Science and Culture Today Discovering Design in Nature
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theology

“People don’t know polar bears can swim!”

Camille Paglia has made interesting comments about global warming in the past that have made me think she might be a (very quiet) Darwin skeptic. Not the NCSE’s Josh Rosenau. His selective quote mining of her comments meant to imply the exact opposite is Orwellian. To make matters worse he really twists things up when attempts to paint those who champion critical thinking on evolution as postmodern Marxists. “Critical thinking” sounds great. But it’s a Marxist approach to culture. It’s just slapping a liberal leftist ideology on everything you do. You just find all the ways that power has defrauded or defamed or destroyed. It’s a pat formula that’s very thin. At the primary level, what kids need is facts. Read More ›

Why Does Ruse Act Like He’s an Expert on Theology?

Several months ago, I participated in a two-hour radio “debate” with Michael Ruse (along with Guillermo Gonzalez and Carlos Calle) about design in cosmology and astronomy. Several times, Michael Ruse lectured me about Christian theology. But it had a surreal quality to it, since he was talking about the theology he (as an agnostic) preferred, but he kept acting as if he was representing Christian theology accurately. I finally insisted that I actually did know a good bit about theology and that he was just making stuff up.

Ruse’s responses to Stephen Fuller in the Guardian over ID have that same, surreal quality. For instance, here’s how he distinguishes the difference between the Protestant and Catholic views of justification:

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misunderstandings
Image Credit: lolloj - Adobe Stock

How to Completely Misunderstand Intelligent Design: A Response to Stephen Barr

Catholic physicist Stephen Barr is a constitutionally uncharitable critic of ID. It's not clear that he has even read the books that he criticizes. Read More ›
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Composite photo collage of scream mouth hate concept scared american girl fly away racism bully stereotype isolated on painted background
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Lewontin and Numbers: Day One of Darwin 2009 at the University of Chicago

“Go to hell!” said Ron Numbers cheerfully to me, as we greeted each other at the front of Rockefeller Chapel last night. “Hey, did I say that loud enough?” he asked, looking around at the various evolutionary biology and history and philosophy of science worthies — Lewontin, Kitcher, Sober, Ruse, Dennett, Richards, and so on — milling about. Ron’s smiling insult was a mocking attempt to redress the widespread criticism that he had let me off easy in our notorious Bloggingheads conversation. A spirit of raillery was in the air, given a vigorous kick at the beginning of the evening by Harvard geneticist Richard Lewontin. Little of the secular sanctimony of the 1959 Darwin centennial (see below) was in evidence. Read More ›

Alchemy, Marxism, and the future of Darwinism

I recently found myself in a conversation with two college undergraduates, both of them seniors in the natural sciences (physics and biochemistry, respectively). At one point we were discussing alchemy, which they knew as a pre-modern attempt to transmute lead into gold. I asked them whether they could name any famous alchemists. They could not, though one of them dimly recalled hearing of “someone whose name began with A.” I then predicted that Darwinian evolution would eventually fade into the same obscurity that now shrouds alchemy. Although I knew from previous conversations that my young friends were skeptical of Darwinian theory, they expressed considerable surprise at my prediction, if only because Darwinism is presently held in such high esteem by Read More ›

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Shattered chemistry flask. Chemistry concept. Scientific experiment
Image Credit: Jane Kelly - Adobe Stock

Don’t Bash it ‘Til You’ve Tried It: A response to Krauthammer and Kriegel

Anti-ID editorials by Charles Krauthammer and Uriah Kriegel misunderstand science and offer poor critiques of intelligent design. Read More ›

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