Science and Culture Today | Page 1304 | Discovering Design in Nature

Joseph Bottum at First Things has an excellent essay on José Ortega y Gasset, the early 20th Century Spanish writer. In Ortega’s masterwork, The Revolt of the Masses, Ortega describes a new sociological phenomenon: the “mass man.” Bottum explains: Ortega’s accomplishment…was to identify a new sociological species: mass man. As The Revolt of the Masses explains, the mass man is not just an ordinary man, and he is not associated with any particular class. He is, rather, a product of European historical development, a kind of human being born for the first time in the nineteenth century…The description Ortega gives is not particularly enjoyable. The mass man lives without any discipline, and–as Ortega remembers from Goethe–“to live as one pleases Read More ›

[Editor’s Note: This is a Part 5 of a 5 part series on whether evolution should be called a “theory” or a “fact.” For the installments, see Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5. The full article can be found here.] Many intelligent people use the “evolution is just a theory, not a fact” line–but they immediately get into trouble because, as I discussed in Part 1, the formal scientific definition of theory is typically understood to mean a “well-substantiated scientific explanation of some aspect of the natural world.” In other words, when talking to a scientifically minded crowd, calling evolution “just a theory” is not a good way to express scientific doubts about neo-Darwinism. As Read More ›

It isn’t just the New York Times that ignores the facts when reporting about the debate over how to teach evolution. Not to be outdone by its competitor the Washington Post catches up today with an ill-informed opinion piece (Evolving Toward a Compromise) that yet again completely misreports what is going on in the upcoming review of Texas’ state science standards. A proposal before the Texas Board of Education calls for including the “strengths and weaknesses” of evolution in the state’s science curriculum. This initiative is understood by supporters and opponents to be a strategic effort to get around First Amendment restrictions on teaching religion in science class. First, there is no such proposal. The Texas state science standards currently Read More ›

[Editor’s Note: This is a Part 4 of a 5 part series on whether evolution should be called a “theory” or a “fact.” For the installments, see Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5. The full article can be found here.] Darwinists love to bash Darwin-skeptics who call evolution “just a theory, not a fact.” The truth is that I rarely, if ever, hear people who are closely involved with the ID movement using this line to oppose evolution. The “evolution is just a theory, not a fact” phrase tends to come from the vox populi–intelligent people who studied this issue in their biology class or perhaps have read books like Darwin’s Black Box, Icons of Read More ›

[Editor’s Note: This is a Part 3 of a 5 part series on whether evolution should be called a “theory” or a “fact.” See: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5. The full article can be found here.] Darwinists claim that it is inappropriate to call “evolution a theory, not a fact” because a theory means “a well-substantiated scientific explanation of some aspect of the natural world.” In Part 1 and in Part 2, I discussed the fact that the word “theory” can have multiple meanings, ranging from a conjecture or guess (the soft definition) to “a well-substantiated scientific explanation of some aspect of the natural world” (the hard definition). In this installment, I will address the Read More ›

The blog site Little Green Footballs has slandered Discovery Institute, whether intentionally or not, by implying that we are in league with Islamic radicals in Turkey. They base this fantasy, apparently, on a CBC radio report of a year ago that was so poorly researched that it called Discovery Senior Fellow David Berlinski “Paul Berlinski” and referred to us as the “Christian Discovery organization.” Then they interview a host of people of varying views in Turkey who are critical of Darwinism and imply that they are all connected. They seemingly imply Discovery’s involvement in this situation based on the fact that Berlinski was invited to speak at a conference held by the municipal government of Istanbul last year. Big deal. (Berlinski, by the way, is a secular Jew, so work with that fact for a while, boys.)

If people at LGF think they can make the case that Discovery Institute is somehow soft on Islamic radicalism and terrorists, perhaps they should pick up a copy of our Senior Fellow John Wohlstetter’s new book, The Long War Ahead: And the Short War Upon Us. It is published by Discovery Institute Press and I challenge the LGF folks to read it–or any of my own writings on the Iraq War and the war on terrorism generally–and continue contending that this institute would ever have any truck with people–Muslim or otherwise–who doubt the danger of Islamic fascism.

In his book God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, atheist author Christopher Hitchens calls intelligent design (ID) “tripe” and “a huge menacing lurch forward by the forces of barbarism.” While supporting the evolution of humans, he asserts that there is “[n]o divine plan” and that “[e]verything works without that assumption.” Hitchens laments the existence of religion because “millions of people in all societies still prefer the myths of the cave and the tribe and the blood sacrifice.” (pg. 282) In his debate against Jay Wesley Richards, Hitchens reportedly argued against God by alleging that God would not create certain features we observe, to which Richards aptly replied, “A sneer is not an argument.” Unfortunately, Hitchens is still using Read More ›

[Editor’s Note: This is a Part 2 of a 5 part series on whether evolution should be called a “theory” or a “fact.” See: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5. The full article can be found here.] In Part 1, I assessed the question of whether Darwinists are correct to define theory as a “well-substantiated scientific explanation of some aspect of the natural world” or a “comprehensive explanation of some aspect of nature that is supported by a vast body of evidence” (the hard definition of theory). I found that they are correct to use such a definition, but that Darwinists sometimes overly downplay the fact that theory can also legitimately mean merely “a proposed explanation Read More ›

Viktor Frankl, a Holocaust survivor who endured the horrors of Auschwitz, astutely commented on the way that modern European thought had helped prepare the way for Nazi atrocities (and his own misery). He stated, “If we present a man with a concept of man which is not true, we may well corrupt him. When we present man as an automaton of reflexes, as a mind-machine, as a bundle of instincts, as a pawn of drives and reactions, as a mere product of instinct, heredity and environment, we feed the nihilism to which modern man is, in any case, prone. I became acquainted,” Frankl continued, “with the last stage of that corruption in my second concentration camp, Auschwitz. The gas chambers Read More ›

Click here to listen to an IDTF podcast featuring part of Stephen Meyer’s opening remarks from this event.

What do intelligent design, evolution, information and purple people eaters all have in common? Well, they all took front stage at Freedomfest in Las Vegas last week when ID proponents Stephen Meyer and George Gilder squared off against Darwinists Michael Shermer and Ronald Bailey in debating whether there is scientific evidence for intelligent design in nature.

The debate was civil, and the audience appreciated the back and forth between the speakers and enjoyed being able to ask questions at the end of the formal debate–and even beyond that. For the rest of the evening following the debate itself Meyer and Gilder patiently answered questions and discussed the debate over evolution with conference attendees. At the end of the formal debate a poll of the audience showed them to be split pretty evenly for and against ID being science.

Stephen Meyer laid out a compelling case for intelligent design being a scientific theory. He briefly explained some of the things that design proponents point to as evidence for intelligent causation–the fine tuning of the laws of physics, the complex machinery at work in the cell, and information-rich digital code in DNA. Finally he explained