Science and Culture Today | Page 1210 | Discovering Design in Nature

How hard is it to understand what we’re not teaching intelligent design means? It means exactly that. Yet for some strange reason there are Darwinist bloggers who insist on passing on false information. Over at The Stir, Julie Marsh uses Stephen Hawking’s recent assertions that the natural laws of physics preclude any intelligent designer as a springboard to jump on the Texas State Board of Education for teaching intelligent design. News flash: they aren’t teaching intelligent design, and no board members have proposed such a thing. Even the Darwin loving Dallas Morning News has clearly reported the Texas State Board of Education’s position against teaching intelligent design. “Should “intelligent design” – the cousin of creationism – be taught in science Read More ›

On September 2nd, the National Science Foundation (NSF) released an announcement regarding its new “Evolution Readiness Project,” whose self-stated goal is: to teach young children how Darwin’s model of natural selection explains the observation that organisms are adapted to their environment When they say “young children,” they mean fourth-graders. And when the project says “teach,” it really means to get students to believe in evolution. The project’s website explains that a main concern driving the project is that “it is unacceptable that 150 years after the birth of the theory of evolution only four out of ten Americans believe in it!” Given this express admission that they seek to get students to believe in evolution, what should we make of Read More ›

Nature news is reporting another feathered dinosaur. The title of the Nature news article says, “Crested dinosaur pushes back dawn of feather.” This dinosaur is from around 130 mya, but feathers are already known from the bird Archaeopteryx around 150 mya. So how does it push back the origin of feathers? Their reasoning is that the feathers on this new species, dubbed Concavenator corcovatus, appear in a different lineage than the one that supposedly led to birds. Since “such structures [feathers] are unlikely to have evolved separately in both groups” they use evolutionary reasoning to infer that “the common ancestor of the two predatory dinosaur branches, ‘could have been feathered’.” This pushes the origin of feathers back to “Middle Jurassic Read More ›

It will be interesting to see how this plays out. From The Catholic Register: Friday, Sept. 10, Father Robert Spitzer, president of the Magis Center of Reason and Faith and author of New Proofs for the Existence of God: Contributions of Contemporary Physics and Philosophy, will defend God’s existence against physicist Stephen Hawking’s belief that God isn’t the creator of the universe on CNN’s “Larry King Live.” Father Spitzer already refuted Hawking’s claim on the Magis Center website. Fr. Spitzer isn’t the only one to respond to Dr. Hawking, but the debate at 9pm EDT will be worth watching.

John Derbyshire at National Review was AWOL for a while but I’m glad to see he’s back in action, abusing us in his accustomed style. He is one of those Darwinists like PZ Myers who’s always at least an enjoyable read notwithstanding that part of the enjoyment lies in the way the actual content tends to boil down to something little above the level of “Mommy, you’re stupid! You’re stupid, Mommy!” (This is our three-year-old Saul’s current best shot at a counterargument when crossed.) Thus it’s a relief to find that on his vacation from Darwin advocacy, John has learned nothing.

On James Lee, briefly famous gunman and hostage-taker at the Discovery Channel headquarters, Derbyshire chides those who took a glance at Lee’s Darwin-heavy manifesto and pointed out the obvious. Writes John, “It ought to be a well-established principle that you can’t deduce anything at all from a lone act of insanity, but when you have an axe to grind, the temptation can be irresistible.”

Who deduced anything? Not me. Observe, quote, correlate, yes. Deduce, no.
Yet John writes:

David Klinghoffer at the Discovery Institute, a creationist think-tank, chimed in with the observation that James Lee seems to have believed in the preposterous and utterly discredited theories of Charles Darwin, along with fellow Darwinists Charles Manson, Mao Tse-tung, Joseph Stalin, Josef Mengele, and of course Adolf Hitler. That doesn’t quite compute. Wouldn’t a Darwinist wish for his species to be successful, not go extinct? But no doubt the Discovery Institute people can discover a response to that.

Huh? I don’t know what a hypothetical Darwinist “would wish for,” I only know what these monsters drew from Darwin’s notion of inevitable ongoing warfare between superior and inferior races by which the species advances, which they translated into their own terms.

Assurances that we have nothing to fear from Darwinism are a familiar species of evolutionary apologetics. We’re told that Darwinian thinking doesn’t threaten morality, religion, or belief in life’s having an ultimate meaning. On the contrary, it enhances all things good and fair. Karl Giberson’s recent column in the Huffington Post, “How Darwin Sustains My Baptist Search for Truth,” deserves to be pinned under glass and put up on a wall as a near-perfect specimen of the genre.

Anyone who’s honest with himself knows this is all propaganda and wishful thinking, but it refreshes us nevertheless to hear Darwinists themselves confess — even trumpet — the truth.

Darwinian scholars and journalists have been writing with what must seem, to their brethren, an alarming frankness. One occasion for the flurry of articles is the recent sensational book Sex at Dawn by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha, who present the picture of our evolutionary human ancestors as enjoying polyamory as their standard reproductive practice. Group sex was the rule for them, so there’s no reason to expect marital fidelity from us, their heirs.

On the Scientific American website, psychologist Jesse Bering throws out the whole structure of sexual right and wrong with one blog post:

There are of course many important caveats, but the basic logic is that, because human beings are not naturally monogamous but rather have been explicitly designed by natural selection to seek out “extra-pair copulatory partners” — having sex with someone other than your partner or spouse for the replicating sake of one’s mindless genes — then suppressing these deep mammalian instincts is futile and, worse, is an inevitable death knell for an otherwise honest and healthy relationship.

Dr. Bering concedes with some feeling that in evolutionary psychological terms, empathy for the jilted sexual partner also plays a role. But in general:

Right is irrelevant. There is only what works and what doesn’t work, within context, in biologically adaptive terms.

In the current issue of Philosophy Now, Joel Marks declares himself a born-again amoralist. He used to be a moral atheist, but now, having divested himself of earlier illusions, he chirpily goes for what he calls “hard atheism” and, “In fact, I have given up morality altogether!” On the science backing up his position, he comments:

[Ed. Note: The previously published version of this post referred to Francisco Ayala as “of the BioLogos Foundation.” While Dr. Ayala has been a guest blogger with BioLogos, he is not directly affiliated with the foundation.]

Late last year, the eminent Christian philosopher and proponent of intelligent design, William Lane Craig, crossed swords in debate with the avid apologist for Darwinian evolution, Francisco Ayala. The debate was chaired by philosopher of physics Bradley Monton of the University of Colorado, an ID sympathizer, though a convinced atheist himself. Monton is the author of the book, Seeking God in Science: An Atheist Defends Intelligent Design. A fascinating ID the Future interview with Professor Monton can be downloaded here.

Following Dr. Ayala’s opening statement, Dr. Craig commenced his presentation by carefully setting out the definition of ID as the study of legitimate design inferences. Craig stipulated that, were Ayala to attempt to refute the inference to design with respect to biological systems, he would need to do one of two things. Either Ayala would need to directly challenge the legitimacy of the explanatory filter (presumably by demonstrating that it incorporates false positives) or demonstrate that the systems featured in biology do not meet the criteria of the explanatory filter. Setting aside the discussions pertaining to the tenability of universal common ancestry, Craig set about to argue that Ayala’s attempts to disqualify ID on scientific grounds were doomed because he had failed to demonstrate, in his published work, that the dual forces of random mutation and natural selection, are causally sufficient to account for macroevolution. He also argued that Ayala’s more numerous attempts to disqualify ID on theological grounds are completely irrelevant to the process of drawing a design inference from biological phenomena, because none of the arguments for ID aspire to show that the designer possesses the qualities of omnibenevolence or omnipotence. After all, Craig argued, a design inference is still warranted with respect to a medieval torture rack, regardless of the malevolent purposes of the system’s design. Questions pertaining to the nature of the designer are for natural theology, not for the scientific research program of ID. This is what distinguishes the modern concept of ID from the Watchmaker argument of William Paley’s Natural Theology.

Here come more threats to academic freedom, not unlike those seen by intelligent design proponents and Darwin skeptics. Over the years we’ve covered many, many cases like this where someone who expresses doubt about Darwinian evolution is harassed, fired, denied tenure, and so on. “The significance of this is a threat to academic freedom and it’s also a threat to academic science,” Siegel said. “If scientists have to produce work that meets a certain view to keep their jobs, researchers are going to stop publishing negative findings for fear of being fired.” No, they will simply stop researching period in the subject areas that get them in trouble. The average scientist can find lots of fruitful areas of research that Read More ›

There is little doubt that hostage-taker James Lee’s virulent Social Darwinism was the product of a tragically disturbed man. But can an entire culture fall for the pernicious ideology of Social Darwinism, especially its scientific and political elites? Unfortunately, the answer to that question is an unequivocal yes, as I have documented in my book Darwin Day in America, and as the new documentary “What Hath Darwin Wrought?” persuasively shows. Perhaps the most jarring fact about the troubling views of James Lee is that similar views have been espoused over the past century by leading scientists, politicians, and thinkers. Ideas do have consequences, and not just for seriously disturbed individuals like James Lee.