Science and Culture Today | Page 1348 | Discovering Design in Nature

Former editor of Seattle Weekly Knute Berger saw the merit in Bruce Chapman’s recent blog post, Thank You, Dr. Watson, though, as he put it, I don’t agree with Chapman often, but he’s absolutely right that such thinking continues in scientific (and I would add corporate) circles. Despite our collective horror about the Holocaust — the extreme Nazi expression of eugenics — there is a general unwillingness to own up to the sorry legacy of eugenics in America and Europe, where hundreds of thousands of people were forcibly sterilized, lobotomized, and institutionalized to “sanitize” society of the poor, disabled, gay, mentally ill, etc. A general sense of amnesia or an attitude that nothing we did was as bad as what Read More ›

The New York Times has not covered any news that might damage Darwinism, at least not since a writer on its Science page a few years back acknowledged that some of the standard textbook proofs employed to bolster Darwin’s theory are false. (That reporter is now in Iraq.) Instead, The Times seeks out ways to anticipate and undermine any reports that could hurt the Darwinist cause. The New York Times, in truth, is in the news making business. Accordingly, Mark Oppenheimer apparently was dispatched by The Times magazine to debunk the new book co-authored by Antony Flew, the famous backsliding English atheist who has decided that there is a god, after all–some kind of god, anyhow, an “Aristotelian god” of the kind that inspires deism, Flew says.

[This four part series responding to Paul Gross can be seen in: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.] In 2005, Michael Behe published an op-ed in the New York Times entitled “Design for Living. Paul Gross has now reviewed Michael Behe’s book The Edge of Evolution in The New Criterion, using exactly the same title as Behe’s 2005 New York Times op-ed, accusing Behe of making so many mistakes that “it would need a book longer than The Edge to restate the model together with its already noticed (in print and online) errors and omissions.” Yet as I will recount in this four-part response, Dr. Gross’s review has many mistakes, and many of his key criticisms of Behe Read More ›

The Incorrigible Dr. Berlinski answers:

Note: This is one of a series of posts adapted from my new book, Darwin Day in America. You can find other posts in the series here.

This week’s installment of “Meet the Materialists” is particularly fitting for the week of Halloween.

By the turn of the nineteenth century, Italian scientist Giovanni Aldini was performing macabre experiments on decapitated oxes, horses, lambs… and humans. “The unenlightened part of mankind are apt to entertain a prejudice against those… who attempt to perform experiments on dead subjects,” Aldini later acknowledged, but he maintained that such experiments were justified because the object was to improve human welfare. “It is… an incontrovertible fact, that such researches in modern times have proved a source of the most valuable information.”

Determined to understand the workings of what he called “the human animal machine,” Aldini knew that he needed to procure bodies while they were still fresh and “retained… the vital powers in the highest degree of preservation.” His solution? “I was obliged, if I may be allowed the expression, to place myself under the scaffold, near the axe of justice, to receive the yet bleeding bodies of unfortunate criminals, the only subjects proper for my experiments.”

In 2001 an internal PBS memo titled The Evolution Controversy, Use It or Lose It: Evolution Project/WGBH Boston, revealed an improper political agenda behind PBS’s miniseries “Evolution.” The memo made very clear how “Evolution” would be used to influence government officials and marketed to the public in an effort to exercise control over how evolution is taught in public schools.

Here they go again. November 13th, PBS’s NOVA will air Judgment Day, which PBS describes as “recreations based on court transcripts, NOVA presents the arguments by lawyers and expert witnesses in riveting detail and provides an eye-opening crash course on questions such as ‘What is evolution?’ and ‘Does intelligent design qualify as science?'” You can bet there won’t be any leaked memos about how they plan to spin the Dover trial. (We hardly need one having been inundated with misrepresentation after mistreprsentation of the trial’s impact for almost two years now.)

[Read the full article, “Principled (not Rhetorical) Reasons Why Intelligent Design Doesn’t Identify the Designer,” here.] In Part 1 I discussed the principled reasons that ID proponents offer to explain why ID does not identify the designer: “while biological structures may be scientifically explained via intelligent design, the structures themselves have no way of directly telling us whether the designer is Yahweh, Buddha, Yoda, or some other type of intelligent agency.” Unfortunately, some critics have misunderstood this point as implying that ID proponents are completely silent about who they believe the designer is, or that ID proponents deny the possibility that the designer could be God. This very misconception was printed in an article co-authored by Barbara Forrest that was Read More ›

CSC senior fellow Benjamin Wiker has had an opportunity to interview Oxford philosopher Antony Flew. Flew, an Oxford educated philosopher, held a number of distinguished teaching posts at British universities and had been a prominent atheist throughout the second half of the 20th century. Indeed, he was sort of Richard Dawkins before Dawkins, his name synonymous with staunchly materialistic beliefs. Another CSC senior fellow, Jonathan Witt, first wrote on Flew abandoning his adherence to atheism back in 2004 in the Seattle Times. So this isn’t exactly new news. However, Flew has now published a book explaining in more details his change of mind titled, “There Is A God.” In it he explains his change as a journey into reason.Flew told Read More ›

[Read the full article, “Principled (not Rhetorical) Reasons Why Intelligent Design Doesn’t Identify the Designer,” here.] Mike Gene recently posted on Telic Thoughts responding to professor James F. McGrath, who accuses intelligent design (ID) proponents of being dishonest when they claim that ID does not identify the designer. This professor wrote: “That isn’t an instance of humility, but of strategy, and we all know why the strategy is being used: to wedge ID into science classrooms by disconnecting it from religion.” Similarly, I recently read a law review article co-authored by Barbara Forrest where she asserts with Stephen Gey and Matthew Brauer that “an intelligent designer is simply a subtle reference to God.” (More on problems with this article in Read More ›

Juno Walker at Letters from Vrai has responded to my post Dr. Pigliucci and Fundamentalism in Science Education. Dr Massimo Pigliucci published an essay in The McGill Journal of Education in which he made the absurd claim that effective science education would dissuade students from a belief in Heaven. I pointed out in my post that Heaven wasn’t exactly a proper subject for the scientific method and that the assertion that science education was even applicable to a belief in Heaven was fundamentalism — a kind of atheist fundamentalism. The conflation of methodological naturalism and philosophical naturalism — science and atheism — is no more acceptable pedagogy than the conflation of science and creationism. Atheism and creationism are philosophical inferences, and, irrespective of the truth of either faith, neither is consistent with the scientific method. The scientific method — methodological naturalism — is the data-driven study of nature. It’s based on natural, not supernatural, claims. The irony is that the McGill Journal of Education published Dr. Pigliucci’s atheist broadsheet for fundamentalism in science education, but would never publish a creationist broadsheet for fundamentalism in science education.

Walker cites Darwinist philosopher Barbara Forrest to defend the assertion that atheism is a scientifically justifiable inference. Dr. Forrest: