Culture

Sometimes Jerry Coyne makes me spray my coffee. This gem from a post of his on detente in the new atheist-theist wars:

Atheists have been “humble” for centuries (who was more humble than Spinoza?) and it hasn’t gotten us anywhere. It’s that crop of new atheist books that have finally created a climate in which atheists need not feel like pariahs…

Humble? Atheism’s first assumption of power at the level of the nation-state was in the French Revolution. “Humility” doesn’t do justice to the carnage wrought by French atheism-in-power, nor to the Napoleonic wars and millions of dead that followed in the ensuing decades of “atheist humility.”

In the 19th century “atheist humility” incubated in the minds of men like Marx, and again gained the reins of power in 1917. The 20th century was the century of atheism in power. Here is the death toll of its “humility” (from The Black Book of Communism):

This morning Discovery Institute announced their lawsuit against the California Science Center for unlawfully refusing to disclose public documents requested by Discovery Institute under the California Public Records Act. The petition, filed December 1, 2009, is available for viewing here.

LOS ANGELES, Dec. 2 — Discovery Institute has filed a lawsuit against the California Science Center (the “Center”) for unlawfully refusing to disclose public documents requested by Discovery Institute under the California Public Records Act. Discovery Institute filed the public documents request on October 9, 2009, following the Center’s October 6, 2009 cancellation of a contract with the American Freedom Alliance (AFA) to screen a pro-intelligent design video, Darwin’s Dilemma, at the California Science Center’s IMAX Theatre on October 25, 2009. On November 2, 2009, the Center released 44 pages of documents claiming to have disclosed “all documents” and that “no documents have been withheld,” apart from a few e-mail addresses that were redacted. “California Science Center’s claims are not Read More ›

Last week National Geographic published an article, “Evolution vs. Intelligent Design: 6 Bones of Contention,” that did a mixed job of conveying the pro-intelligent design (ID) viewpoint. When the article actually provided quotes from me (or other ID proponents) about ID–which I very much appreciated–it was accurate. When the article purported to convey the views of ID proponents, sometimes it went badly astray. The article also provided the views of ID-critics, namely Donald Prothero. That’s fine, but unfortunately in each case, the pro-ID viewpoint was immediately rebutted by Prothero with zero sur-rebuttals defending ID. Dr. Prothero, who is a geology professor at Occidental College, is debating with Michael Shermer against Stephen Meyer and Richard Sternberg today in Los Angeles on Read More ›

Although this year has been widely touted as the “Year of Darwin” because of its big Darwin-related anniversaries, the book reviewers at the Times Literary Supplement (TLS) in London seem less than enthralled with the year’s crop of pro-Darwin retreads from the publishing industry. Indeed, the TLS’s “Books of the Year” issue just released last Friday fails to include any of the year’s big pro-Darwin tomes such as Jerry Coyne’s Why Evolution Is True or even Richard Dawkins’ The Greatest Show on Earth among its “Books of the Year.” Instead, the only book so honored that focuses on the Darwin-ID debate is Stephen Meyer’s Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design, which was selected by noted Read More ›

Discovery Institute President Bruce Chapman has written an insightful essay examining the broader significance of the ClimateGate scandal, including its implications for the Darwin-ID debate. Noting that certain major media outlets have tried to spike the ClimateGate story, Chapman observes that “the story is just too compelling to suppress in other outlets and on the Internet.” But he goes on to ask: what will it take for the media to take up the exactly parallel case of scientists who question the ability of Darwinian natural selection to explain the origin of life and the development of species? In several instances (the Richard Sternberg case, the Guillermo Gonzalez case), email trails have shown a similar attitude of entitlement and coercion. And Read More ›

Wesley J. Smith has an excellent post at his First Things blog on how the recent ClimateGate scandal is just a symptom of a much broader problem involving the ideological corruption of science: Global warming isn’t the only field in which we have witnessed this kind of brazen ideological corruption of science in recent years. I have seen the same approach taken repeatedly against heterodox views in the human cloning/ESCR controversy, to the point that people have been driven off of faculties or denied tenure. My colleagues at… Discovery Institute face a similar buzz saw in their pursuit of intelligent design hypothesis, and then are taunted by the censors for not being published in peer reviewed journals. Indeed, when Richard Read More ›

The silence of the ‘pro-science’ blogsphere on the ClimateGate scandal is remarkable. For years, readers of Pharyngula, Panda’s Thumb, Neurologica, WhyEvolutionIsTrue, Denialism, Respectful Insolence, and other militantly ‘pro-science’ blogs have been treated to rants about the need to protect the integrity of science from frauds and ideologically motivated practitioners. Of course, ‘protection of the integrity of science’ in the faux ‘pro-science’ blogsphere has generally meant suppression of skeptics who question so-called ‘consensus science’ on Darwinism and on Anthropogenic Global Warming. ‘Protection of science’ has more often that not entailed personal invective, recourse to ‘consensus’, advocacy of professional destruction of skeptics, deference to scientific authorities, censorship, and judicial coercion. The ClimateGate e-mails and data sets obtained from the Climate Research Unit Read More ›

It’s the question that bothers many Darwinists: why doesn’t everyone believe us? This is compounded of course by the fact that most of the people Darwinists interact with in the mainstream media believe everything anyone in the scientific establishment tells them (see: ClimateGate) as if it were gospel truth, causing them to wonder why a solid year of attention paid to Charles Darwin and his 150-year-old book isn’t convincing anyone.

As John West explains at ID the Future podcast, people have good reasons for rejecting Darwinian evolution, based on both the scientific evidence and the way it purports to overthrow long-cherished ideas about human dignity, morality, and God.
Click here to listen.

This is a hard pill for many Darwinists to swallow, particularly those who themselves uphold traditional morality and belief in God, but since they have no problem seeing no problems with the mounting scientific evidence against Darwin’s theory, it’s not too difficult for them to turn a blind eye to the social implications of Darwinian evolution.