Psychology

CSC senior fellow John West has an article up at Washington Post‘s “On Faith” blog highlighting the importance of an open and broad debate on faith and evolution — one that includes intelligent design proponents. Dawkins and Collins are often put forward as the two alternatives in discussions over faith and evolution, but since they both embrace Darwin’s theory, they represent only a thin slice of the overall debate. Largely shut out from current media coverage are the growing number of scientists, as well as the vast majority of Americans, who view Darwin’s theory with skepticism. In an effort to broaden the conversation, Discovery Institute has launched www.faithandevolution.org, a website featuring scientists and scholars who aren’t afraid to ask tough Read More ›

I believe it was Philip Johnson who once said that if you replaced the word “evolution” in biology textbooks with the word “design,” almost nothing of substance would change. I think he was right. We wonder at nature, not because we are so ignorant, as some people think, but rather because it is so amazing. As Benjamin Wiker and Jonathan Witt explained in A Meaningful World, nature displays true genius. And it is this plain fact that drives design-deniers to deify, or at least personify, Evolution. Take as just one example this extremely fascinating article, “To Be a Baby,” (a play on Thomas Nagel’s question of what it is like to “be a bat”) from Seed Magazine. The article is Read More ›

This week’s conference in Rome on Darwin and evolution, nominally sponsored by the Gregorian University and Notre Dame “under the High Patronage of the Pontifical Council on Culture,” has a public relations budget to promote some conclusions that would seem to vary from the positions of Pope Benedict. The Council on Culture has little or no funding of its own for such science conferences and has had to accept non-Vatican funding — and the guidance and other strings that go with it. Intelligent design scientists not only are not present, as a consequence, but their views were misrepresented and trashed ahead of time by the conference organizers. Instead, alongside some rather interesting speakers, you will hear a parade of atheists, Read More ›

I am often asked what to make of Christoph Cardinal Schonborn’s new book Chance or Purpose? Luckily, I can now point people to Denyse O’Leary’s spot-on review. Among the many highlights, O’Leary notes that Schonborn focuses on knowing design not through empirical evidence but through natural reason. Yet if Darwinism is correct, true reason may not exist. Second, if Schonborn wants to oppose the fatuous conclusions of evolutionary psychology then he needs to oppose the supposed facts on which it is based. (Francis Collins makes the same mistake regarding altruism in The Language of God. He argues for Darwinian evolution and then argues against evolutionary explanations of altruism. Apparently he thinks the miraculous powers of natural selection can build the Read More ›