Philosophy
Animation Reveals Engineering Elegance of RNA Interference
The 20th Anniversary of Darwin on Trial
About Those Odd Patterns in the Chinese Desert
Watch Oxford Mathematician John Lennox’s Response to Stephen Hawking’s Grand Design
Metamorphosis Debuts at Butterfly World, Florida

Another Reason to Doubt the Relevance of Jeffrey Shallit
Materialist mathematician Jeffrey Shallit has a post on an article in the Globe and Mail about philosophy and the immateriality of the mind. Shallit’s post is titled “Another Reason to Doubt the Relevance of Philosophy”. Shallit doesn’t think much of philosophy: If philosophers think the view that “The brain is not an organ of consciousness. … The brain has no cognitive powers at all” deserves anything more than a good horselaugh, this simply shows how irrelevant philosophy has become … Our future understanding of cognition will come from neuroscience, not from Wittgenstein. Philosophy is plainly irrelevant to Shallit, which is the problem. Wittgenstein may not inform Dr. Shallit’s understanding of cognition, but Descartes, Kant, Hume, James, Skinner, Block, the Churchlands, Read More ›
Broadening the Faith and Evolution Debate in the Washington Post
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 ›
Hello Evolution, Nice to Meet You
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 ›
