AP Texas Spins Story About Scientists Uniting Against Teaching the Controversy

The latest from the Associated Press out in Texas (via Houston Chronicle) reports that “Scientists from Texas universities on Tuesday denounced what they called supernatural and religious teaching in public school science classrooms and voiced opposition to attempts to water down evolution instruction.” We covered the Texas science standards last week, noting that Darwinists there oppose teaching the strengths and weaknesses of evolution. In the AP article, no explanation is given for their opposition to the “strengths and weaknesses” language except the unsupported claim that thoroughly examining Darwin’s theory in the classroom is something only creationists do. Actually, AP reporter Kelley Shannon is pretty sure that the whole thing is a creationist ploy to teach religion in our schools. That’s Read More ›

On Non-Nihilistic “Scientific” Atheism

Nobel laureate in physics Steven Weinberg recently revamped his 2008 Phi Beta Kappa Oration at Harvard University for an essay entitled “Without God” in The New York Review of Books. As the essay moves toward a close, Weinberg tells us: the worldview of science is rather chilling. Not only do we not find any point to life laid out for us in nature, no objective basis for our moral principles, no correspondence between what we think is the moral law and the laws of nature, of the sort imagined by philosophers from Anaximander and Plato to Emerson. We even learn that the emotions that we most treasure, our love for our wives and husbands and children, are made possible by Read More ›

Council of Europe’s Intolerance of Darwin-Dissenters Shared by some Ohio State University Faculty

I recently discussed how the Council of Europe’s “Committee on Culture, Science and Education” proposed “banning” intelligent design (ID) from science classrooms on the grounds that teaching ID may represent a “threat to human rights.” Sadly, that mindset does not exist in Europe alone. In 2005, three Ohio State University (OSU) faculty wrote a letter claiming that a doctoral thesis project by an OSU graduate student, Bryan Leonard, engaged in “unethical human subject experimentation” simply because Leonard taught students about scientific problems with Neo-Darwinism. (See “Professors Defend Ohio Grad Student Under Attack by Darwinists” for details.) Jonathan Wells dicusses this case: Although Leonard had gone through normal procedures and received proper approval to conduct research, OSU professors Brian McEnnis, Steve Read More ›

To Chicago Sun-Times: Thanks for Pinker’s Change of Heart

Dear Chicago Sun-Times Editor: Thank you for running Steven Pinker’s “In defense of dangerous ideas” (July 15) which recognized the need for the scientific community to embrace its scientific taboos–such as whether the state of the environment has actually improved in the last 50 years or whether men and women may have different innate aptitudes. Would that Pinker truly supported academic freedom for all scientists. While he is even willing to ask if men have an innate tendency to rape, apparently asking if nature exhibits deliberate design is beyond the pale.