV, it is now online in Real Player format, here. Unfortunately, the video is pretty low-resolution, but the audio comes through very well. John West makes an interesting point that since the Kitzmiller decision, Judge Jones has engaged in a number of speaking engagements, including one where he stated that as a judge, he is guided by the belief that “true religion was not something handed down by a church or contained in a Bible.” Here’s the whole statement as recorded in the transcript of the commencement address: The Founders believed that true religion was not something handed down by a church or contained Read More ›

Seth Cooper and Leonard Brown have published an article entitled, “A Textbook Case of Judicial Activism: How a Pro-ID Publisher Was Denied its Day in Court,” which describes how the publisher of the textbook Of Pandas and People, Foundation for Thought and Ethics (FTE), was denied the right to become a party to the Kitzmiller trial despite the fact that its intellectual property rights were implicated in the lawsuit. As background, the right of a party to “intervene” in a lawsuit is governed by Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 24 (a): (a) Intervention of Right. Upon timely application anyone shall be permitted to intervene in an action: (1) when a statute of the United States confers an unconditional right to Read More ›

I report with great sadness that my friend Wesley Elsberry of the National Center for Science Education (NCSE) has a publicly stated a strategy of trying to paint ID-proponents as liars: If you want to drive a wedge between an audience of evangelical Christians and the professionals in the ID movement, you need a third approach: show that the ID advocate on stage with you has been lying to his followers. Show misquote after misquote; demonstrate error after checkable error, and make the audience understand that if the ID advocate claims that the sky is blue, their next step had better be to look out the window to see for themselves. Evangelicals do want to take Christ’s message to the Read More ›

Yesterday, Cornelius Hunter critiqued at IDtheFuture some of Brown University biologist Kenneth R. Miller’s theologically-charged arguments for evolution during the Kitzmiller trial. Miller is a widely promoted theistic evolutionist, and thus served as the plaintiffs leadoff expert witness for biology, evolution, and theistic evolutionism during the Kitzmiller trial. Judge Jones apparently found Miller’s existence so compelling that the Judge ruled that evolution and “belief in the existence of a supreme being” are compatible, and ruled that any belief otherwise is “utterly false.” Yet significant portions of Miller’s testimony about the anti-religious descriptions of evolution contained in his textbooks were factually challenged (i.e. wrong). On the second day of the Kitzmiller trial, Miller was confronted about theologically charged statements about evolution Read More ›

[Editor’s Note: The three individual installments of this series can be seen here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3. The final complete article, New England Journal of Medicine Traipses Into the Kitzmiller Decision, can be found here.] In a New England Journal of Medicine article entitled “Intelligent Judging — Evolution in the Classroom and the Courtroom,” George J. Annas lavishes the Kitzmiller decision with praise. Ironically, Mr. Annas lauds some statements by Judge Jones which others have viewed as undermining the Judge’s credibility. For instance, Mr. Annas applauds the following proclamation of judicial superiority by Judge Jones: After a six week trial that spanned twenty-one days and included countless hours of detailed expert witness presentation, the court is confident that Read More ›