Delusion

It’s surprising that editorial writers aren’t better educated on the issues they pontificate on.
Last weekend it was the New York Times making the claim that there are no weaknesses in modern evolutionary theory, albeit they were likely led astray by the misleading article by Laura Beil.
(As an aside, Ms. Beil finally did respond to my question about why she didn’t bother to contact Discovery Institute or Texans for Better Science Education, both of which she attacked in her story. Her response:

I did not contact you before the story because I was focusing on the situation here in Texas, and I am not aware that you have any direct involvement. I did not contact Texans for Better Science Education (other than to note their efforts) because the best source to represent their views is Don McLeroy.

You would think that in Journalism 101 reporters would learn that the best source to represent one’s views is one’s self, not someone else. But it is the New York Times, after all.)
Today it’s the Waco Tribune with this statement.

Evolution is fact, not theory.

Of course, it depends on what you mean by evolution.

Can’t get enough David Berlinski? If you’ve been going through withdrawl since Dr. Berlinski returned to Paris after his American book tour for The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions, then have we got an interview for you: Read Christopher A. Ferrara’s interview “Jewish Intellectuals Challenge Tyranny of Darwinism.”

Dogmatic materialist Dr. Steven Novella, assistant professor of neurology at Yale, president and co-founder of the New England Skeptical Society, and my interlocutor in an ongoing debate on the mind-brain problem, has issued a challenge to me regarding his theory that the mind is caused entirely by matter:

Prove me wrong, Egnor.

A bit of background helps explain Dr. Novella’s pique. In an earlier post arguing for a pure materialist understanding of the mind, Dr. Novella made this astonishing claim:

The materialist hypothesis – that the brain causes consciousness – has made a number of predictions, and every single prediction has been validated. Every single question that can be answered scientifically – with observation and evidence – that takes the form: “If the brain causes the mind then…” has been resolved in favor of that hypothesis.

I noted:

A bit of advice: whenever a scientist says of his own theory that “every single prediction has been validated,” you’re being had. No scientific theory has had “every single prediction” validated. All theories accord with evidence in some ways, and are inconsistent in others. Successful scientific theories prevail on the preponderance of the evidence, not validation of “every single prediction.” Real science lacks the precision of ideology.

Dr. Novella replied:

The January 2008 issue of Christianity Today contained a letter from Randy Isaac titled “Providence and Evolution.”

In his critique of Alister McGrath’s The Dawkins Delusion? [“The CT Review,” November], Logan Paul Gage fails to distinguish between scientific randomness and metaphysical randomness. By insisting that these two concepts are inextricably linked, Gage concludes that McGrath (and Francis Collins) maintain a position that precludes divine providence. Evolution is not a purely random process,

Ahem: something I never denied. But I interrupt.

Over at the First Things blog On the Square, Francis Beckwith carefully shows how even Professor Dawkins cannot escape the common sense perception that the world is filled with agency, and those agents have a proper function. To get at all this, Beckwith describes Dawkins’ lambasting of Kurt Wise, the young-earth creationist who did doctoral work under Stephen Jay Gould at Harvard.

Dawkins writes:

Cornell Professor Emeritus Richard A. Baer has an opinion piece in the Cornell Daily Sun that is right on target in several areas but completely lost when it comes to freedom of scientific inquiry and intelligent design. Baer rightly points out instances where staunch Darwinists such as Carl Sagan or Richard Dawkins have clearly crossed out of the realm of science and into philosophy by making dogmatically materialistic statements such as Sagan’s famous line that “The cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be.” Baer explains that in his experience:

A far more serious problem at Cornell and at most universities is the many illegal border crossings that go on in the opposite direction: claims made by scientists, speaking as scientists, that are really theological, philosophical or ethical claims, rather than scientific ones.

TIME magazine this week has an interesting discussion between Richard Dawkins, author most recently of The God Delusion, and Francis Collins, author of The Language of God. It is worth reading. Two observations: