Culture

AUSTIN, TX–As I noted in my other blog post on Dr. Stephen C. Meyer’s testimony today before the Texas State Board of Education, you can always tell a strength of a person’s position based upon the arguments they make. In this regard, Texas Darwinists apparently scripted 2 questions for hostile Texas State Board of Education members to ask Dr. Meyer. Both questions were asked by Board Member Bob Craig and dealt with, you guessed it, personal attacks on Dr. Meyer. The first question the Texas Darwinists asked was whether Dr. Meyer has a Ph.D. in biology. No, Dr. Meyer answered, he merely holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy and History of Science from Cambridge University that focused on the history of Read More ›

I’m posting the following report for Casey Luskin, who is currently in Texas at the expert hearing before the Texas State Board of Education. AUSTIN, TX—The NCSE and their friends at the Texas Freedom Network (TFN) are here in Texas and they have one main argument. Or maybe two. The first argument basically says this: Don’t listen to any of these guys because they’re creationists. Creationists. Creationists. Creationists.Creationists. Did I mention that they’re just creationists? The logical fallacies and falsehoods in this short sound-byte argument are legion. They include: motive-mongering, false premise, the genetic fallacy, and perhaps most of all hypocrisy. As Meyer testified, he fully accepts a billions of years old earth. He doesn’t fit Eugenie Scott’s “creationist” mold. Read More ›

In previous posts in this brief series, we’ve been looking at the relationship between Marx and Darwin, who developed parallel theories of historical or natural law. In a religious context, law is perceived as static and eternal: God’s law, higher than any man, worthy of judging kings and tyrants by its light. Marxism and Darwinism, as materialist philosophies, believe they have succeeded in obviating the need for God, or metaphysics generally. For them, there is no such thing as a static, eternal moral law. Thus in the Descent of Man, Darwin describes the process by which morals evolve, just like animal bodies. He finds nothing absolute or God-given even in a seemingly fundamental moral instinct like that against incest: “We Read More ›

Darwinists are quick to claim there is no controversy over Darwinian evolution, and indeed often claim there are no weaknesses whatsover with Darwin’s controversial theory. Take the case of Texas firebrand, and Darwinian activist and evolution defender Dr. Steven Schafersman. Schafersman is opposed to students learning about both the strengths and weaknesses of evolution. When it comes to weaknesses of evolution, Schafersman has –over time– transitioned his position from one point to another so many times that his tree of evolution looks more like a bush. First there were no weaknesses, then there were only a few certain weaknesses. Of late, he has ended up again defending the position that there are no weaknesses whatsoever. John West outlines how Schafersman Read More ›

If you live in Texas and would like to let the state’s board of education know where you stand on teaching the strengths and weaknesses of evolution, you can do so here. You can support academic freedom by signing this statement: I agree that the current wording of the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) that specifies teaching both “strengths and weaknesses” of evolution and other theories, having the effect of both interesting students in the subjects and in developing critical thinking skills, and having withstood TWENTY YEARS of good service in Texas without a single lawsuit, should be retained.

Does Darwinism lend support more naturally to a capitalist moral-economic perspective or to some other competing philosophical standpoint, say, a Marxist one? Economic historian Niall Ferguson takes the former view. He’s been having a good run with his new book The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World — that is, apart from being taken to task by a number of reviewers for applying a Darwinian framework to understanding market forces. In the current New York Review of Books, economist Robert Skidelsky chides Ferguson for purveying “false analogies between financial evolution and Darwinian natural selection….These attempts to explain the rise of money in terms of natural processes strike me as being both morally and philosophically naïve.” Ferguson describes Read More ›

The Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE) voted unanimously to adopt rules today implementing the Louisiana Science Education Act (LSEA), the landmark academic freedom bill passed last summer. The rules approved by the BESE effectuate the academic freedom bill’s purpose to allow teachers to use supplementary materials to teach controversial scientific theories without threat of recrimination. A subcommittee of the Board removed a provision prohibiting intelligent design before passing the rules unanimously. The legally redundant provision would have gone beyond the intent of the legislation and was dropped after the subcommittee heard testimony from supporters and opponents of the language. In adopting these rules, the BESE reiterated its support for academic freedom for teachers to teach controversial scientific Read More ›

Medieval alchemists searched for a legendary “philosopher’s stone” capable of turning lead into gold. Modern Darwinists have given us a different “philosopher’s stone” — one that turns gold into lead.

Darwinism is the doctrine that all living things are biological descendants of common ancestors that have been modified by unguided variations and natural selection. Although Darwinists claim that their doctrine is supported by “overwhelming evidence,” nothing could be further from the truth. The fossil record shows that living things originated in a particular pattern, but Darwinists themselves (when they’re being candid) admit that the pattern tells us nothing about the process of origination. As for the process, variation and selection are well-documented in existing species, but Darwin didn’t write a book titled How Existing Species Change Over Time. He wrote a book titled The Origin of Species — and no one has ever observed the origin of a single species by variation and selection.

Empirical science tests hypotheses by comparing them with the evidence, but Darwinists never allow evidence to jeopardize their basic claims. Darwin called The Origin of Species “one long argument,” but his followers are engaged in one long bluff. Books and articles promoting Darwinism invariably make inflated claims based on little evidence — or worse, evidence that is misrepresented or even faked.

Darwinist and University of Toronto biochemistry professor, Larry Moran, who has called publicly for the expulsion of Christian college students who, despite passing all exams, don’t personally believe in atheism and materialism, has commented on my recent post on qualia in the mind-body problem. I had used a famous traditional philosophical argument on the mind-body problem called the ‘knowledge argument.’ The knowledge argument, first articulated explicitly by Frank Jackson in his ‘Mary’s Room’ thought problem in 1982, highlights the hard problem of consciousness, which is the problem of subjectivity. Why is it that we have subjective first-person experience, whereas all that we know about the brain is objective third person knowledge? The knowledge argument points out that there are things about mental states — subjective experience called ‘qualia’ — that are knowledge that is not material. The denouement of the knowledge argument is that materialist monism is an incomplete description of the mind because it is inadequate to explain subjective experience. Some sort of dualism is necessary for a satisfactory understanding of the mind.

The knowledge argument is a profound problem for strict materialism, and materialist philosophers of the mind such as Daniel Dennett have devoted considerable effort to refuting it. The primary materialist recourse has been to deny the reality of subjective mental states. Most philosophers — and most other people — find such denial hard to take seriously.
I formulated a question for Dr. Steven Novella, who is a materialist with a dogmatic approach to the mind-body problem, that is based on the knowledge argument. My question is this:

In his book The Language of God, theistic evolutionist scientist Francis Collins contends that diversity within populations of stickleback fish demonstrates that there is no distinction between “macroevolution” and “microevolution.” According to Collins, “It is not hard to see how the difference between freshwater and saltwater sticklebacks could be extended to generate all kinds of fish. The distinction between macroevolution and microevolution is therefore seen to be rather arbitrary; larger changes that result in new species are a result of a succession of smaller incremental steps.” (p. 132) Aside from the fact that this provides another example refuting the Darwinist myth that ID proponents invented terms like “macroevolution” or “microevolution,” a closer look at the facts shows that Collins’ story Read More ›