Month: March 2009
NCSE Texas “Talking Points” Expressly Advocate Scientism and Deny the Existence of the Supernatural
The National Center for Science Education (NCSE) usually tries to puts forth a religion-friendly image, despite the fact that the NCSE’s executive director, Eugenie Scott, is a signer of the Third Humanist Manifesto. Something must have slipped through the cracks, because the NCSE’s talking points for Texas have encouraged activists to testify not just that science doesn’t study the supernatural, but to expressly testify that science denies the existence of the supernatural: Science posits that there are no forces outside of nature. Science cannot be neutral on this issue. The history of science is a long comment denying that forces outside of nature exist, and proving that this is the case again and again. There is simply zero scientific evidence Read More ›
Trying to Put Intelligent Design Under a Taboo
It’s always amusing how evolutionists continually proclaim, and then re-proclaim, the apparent demise of intelligent design (ID) (i.e. ‘no really, this time ID actually is dead!‘). We’re pretty used to that, but then it gets a little creepy when they exude what appears to be an unhealthy pleasure in ID’s (purported) demise. Such was recently the exact case when National Center for Science Education (NCSE) president Kevin Padian and former NCSE spokesman Nick Matzke, in a January issue of Biochemical Journal, published a “review article” claiming that the “case for ID” has “collapsed,” gleefully asserting that “no one with scientific or philosophical integrity is going to take [Discovery Institute or ID] seriously in future.” I challenged Nick on his words Read More ›
Michael Behe’s Edge of Evolution Vindicated From Genetics Paper
As we reported earlier, Michael Behe has been responding to critics of his scientific arguments in Edge of Evolution over at his Amazon blog, concluding with this thought: Here’s a final important point. Genetics is an excellent journal; its editors and reviewers are top notch; and Durrett and Schmidt themselves are fine researchers. Yet, as I show above, when simple mistakes in the application of their model to malaria are corrected, it agrees closely with empirical results reported from the field that I cited. This is very strong support that the central contention of The Edge of Evolution is correct: that it is an extremely difficult evolutionary task for multiple required mutations to occur through Darwinian means, especially if one Read More ›
When Theology Becomes Invisible: A Reply to Joshua Rosenau (ID at the AAAS Annual Meeting)
Last month, NCSE staffer Joshua Rosenau complained on his blog that I failed to report on his talk, “Why We Need to Apply Dobzhansky’s Maxim Today,” which opened the February 15, 2009 AAAS session, Evolution Makes Sense of Biology. Instead, he says, my blog post focused on issues of my own manufacture, and missed the point, not only of his talk, but of the entire session — evolution, not intelligent design. Did I miss the point? Here’s the evidence:
Remembering Raymond Shaw
The power of a slogan is that if you say it over and over again enough times, the effect is like brainwashing on yourself and many of the people who listen to you. It crowds out thought, to the point where, when a particular topic comes up in conversation, the slogan-imprinted mind simply spits back the slogan. You’ll see this at work among scientists, journalists, and the general public. Take, for example, a slogan that dogs the evolution debate: “There is no debate,” along with its variant, “There is no controversy.” A Google search on those two, linked with the word “evolution,” produces 20,800 and 18,800 hits respectively. One of those hits, I noticed, was from a piece I wrote Read More ›