Month: October 2007

October 31, 2007, 12:46 PM

One Of The World’s Most Famous Atheists Changes His Mind

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 ›

October 31, 2007, 9:55 AM

Principled (not Rhetorical) Reasons Why ID Doesn’t Identify the Designer (Part 1)

[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 ›

October 30, 2007, 4:36 PM

Atheist Fundamentalism and the Limits of Science

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, Read More ›

October 30, 2007, 12:05 AM

“Fossils. Fossils. Fossils.” Does Ken Miller Win?

Ken Miller was recently quoted in a campus news article saying, “We have the fossils. … We win.” Professor Miller’s logical fallacy was pointed out years ago by those who attempted to clarify reasoning in paleontology, systematics, and evolutionary biology, and it led some scientists (like Colin Patterson) to the conclusion that a paleontological pattern may support or falsify an evolutionary hypothesis, but it can never absolutely prove one (i.e. fossils can’t make Darwinism positively “win”). As a result, some scientists (e.g., Brower, 2000) proposed a strict separation between paleontology and systematics on the one hand, and evolutionary theory on the other. Unfortunately, this clear-thinking approach has been largely abandoned or ignored by most paleontologists and evolutionary biologists. Those who Read More ›