Science and Culture Today | Page 1302 | Discovering Design in Nature

If you missed seeing Expelled in theaters last spring, relax. Expelled will be out on DVD Tuesday, October 21st. “Big Science in this area of biology has lost its way,” says Stein. “Scientists are supposed to be allowed to follow the evidence wherever it may lead, no matter what the implications are. Freedom of inquiry has been greatly compromised, and this is not only anti-American, it’s anti-science. Its anti-the whole concept of learning.” Now that the legal issues swirling around Expelled have been mostly resolved, it will be interesting to see what “Big Science” Darwinists will try next to expel smart new science from labs and classrooms. Go here for more on Expelled. [Note: For a more comprehensive defense of Read More ›

During their opening statements in the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial, the plaintiffs argued that “there is no such thing as a little constitutional violation,” and thus Dover’s requirement that biology teachers read to students a short 4-paragraph statement that briefly mentioned intelligent design (ID) could be unconstitutional. (See Trial Transcript, Day 1, pg. 13.) But this is not how attorneys defending the pro-evolution UC Berkeley Evolution website argued in the Caldwell v. Caldwell lawsuit, where the 9th Circuit recently ruled that a parent could not sue because she had suffered no “injury in fact,” even though she had observed government-endorsement of pro-evolution theology on a government-sponsored website. Apparently when Darwinists themselves face accusations of violating the establishment clause, they happily Read More ›

Justify Censorship on the Back of Your Car Today:The “Judge Jones Said It, I Believe It, That Settles It” Bumper Sticker! http://www.discovery.org/f/683 Justify Censorship on the Back of Your Car Today:The “Judge Jones Said It, I Believe It, That Settles It” Bumper Sticker! Justify Censorship on the Back of Your Car Today:The “Judge Jones Said It, I Believe It, That Settles It” Bumper Sticker! As we discussed last week with the American Library Association’s Banned Books Week, we’re recounting efforts by and support of Darwinists to ban pro-intelligent design (ID) books or ideas from schools. Part 1 of this 3-part series recounted attempts to censor pro-ID books from public school libraries, and Part 2 discussed attempts to ban pro-ID viewpoints Read More ›

Last week, in Part 1 of this 3-part series observing Banned Books Week, I recounted successful attempts to censor pro-intelligent design (ID) books from public school libraries, with high praise for such efforts from academia. But libraries, of course, aren’t the only location where Darwinists have tried to ban pro-ID materials. In 2005, Darwinists successfully banned both pro-ID books and pro-ID viewpoints from both the library and the classroom in Dover, Pennsylvania. While public support for ID has remained high even after the Dover trial, this incident sadly motivated other Darwinists around the U.S. to go out and recreate little Dovers within their own spheres of influence. For example, in the wake of the Dover incident, the president of the Read More ›

Get your banned intelligent design books:Darwin’s Black Box: Darwin on Trial: This week is the American Library Association’s annual “Banned Books Week.” Given recent issues with the economy and the presidential election, Banned Books Week is probably not attracting as much media attention this year as usual. But we want to observe Banned Books Week by posting a 3-part series revisiting some recent instances of support for banning or censoring intelligent design (ID) books and ideas from libraries and student minds. In 2007, New York Law School professor Stephen A. Newman wrote a law review article in Rutgers Journal of Law and Religion praising the efforts of librarians who prevented pro-ID books from entering their school’s library collection. The article Read More ›

Earlier this year, the popular blog Little Green Footballs (LGF) made an outrageous attempt to link Discovery Institute to the Muslim creationist Harun Yahya (a.k.a. Adnan Oktar). Their post claimed, “Discovery Institute is in league with Islamist creationists, a fact that is indisputably true,” specifically mentioning Yahya / Oktar (“just happens to be a former volunteer for Harun Yahya”). Discovery Institute’s president Bruce Chapman dignified their charges with a forceful refutation, but LGF’s reply to Mr. Chapman was basically a string of ad hominem attacks that relied on a tenuous chain of distorted and incomplete facts. If there was any doubt left that Discovery Institute and Islamic creationists are not “in league,” consider a recent interview with Harun Yahya/Adnan Oktar Read More ›

Texas Darwinists are afraid of language in the Texas Science Standards that requires students to learn about the “strengths and weaknesses” of evolution, justifying their fear by claiming that when it comes to neo-Darwinian evolution, “[t]here may be some questions that may yet to be answered, but nothing that’s to the level of a weakness.” Nothing that’s to the level of a weakness? That’s a pretty dogmatic and unscientific claim. If this Texas Darwinist is right, then I suppose that these comments by leading scientists must not show that there is anything that rises “to the level of a weakness” in neo-Darwinian evolution: Still think Darwinian evolution has “nothing that’s to the level of a weakness”? I strongly suspect we’ll Read More ›

The latest from the Associated Press out in Texas (via Houston Chronicle) reports that “Scientists from Texas universities on Tuesday denounced what they called supernatural and religious teaching in public school science classrooms and voiced opposition to attempts to water down evolution instruction.”

We covered the Texas science standards last week, noting that Darwinists there oppose teaching the strengths and weaknesses of evolution.

In the AP article, no explanation is given for their opposition to the “strengths and weaknesses” language except the unsupported claim that thoroughly examining Darwin’s theory in the classroom is something only creationists do.

Actually, AP reporter Kelley Shannon is pretty sure that the whole thing is a creationist ploy to teach religion in our schools. That’s why she makes a point of giving credibility to the several Darwinists in the story before calling McLeroy a creationist, then discrediting the position she assigned him:

Nobel laureate in physics Steven Weinberg recently revamped his 2008 Phi Beta Kappa Oration at Harvard University for an essay entitled “Without God” in The New York Review of Books. As the essay moves toward a close, Weinberg tells us:

the worldview of science is rather chilling. Not only do we not find any point to life laid out for us in nature, no objective basis for our moral principles, no correspondence between what we think is the moral law and the laws of nature, of the sort imagined by philosophers from Anaximander and Plato to Emerson. We even learn that the emotions that we most treasure, our love for our wives and husbands and children, are made possible by chemical processes in our brains that are what they are as a result of natural selection acting on chance mutations over millions of years. And yet we must not sink into nihilism or stifle our emotions. At our best we live on a knife-edge, between wishful thinking on one hand and, on the other, despair.
What, then, can we do?

Answering his own rhetorical question, Dr. Weinberg believes

The media is abuzz about a suggestion made by a Church of England spokesman that it should apologize for initially opposing Darwinian evolution back in Darwin’s day. An Associated Press article in the International Herald Tribune says that “[t]he church did not take an official stand against Darwin’s theories, but many senior Anglicans reacted with hostility to his ideas, arguing against them at public debates.” The example given is the account of Bishop Wilberforce: “At a University of Oxford debate in 1860, the bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce, famously asked scientist Thomas Huxley whether it was through his grandfather or his grandmother that he claimed to be descended from a monkey.” According to the legend, Huxley reportedly replied that he Read More ›