Science and Culture Today | Page 1231 | Discovering Design in Nature

The vision that first inspired the contemporary conservative movement back in the 1940s and ’50s would be unrecognizable to many conservatives today. In Richard Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences (1948), the book that sociologist Robert Nisbet credited with “launch[ing] the renaissance of philosophical conservatism in this country,” you will not find a single reference to the then sitting President of the United States (Truman). It’s not really a political book at all. It is not about setting or opposing a legislative agenda. It is about correcting a faulty and widespread materialist “world picture” of which Darwinism forms a crucial ingredient. We are reconsidering and appreciating Weaver in this series. (See Parts I and II, here and here.) With “Darwinism … lurking Read More ›

Q: Which Steve said design is an excellent and irrefutable explanation?Hint: He didn’t write Signature in the Cell. This incredible interaction came at last Friday night’s presentation of Signature in the Cell by Stephen Meyer at Biola University in front of 1,400 attendees and hundreds more watching the event streamed live on the internet. In a panel discussion after his lecture, Meyer met two of his critics head-on, one of whom essentially conceded that intelligent design is a better explanation than an unguided process like Darwinian evolution. The critics were Steve Matheson, a theistic evolutionist from Calvin College, and Arthur Hunt a Darwinist and biologist from the University of Kentucky. Both have written critically of SITC and intelligent design and Read More ›

Somewhat unlike its current form, conservatism in its modern-day inception was about ideas and their consequences. It was primarily a philosophical dissection of what ails our culture. So Richard M. Weaver put it in the famous title of his 1948 book, Ideas Have Consequences. A professor of English at the University of Chicago, a Southerner who looked back on the lost culture of the South as the Western world’s last surviving “non-materialist” civilization, Weaver was a Darwin critic. That fact comes out again and again in his books. In his view, Darwinism was among the chief ideas roiling the culture and with the most disastrous results. In this series, we are in the process of taking a glance back at Read More ›

What has conservatism come to? John Derbyshire, an inveterate Darwin booster and atheist, has an online diary entry up at National Review Online trying to explain to himself why, since life develops so readily and spontaneously from non-life, the universe nevertheless seems so strangely silent. SETI detects no hint of communication floating to us through the vacuum of space from elsewhere. Derbyshire tries to set things right between reality and himself through a series of ad hoc solutions — the details of which don’t matter. What’s interesting is to observe that when conservative intellectuals talk about the Darwin problem, and that is rare, this is pretty much all you are likely to get. It didn’t use to be this way. Read More ›

Responding to Zimmerman’s latest blog is almost too easy. All a response to this really requires is to post a few photos of clearly designed items that have had amazing, spectacularly bad problems. (The Hindenberg for instance. Or any Toyota apparently.) How stupid, yes I said stupid, do you have to be to equate bad design with no design? How is it that if the body is poorly designed, humans have risen to the pinnacle of life? If we were blind as bats say, would we have been better off? Would we have stumbled over the secret of time-travel by now? Zimmerman’s argument is so weak as to be laughable. In fact, I had to stop my inelegant laughing so Read More ›

Even if you can’t make it to the free Signature in the Cell event in Southern California this Friday, you’re in luck. Biola University will be broadcasting the event with Stephen Meyer live for a fee. According to the website: The broadcast fee helps subsidize the cost of the event, and the cost of producing and hosting the video broadcast. It is intendend primarily for large groups and we hope you choose to view it in a group to foster discussion about this topic. Discussion groups, interested friends, churches, families and individuals are encouraged to participate in the broadcast on Friday at 7pm PDT. Go here for system requirements (a computer with high-speed internet) and ordering information.

Camille Paglia has made interesting comments about global warming in the past that have made me think she might be a (very quiet) Darwin skeptic. Not the NCSE’s Josh Rosenau. His selective quote mining of her comments meant to imply the exact opposite is Orwellian. To make matters worse he really twists things up when attempts to paint those who champion critical thinking on evolution as postmodern Marxists. “Critical thinking” sounds great. But it’s a Marxist approach to culture. It’s just slapping a liberal leftist ideology on everything you do. You just find all the ways that power has defrauded or defamed or destroyed. It’s a pat formula that’s very thin. At the primary level, what kids need is facts. Read More ›

Several months ago, I participated in a two-hour radio “debate” with Michael Ruse (along with Guillermo Gonzalez and Carlos Calle) about design in cosmology and astronomy. Several times, Michael Ruse lectured me about Christian theology. But it had a surreal quality to it, since he was talking about the theology he (as an agnostic) preferred, but he kept acting as if he was representing Christian theology accurately. I finally insisted that I actually did know a good bit about theology and that he was just making stuff up.

Ruse’s responses to Stephen Fuller in the Guardian over ID have that same, surreal quality. For instance, here’s how he distinguishes the difference between the Protestant and Catholic views of justification:

Pretty much everyone agrees that natural selection acting on random genetic mutations can explain some things. The really interesting question is, how much can it explain? Since Darwin’s mechanism seems intuitively plausible, we’re often tempted just to trust our intuitions rather than to look at the hard data. And yet the data increasingly show that, whatever its intuitive attractions, the powers of selection and mutation are surprisingly limited. In many cases, new biological functions require several mutations. And everyone agrees that natural selection doesn’t have foresight. But it’s widely assumed that if each of the individual mutations leading to new functions are themselves adaptive, then natural selection can traverse the pathway. Again, this makes intuitive sense. But what about the Read More ›