Science and Culture Today | Page 1314 | Discovering Design in Nature

Dr. Steven Novella and I have been engaged in a vigorous blog debate (here, here, here, here, here, here, here, , and here,) about the mind/brain problem and about intelligent design. Dr. Novella, who presents himself as a pro-science ‘skeptic’ (he’s president and co-founder of the New England Skeptical Society), is a passionate Darwinist and materialist. He blogs often on Darwinism, materialism, and “denialism” in science.

Monday morning I checked Dr. Novella’s blog. I noticed that several (at least four) of his recent controversial blog posts were missing. The links are here, here, here, and here. I checked more closely– using my own previous links to the posts– and the posts (#165, #189, #260, and #283) were gone, without a trace and without an explanation. The blog posts dealt with his view that intelligent design wasn’t falsifiable and with the debate between materialists and dualists on the mind-brain problem. What was up?

I emailed Dr. Novella, and asked him:

“We should teach only science in the science classroom.” Of course, who would disagree? The fact of the matter is, what happens in the science classroom — as several textbooks can attest — isn’t always science, but often philosophy.

Why do so many fail to understand the difference? As Dr. Rebecca Keller, CEO of textbook publisher Gravitas Publications, explains,

The philosophical aspects of science are usually not discussed in elementary or high school grades and for that matter, neither are they taught to scientists. Most people and most scientists are completely unaware that science is any different than the philosophies that are currently masquerading as science.

So it isn’t Science that we’re talking about, per se, but Scientific materialism, the philosophy that groups like the NCSE want taught in science class.

Scientific materialism is the current philosophy that guides and interprets most of modern science. Most scientists are unaware that they operate from within this interpretative framework and as a result it has become science. But scientific materialism is not science. It is one way to interpret scientific information.

Last month, I blogged about a pre-med student who recently took the MCAT and found emotionally-charged pro-evolution-biased language on reading comprehension questions. As he concluded, the MCAT exam is “just supposed to be a way to evaluate how you process information, and they don’t want to influence your reasoning by making you answer emotionally charged questions. This passage was distracting while I was taking the test. It was distracting because it’s about an emotionally controversial topic, and I don’t agree with everything they said. This crosses the line.” Following that post, another pre-med student (who is about to matriculate into medical school) contacted me and had this to say about the distracting pro-evolution bias on the MCAT: I sat for Read More ›

Note: This is one of a series of posts excerpted from my book, Billions of Missing Links: A Rational Look at the Mysteries Evolution Can’t Explain. When it comes to citing examples of purposeful design, nearly every author likes to point out the hen’s egg. It’s really quite remarkable. Despite having a shell that is a mere 0.35 mm think, they don’t break when a parent sits on them. According to Dr. Knut Schmidt-Nielsen, A bird egg is a mechanical structure strong enough to hold a chick securely during development, yet weak enough to break out of. The shell must let oxygen in and carbon dioxide out, yet be sufficiently impermeable to water to keep the contents from drying out. Read More ›

Naturalism: A Critical Analysis
Edited by William Lane Craig and J.P. Moreland
With contributions by William Lane Craig, William Dembski, Stewart Goetz, John E. Hare, Robert C. Koons, J. P. Moreland, Paul K. Moser, Michael Rea, Charles Taliferro, Dallas Willard, David Yandell
Routledge, 2000, 286 pages
ISBN: 0-415-23524-3

This impressive volume contains critical essays on naturalism from the perspectives of theology, ethics, cosmology, ontology, and epistemology. Various Discovery Fellows make contributions including Robert C. Koons, J.P. Moreland, William Lane Craig, and William Dembski.

Koons begins by noting that there is a simple correlation between existence and the requirement of some non-natural first cause. He observes an irony that science thinks it requires naturalism, when our very ability to practice science, due to the orderly, reliable, and predictable behavior of the universe implies a non-natural intelligent cause. Scientific dependence upon naturalism is self-refuting.

The Florida state legislature’s inability to push through an academic freedom bill highlights the difficulty of passing any legislation, expecially one that has strong opposition. Any legislation dealing with the teaching of evolution is bound to face an uphill battle as Darwinists are effective at organizing groups and people to pressure the legislators. Where does that leave the teachers in Florida?

The documentary Expelled keenly observes that scientific ideas begin in the academy, but if they’re to get out to the people, they must pass through a series of barriers and “checkpoints,” which means they can be hindered or stopped at any point along the way. In the film, the first checkpoint is the academy, which polices journals and controls research grants and funding. The second checkpoint is comprised of watchdog groups, like the NCSE, that work hard to organize and kindle opposition against Darwin-skeptics. The next checkpoint is the media, which carefully selects the sources of information it will broadcast to the public on this issue. When all those checkpoints fail, the final checkpoint is the courts. (This idea is Read More ›

Richard Dawkins just can’t seem to keep his foot out of his mouth. He has spent the last several weeks trying to recover from his embarrassing interview in the film Expelled where he concedes that intelligent design is a scientific hypothesis after all — so long as you limit the intelligence being studied to space aliens. Now, after denouncing Expelled as “wicked, evil” and an “outrage” for pointing out that Darwinism was one of the intellectual influences on Nazism, Dawkins has compared a popular Rabbi who dares to criticize him to Hitler! And he did it no less on World Holocaust Remembrance Day. No, I’m not joking. As I’ve said before, it’s getting really hard to parody the Darwinists. They do it so well themselves.

Does the biology textbook Explore Evolution manufacture false controversies about evolution, while ignoring real ones?

That’s what biologist and science writer John Timmer claimed in a post earlier this week at Ars Technica. Timmer attended a two-day symposium on evolution at Rockefeller University and noted the many debates brewing there. “Evolution clearly has no shortage of controversies,” he concluded . But those real controversies have “no overlap,” he claimed, with the “ostensible” (i.e., fake) controversies supposedly “manufactured” by Explore Evolution. Bottom line for Timmer: while students may, or may not, need to learn about controversies in evolution — he leans strongly towards “not” — Explore Evolution is misleading at best, and the academic freedom bills being introduced around the country aren’t needed.

Darwinists have long made an argument from ignorance, where our lack of present knowledge of the function for a given biological structure is taken as evidence that there is no function and the structure is merely a vestige of evolutionary history.  Darwinists have commonly made this mistake with many types of “junk” DNA, now known to have function.  In contrast, intelligent agents design objects for a purpose, and therefore intelligent design predicts that biological structures will have function. Here’s where it gets interesting: Functionless structures may have been originally designed but were later rendered functionless by natural processes. For example, if you leave a laptop computer on the top of a mountain for 1000 years where it is exposed to Read More ›