Richard

Regular visitors to ENV know well the recent trials and tribulations of astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez, who was denied tenure in spite of his stellar credentials. Now it seems the rest of the world will learn about Gonzalez’ persecution for being a proponent of intelligent design. Expelled, the forthcoming film that explores the academic persecution of pro-ID scientists, apparently will be featuring some of Gonzalez’s story. After his tenure was denied earlier this year, a faculty member at ISU on the tenure committee admitted he voted against Gonzalez because of his support for, and research into, intelligent design theory. While he didn’t teach about ID in his classes at Iowa State University, Gonzalez did co-author an important ID book, The Privileged Read More ›

An Associated Press article titled “African fossils paint messy picture of human evolution” explains that common popular conceptions of human evolution are incorrect: “Surprising fossils dug up in Africa are creating messy kinks in the iconic straight line of human evolution with its knuckle-dragging ape and briefcase-carrying man.” Indeed, the inappropriateness of such “straight line” depictions of human evolution was one of Jonathan Wells’ main points in chapter 11 in Icons of Evolution, “From Ape to Human: The Ultimate Icon.” A Harvard biological anthropologist stated the newly reported fossils reveal, “how poorly we understand the transition from being something much more apelike to something more humanlike.” The Associated Press article goes on to explain why Homo habilis can no longer Read More ›

Stealth: the act or action of proceeding furtively, secretly, or imperceptiblyPronunciation: ‘stelthFunction: nounEtymology: Middle English stelthe; akin to Old English stelan to steal Richard Brookhiser’s recent TIME magazine article “Matters of Morality” is just lovely in its description of intelligent design: In 2005 Bush said that both intelligent design (a stealth creationist theory) and evolution ought to be taught in schools. Wow. First of all, ID is not creationism–and no one is more vociferously insistent about this than the major creationist organizations like Answers In Genesis. We’ve heard this charge before. But stealth? Stealth…like black helicopter stealth? I guess we better take all of our pro-ID websites down. Michael Behe better round back up the quarter million copies of Darwin’s Read More ›

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:

It’s disheartening (and revealing) when people have to demonize their opponents in order to argue against them. Unfortunately, SMU biology professor John Wise has chosen this approach, opening his rebuttal to Anika Smith and Sarah Levy by stating, “Deceptive tactics seem to be a recurring theme at the Discovery Institute,” and continuing for the entirety of his response to supply nothing more than a string of misdirected or misinformed ad hominem attacks. Baseless ad hominem attack 1–Of Pandas and People: Wise attacks the Of Pandas and People textbook as if it is dishonest, and as if that affects the Discovery Institute. But Wise fails to mention that the textbook was first published a year before Discovery Institute was even founded, Read More ›

It is a rare day that I would dispute Bruce Chapman’s reading of anything. But today is one such day. Disagreeing with Ambassador Chapman’s and Richard Kirk’s interpretations of David Brooks’ recent column “The Age of Darwin,” I (perhaps mistakenly) thought that Brooks was pointing out the irony of our supposedly post-modern intellectual culture which waxes eloquently about having no grand, unifying metanarrative and at the same time bows down to the Darwinian fairytale, to borrow David Stove’s phrase.

Writes Brooks:

Note: This post has been updated to reflect the fact that the Sacramento Unified School District has not yet officially acted on the name change to its middle school.

Like most mainstream American newspapers, the Sacramento Bee is a strong and uncritical proponent of Darwin’s theory of evolution. The Bee recently demonstrated its devotion to the Darwinist cause with two news articles spotlighting the celebration of Darwin Day in Sacramento.

Ironically, the day after Darwin Day, the Bee included an editorial that rightly condemns the American eugenics movement and that rightly supports a proposal to remove a famous Sacramentan’s name from a school based on his enthusiastic support of eugenics.

Richard Fortey, President of the Geological Society of London, has found a heretofore unknown formula for attacking ID. In “The Ego and the ID,” Fortey calls his interlocutors “religious hard liners,” says that if they doubt common ancestry it is tantamount to “believing the earth is flat as a pancake,” and calls them “IDiots.” How becoming of the Michael Faraday Prize recipient. I suppose Faraday himself would surely have been a “religious hard liner” by Fortey’s standards.

Fortey continues:

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: