Month: September 2009
Richard Dawkins’s Jewish Problem
The Anti-Defamation League, the country’s leading group dedicated to fighting anti-Semitism, is rightly sensitive to the offense of trivializing the Holocaust. Why, then, has the ADL said nothing in protest against the Darwinian biologist and bestselling atheist author Richard Dawkins and his comparison of Darwin doubters to Holocaust deniers? The ADL has objected to attempts to inject Nazi imagery into the health-care reform debate (“Such statements only serve to diminish and trivialize the extent of the Nazi regime’s crimes against humanity”), the abortion debate (“Such analogies can only trivialize and diminish the horror”), the animal-rights debate (“the issue should stand on its own merits, rather than rely on inappropriate comparisons that only serve to trivialize the suffering of the six Read More ›
Nature Publishes Paper on the Edge of Evolution
Nature has published an interesting paper recently which places severe limits on Darwinian evolution. This is the first of several posts discussing it. The manuscript, from the laboratory of Joseph Thornton at the University of Oregon, is titled “An epistatic ratchet constrains the direction of glucocorticoid receptor evolution.” The work is interpreted by its authors within a standard Darwinian framework. Nonetheless, like the important work over the years of Michigan State’s Richard Lenski on laboratory evolution of E. coli, which has shown trillions of bacteria evolving under selection for tens of thousands of generations yielding just broken genes and minor changes, the new work demonstrates the looming brick wall which confronts unguided evolution in at least one system. And it Read More ›
Godless Theodicy
The Problem of Evil is perhaps the most vexing problem in theology. There are many answers to it, which means that there is no single satisfying answer to it. What I’ve never understood about theodicy is this: why do atheists ponder the Problem of Evil?Jerry Coyne has a recent post on theodicy. He (finally) admits …I’m no philosopher…this is amateur philosophizing. Damn right. For a man who recently sneered at Thomas Aquinas, this is progress.Coyne:
Reality Check: Oklahoma Darwinists’ “Gotcha” Moment at Cambrian Explosion Film Falls Flat
According to a live-blogger at the Southwestern premiere of “Darwin’s Dilemma” earlier tonight, a Darwinist during Q and A challenged Stephen Meyer and Jonathan Wells by charging that the interviews in the film of noted paleontologists Simon Conway Morris and James Valentine (both evolutionists) were done a decade ago. “Are you aware that the interviews of Morris and Valentine were done 9 and 10 years ago?” the questioner asked. Apparently the implication was that the interviews were so old they no longer accurately reflected the views of Morris and Valentine. Except that the questioner was flat wrong. According to Illustra Media, with whom I checked tonight, the interviews were done specifically for this project in October and November of 2006 Read More ›
Coverage of Last Night’s ID Lecture at OU
Well, the news out of Oklahoma about Stephen Meyer’s intelligent design presentation at the University last night is quite encouraging. Over three hundred people reportedly turned out for the lecture and discussion following. For all the potty-mouthed bluster that local Darwin activists offered up ahead of time, almost everyone in attendance, whether for or against ID, was civil and respectful during the presentation and discussion last night. The local daily paper, The Norman Transcript, has two stories today, one about the event last night and one about the screening of Darwin’s Dilemma this evening. Intelligent design is the most likely explanation of the origin of life, an author and speaker at the University of Oklahoma said Monday night.