atheism

The Washington Post‘s Michael Gerson recently wrote: The latest findings of the Pew Forum’s massive and indispensable U.S. Religious Landscape Survey reveal some intriguing confusion among Americans on cosmic issues. About 13 percent of evangelicals, it turns out, don’t believe in a personal God, leading to a shameful waste of golf time on Sunday mornings. And 9 percent of atheists report that they are skeptical of evolution. Are there atheist creationists? Well, there probably aren’t any atheist creationists, although, if Richard Dawkins can be an “Atheist for Jesus,” anything is possible. Yes, these folks may be severely confused (“deluded,” if you prefer). However, perhaps many of these atheists, while not being creationists, are simply skeptical of the Darwinian mechanism. (Gerson 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 ›

[Editor’s Note: This is slide 12 in a series of 14 slides available at JudgingPBS.com, a new website featuring “Darwin’s Failed Predictions,” a response to PBS-NOVA’s online materials for their “Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial” documentary.] If, as Slide 11 suggests, human origins are a mystery to Darwinian scientists, the chemical origin of life presents a far greater challenge. As Gregg Easterbrook recently wrote in Wired Magazine, “What creates life out of the inanimate compounds that make up living things? No one knows. How were the first organisms assembled? Nature hasn’t given us the slightest hint. If anything, the mystery has deepened over time.”1 Origin of life theorists have struggled simply to account for the origin of pre-biological organic Read More ›

Yesterday, The Diane Rehm Show on NPR held a discussion on the new National Academy of Sciences (NAS) booklet Science, Evolution, and Creationism. To anyone with eyes to see, the booklet is a transparent attempt to label any criticism of Darwinism as “creationism.”

This evolutionary-evangelistic tract is so dogmatic Catholic News World said, the NAS “has produced a new text warning against the terrible danger that someone, somewhere, might not entirely accept evolutionary theory.”

Darwinian logic often contends that because a given proportion of ID proponents are creationists, ID must therefore be creationism. It’s a twist on the genetic fallacy, one I like to call the Darwinist “Genesis Genetic Argument.” As noted, it implies that each and every argument made by a creationist must be equivalent to arguing for full-blooded creationism. This fallacious argument is easy to defeat on logical grounds by pointing out that some ID proponents are not creationists, and in fact have been persuaded to support ID in the absence of religion. Thus something other than creationism or religion must be fundamental to the set of views underlying ID (big hint: it’s the scientific data indicating real design in nature)! Michael Read More ›

Thanks to a notice by William Dembski at UncommonDescent, people are becoming aware that video footage of the “Beyond belief: Science, religion, reason and survival” conference where scientists bashed religion at the Salk Institute is now online. A panel discussion, which included Neil deGrasse Tyson, Lawrence Krauss, and Michael Shermer, discussed why as many as 15% of National Academy of Sciences (NAS) scientists believe in God. Tyson expressed surprise that the number was as high as 15%: Tyson: I want to put on the table, not why 85% of the members of the National Academy of Sciences reject God, I want to know why 15% of the National Academy don’t. That’s really what we’ve got to address here. Otherwise the Read More ›

Both Uncommon Descent and Telic Thoughts are discussing how less than 1 mile up the road from UCSD, scientists gathered last week at The Salk Institute for Biological Studies to bash religion. The New York Times‘ science section covered the conference, but failed to recognize that many ID-proponents accept Big Bang cosmology and even find it is evidence indicating cosmic design. Nonetheless, the vitriol and hatred coming from these scientists against religion is striking. Consider these excerpts from the article: [O]ne speaker after another called on their colleagues to be less timid in challenging teachings about nature based only on scripture and belief . . . With a rough consensus that the grand stories of evolution by natural selection and Read More ›

We’ve recently discussed the media bias against intelligent design (ID) (see here and here). As also reported, the British Independent published a harshly anti-ID article adopting the rhetoric of ID-critics as if it were reportable fact. This same article made much ado about the alleged religious motives of proponents of intelligent design. Yet The Independent relies upon the British Humanist Association (BHA) as an authority which opposes teaching ID. This BHA has an anti-religious agenda which instructs people to live “without religious [belief]”. The BHA seeks “an end” to the “privileged position of religion — and Christianity in particular” in society. For The Independent to harp upon the alleged religious motives of ID-proponents and ignore all potential anti-religious motives of Read More ›