Science and Culture Today | Page 1311 | Discovering Design in Nature

Over the weekend, the New York Times editorial page showed yet again how pro-Darwin ideology trumps the facts when it comes to the major media’s coverage of the evolution debate. On Saturday, the Times’ editorial page warned readers ominously:

The Texas State Board of Education is again considering a science curriculum that teaches the “strengths and weaknesses” of evolution, setting an example that several other states are likely to follow.

The Times apparently hasn’t been paying attention to Texas during the past decade, because (as we pointed out last week) the “strengths and weaknesses” language the Times’ editorialists so fear has been part of the Texas science standards since at least 1998! In short, the Texas State Board of Education isn’t considering whether to add “strengths and weaknesses” language; it’s the Darwinists who are trying to remove the language that has been in the Texas science standards for a decade.

In the recent Intelligent Design issue of Salvo Magazine, Logan Gage and I co-authored a piece titled, “Barking up the Wrong Tree,” which assesses popular arguments for universal common ancestry. From the outset, it should be stated that neither Logan Gage nor I feel that universal common ancestry is necessarily incompatible with theism. In a twist of poor logic, however, that fact is apparently sufficient for some theists to think that they should therefore accept common ancestry. Logan Gage and I observe that “when discussing science and faith, it is vital to ask the right questions. Queries beginning with the words ‘Could God have…?’ tend to be unenlightening. The much more revealing question is ‘What does the evidence say?’” Thus Read More ›

I am often asked what to make of Christoph Cardinal Schonborn’s new book Chance or Purpose? Luckily, I can now point people to Denyse O’Leary’s spot-on review. Among the many highlights, O’Leary notes that Schonborn focuses on knowing design not through empirical evidence but through natural reason. Yet if Darwinism is correct, true reason may not exist. Second, if Schonborn wants to oppose the fatuous conclusions of evolutionary psychology then he needs to oppose the supposed facts on which it is based. (Francis Collins makes the same mistake regarding altruism in The Language of God. He argues for Darwinian evolution and then argues against evolutionary explanations of altruism. Apparently he thinks the miraculous powers of natural selection can build the Read More ›

Discovery senior fellow and bioethicists Wesley J. Smith weighs in on scientism at his blog SecondHand Smoke. You can read the whole thing here.

As previously pointed out, the New York Times botched its recent story about the science standards debate in Texas, implying that support for covering the “strengths and weaknesses” of evolution is supposedly a new strategy on the part of Darwin critics. The only problem is that the “strengths and weaknesses” language in the Texas science standards was already included some 10 years ago in 1998 when the existing science standards were adopted, and so there is nothing new about it. (Indeed, the language itself derives from the 1980s, before the current sciences standards.) More importantly, the debate over whether to teach both the strengths and weaknesses of Darwinian evolution has been going on across the nation for the past decade. Read More ›

The New York Times is reporting on the scheduled review of Texas’ science standards later this year by the state school board. Seems like this must be reporter Laura Beil’s first rodeo because she gets all excited (mistakenly) about something that is old hat in Texas: textbook wrangling. Now a battle looms in Texas over science textbooks that teach evolution, and the wrestle for control seizes on three words. None of them are “creationism” or “intelligent design” or even “creator.” The words are “strengths and weaknesses.” Surely Beil did some research and found out that this battle last played out five years ago, so it’s hardly new. Back then the issue really was textbooks. This time it’s the language of Read More ›

There are several good news stories on the recent development in the federal court case in which Yoko Ono seeks to prevent further distribution of Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, the Ben Stein film. And then there is this one from ars technica: Notice the way the writer feels obliged to abuse free speech–by misrepresenting intelligent design–even as he defends it.Read more here at Discovery Blog.

There is an interesting new education project under construction at Binghamton University. According to The New York Times:

Yet a few scholars of thick dermis and pep-rally vigor believe that the cultural chasm can be bridged and the sciences and the humanities united into a powerful new discipline that would apply the strengths of both mindsets, the quantitative and qualitative, to a wide array of problems.

Now, we’re all for combining the sciences with the humanities. Clearly we should be developing well-rounded students. But what I fear is

Update: Download the US District Court ruling here. The Wall Street Journal Law Blog has more on the story. According to the Associated Press: Yoko Ono has lost her Manhattan legal battle to block the use of John Lennon’s song “Imagine” in a film challenging the theory of evolution. EMI still has a state level suit in New York against Premise Media for the inclusion of Imagine in Expelled, and no word yet when that might be resolved one way or the other. Premise now looks north with plans to launch Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed nationwide in Canada later this month. [Note: For a more comprehensive defense of Ben Stein’s documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, please see: NCSE Exposed at Read More ›