Creationism:
But, allowing that we were to take the operations of one part of nature upon another, for the foundation of our judgement concerning the origin of the whole, (which never can be admitted,) yet why select so minute, so...
Posted on October 6, 2008 3:25 AM • 4 Comments •
... here, at IAmYourGod. Personally, I suspect God actually wants all those atheists and agnostics, because he values critical thinking....
Posted on October 5, 2008 8:04 PM • 4 Comments •
... by GumbyTheCat, with just the right amount of snark. Late note: See the critical commentary by Galley Proofs....
Posted on October 4, 2008 12:17 AM • 1 Comments •
Many people are confused about what counts as a fallacy, including teachers of critical reasoning. Opponents of science often accuse pro-science writers of "the fallacy of authority" or "the ad hominem fallacy" when they are noted for having made...
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Posted on September 22, 2008 1:03 AM • 8 Comments •
Actually I'm not. The Sea of Faith In Australia crowd are very nice and easy to get on with folk, and many of them are your garden variety humanists, atheists and skeptics. Lawrence Krauss is a very nice guy...
Posted on September 20, 2008 1:41 AM • 5 Comments •
Here is a roundup of links and stuff that I don't have time to blog on right now. A. C. Grayling replies in a piece of beautiful snark to Steve Fuller's response to his review of Dissent over Descent....
Posted on September 13, 2008 3:09 AM • 7 Comments •
I am presently reading Fuller's Dissent over Descent, but here's A. C. Grayling's review in advance of mine. The money quote: The demerits of ID theory itself – so woeful as to be funny: in this world of ours,...
Posted on September 9, 2008 1:25 AM • 10 Comments •
One of the enduring objections to evolution of the Darwinian variety is that it is based on chance, and so for theists who believe God is interventionist, it suggests that God is subjected to chance, and hence not onmi-something...
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Posted on September 5, 2008 8:47 AM • 38 Comments •
A little while back I linked to Sahotra Sarkar's review of Steve Fuller's Science versus Religion. Now Fuller has put up a defence at the Intelligent Design website, Uncommon Descent, under the gerrymandered image of a bacterial flagellum (if...
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Posted on August 22, 2008 11:25 PM • 53 Comments •
As I sit here, dying slowly and loudly from a dose of gastro and probably 'flu (Australian male: we don't do sick well), trying to distract myself from the efforts of my lower intestines to escape to Jamaica, I...
Posted on August 14, 2008 3:59 AM • 17 Comments •
Steven ("Steve") Fuller is a well known sociologist of science (he began as a philosopher of science but is presently employed by the University of Warwick as a sociologist). He is widely credited for the subject and journal of...
Posted on August 11, 2008 9:13 PM • 8 Comments •
Once upon a time, a Roman author named Quintus Ennius wrote: "how like us is that very ugly beast, the ape!" It was quoted by Cicero, and from him Bacon, Montaigne and various others. But always it was thought...
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Posted on July 23, 2008 4:05 AM • 53 Comments •
A Floridan neighborhood was surprised yesterday when after heavy rain, catfish started walking around their street. Of course, the fish were quick to point out that this doesn't prove evolution is possible, as they all went to the local...
Posted on July 22, 2008 10:39 PM • 6 Comments •
Barbara Forrest has an excellent analysis and background story on the introduction of the creationist bill in Louisiana, and the organisations supporting it, here at Talk2Reason. There's a new phylogeny of birds out. See GrrllScientist's post, and a full...
Posted on June 26, 2008 11:54 PM • 3 Comments •
From the Enough Rope series by the inestimable Andrew Denton, interviewing Sir David Attenborough, in the course of which, this segment on creationism, below the fold. Humane thoughts of a great humanist....
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Posted on June 16, 2008 8:14 AM • 7 Comments •
History is one of those things that the venal mine to serve their special interests, with no concern for truth or accuracy. But it takes real stupid to say this: Contrary to popular belief, as historian David Barton points...
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Posted on June 11, 2008 9:10 PM • 17 Comments •
This guy is brilliant, both as a guitarist and a lyricist. Oh, his name's Chris Smither, if you want to Google him....
Posted on June 11, 2008 1:10 AM • 10 Comments •
This is a kind of scattered post on a few things that have caught my eye, while I am avoiding boring work. Paeloblog reports that a paper in Nature has done a phylogeny on continuous rather than discrete characters,...
Posted on June 4, 2008 11:47 PM • 13 Comments •
Creationism is being pushed legislatively in Texas again. But this line is priceless, from State Board of Education vice chairman, David Bradley (yes, you guessed, a Republican): Bradley said he doesn't foresee any successful effort to remove the “strengths...
Posted on June 2, 2008 10:43 PM • 8 Comments •
Peter Bebergal has a lovely, lyrical and wistful piece on Nextbook, on how scriptural literalism and creationism destroys what is best in religious imagination. Go read it....
Posted on May 25, 2008 10:56 PM • 31 Comments •
Nothing is more excruciating to me than to see myself and hear myself. It's even worse when I'm up against someone who presents so much better than I do. So watch Paul Myers (I think that's how they spell...
Posted on May 24, 2008 9:09 PM • 15 Comments •
In the thread on the recent debate between Winston and Dennett, I said that I thought the greatest threat to scientific progress and rationality was antimodernism, which was not always religious. Here, I'm going to elaborate on that cryptic...
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Posted on April 27, 2008 8:45 PM • 31 Comments •
One of the enduringly evil things done by Hitler and the Nazis was to pick a minority - Jews - and blame them for all the evils that had occurred in German society. Of course, all these evils had...
Posted on April 23, 2008 3:50 AM • 24 Comments •
Imagine a scientific theory that very few people know or understand. Let's call it "valency theory". Now suppose someone objects to valency theory because it undercuts their view of a particular religious doctrine, such as transubstantiation. So they gather...
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Posted on April 20, 2008 11:16 PM • 25 Comments •
Biologist and philosopher Sahotra Sarkar is combative, to say the least. When he says what he means, it can hurt physically if you are the target. I almost feel sympathy for Ben Stein... And knowing one of the principals...
Posted on April 20, 2008 9:50 AM • 27 Comments •
In an amazing display of misjudgment, Paul Newall of the (otherwise) excellent site The Galilean Library has interviewed me about my views on the philosophy of biology. There are some serious folk interviewed there, so of course I feel...
Posted on April 15, 2008 7:15 AM • 7 Comments •
Following on from my demonstration that Darwinism is entirely responsible for anti-Semiticism back on 1 April, comes this discussion of how Darwinism has even infected the morals of anti-Darwinians, via John Lynch; in this case Maciej Giertych, one of...
Posted on April 13, 2008 3:06 AM • 12 Comments •
While it's always nice to see a scientists step up to argue that intelligent design or creationism ought not to be taught as science because they aren't science, this worries me somewhat: Scientists have failed to explain the limits...
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Posted on April 7, 2008 2:27 AM • 90 Comments •
Evilunderthesun is a German language blog that recently did two things: totally demolished the "Nazism was caused by Darwin" trope, with generous quoting of mich, and educated me that the word for April fool in German is Aprilschmerz, which...
Posted on April 4, 2008 8:37 PM • 19 Comments •
I have yet to see the film Expelled, because it hasn't come to Australia yet, but I have become absolutely convinced that Ben Stein is correct. Darwinism causes antisemitism. I have therefore conveniently listed all the cases known of...
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Posted on April 1, 2008 12:00 AM • 60 Comments •
I once sat across the table from Alex Rosenberg, a well known philosopher, who argued persuasively that one cannot be both a Christian and accept natural selection. I think Alex intended this as a reductio for Christianity, as natural...
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Posted on March 24, 2008 7:03 PM • 77 Comments •
This is a nice review in New Scientist, obviously "framed" more in sorrow and confusion than in anger, which ends with Throughout the entire experience, Maggie and I couldn't help feeling that the polarised audience in the theater was...
Posted on March 24, 2008 5:23 PM • 0 Comments •
So here's a neo-Thomist talking about species, and not getting it due to (i) prior metaphysical commitments, and (ii) not understanding Aristotle - dude, he never called anything a species, not in the biological sense. Eidos and genos were...
Posted on March 24, 2008 4:26 AM • 35 Comments •
PZ Mydfgsers tried to see Expelled, Ben Stein's silly film about ID. He was asked to leave by some uniformed guard or policeman, as the producers had him on a Watch List or something. They let his family, and...
Posted on March 20, 2008 9:35 PM • 14 Comments •
Ever since Gould's Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History, the popular view has been that the Cambrian was an "explosion" of living forms, and for some, usually but not always creationists, this has been touted...
Posted on March 17, 2008 2:13 PM • 2 Comments •
Chaim Potok, I think, once wrote that people either love the Jews too much or hate them too much. I hope I do neither, but I found this particular point of view by Rabbi Lawrence Hoffman a brilliant example...
Posted on February 27, 2008 8:54 PM • 27 Comments •
One of the more curious episodes in recent cultural history is the adoption, word for word, by Islamists particularly in Turkey of the American Christian fundamentalist antievolution schtick. Nobody knows more about this than Taner Edis, whose book An...
Posted on February 21, 2008 7:51 PM • 4 Comments •
Back when Darwin was a student at Cambridge, he read, and almost memorised the Rev William Paley's Natural Theology, and thereafter remained impressed by the obvious adaptiveness of the parts of organisms and their interrelations. As is well known,...
Posted on February 18, 2008 10:30 AM • 29 Comments •
In particular, see the final panel... Cf. also here on Private Languages in philosophy...
Posted on February 17, 2008 11:49 PM • 6 Comments •
A rather cute article at the Catholic News Service says this: In commentaries, papal speeches, scientific conferences and philosophical exchanges, the Vatican has been focusing more and more on the relationship between God and evolution. From the outside, this...
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Posted on February 1, 2008 11:08 PM • 21 Comments •
Colin Purrington has a nice set of publicly available images for use in pro-science talks. Go check 'em out....
Posted on January 17, 2008 11:00 PM • 2 Comments •
Rob Helpy at Big Monkey, Helpy Chalk, has a post on what postmodernism was and why it came about. In it, he says he thinks it is a dying fad. Is this true?...
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Posted on January 7, 2008 10:23 PM • 43 Comments •
Some press releases get the right money quote: "The bottom line is that the world is round, humans evolved from an extinct species and Elvis is dead," Weissmann said. "This survey is a wake-up call for anyone who supports...
Posted on January 3, 2008 11:27 PM • 22 Comments •
OK, so the next door party finished about 1.30, but the family disputes finished about 5 am, so instead of thinking, I'm going to let others think for me, and round up a few New Years Day links......
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Posted on January 1, 2008 12:28 AM • 0 Comments •
Henry Gee reviews the Golden Compass, and comes up with largely the same conclusions I would have had I been as insightful as he. A quote: It’s a long time since I read the book, The Northern Lights, on...
Posted on December 29, 2007 11:05 PM • 14 Comments •
Just to demonstrate that it is not only the Christians who have their religious fundamentalists opposing science, here's a piece that claims that the Vedas are the source of all true scientific knowledge. OK, guys, inventing zero was cool,...
Posted on December 28, 2007 3:42 AM • 25 Comments •
It is the default opinion of those who accept evolution and those who deny it, that before Darwin, or Lamarck at any rate, everyone was a special creationist. Even Darwin implies in the Origin that if one is not...
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Posted on December 25, 2007 10:39 PM • 10 Comments •
Okay, so the Eighth Day Inventism calendar as rolled around to coincide our Holy day with one of yours. We Inventists are open minded people and often try to reach out to you heathen irreligious puppy grinding moral monsters....
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Posted on December 22, 2007 9:07 PM • 34 Comments •
As I mentioned earlier, I love a good book review if it excoriates a stupid book. Norman Levitt, of Rutgers University, has an absolutely lovely piece of critical invective for Steve Fuller's defense of Intelligent Design here. Fuller is...
Posted on December 19, 2007 7:09 PM • 5 Comments •
It's a dangerous thing to let philosophers talk to high school students, in the main, for we tend to drown our audience in terminology and deep concepts (many of which turn out to be not so deep), but I...
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Posted on December 14, 2007 5:34 AM • 24 Comments •
For those who wish a copy of Gosse's famous Omphalos, I have uploaded it to Internet Archive. It's still only a PDF, but I hope that the IA folks will do an OCR. Many thanks to Noelie Alito for...
Posted on December 9, 2007 9:25 AM • 3 Comments •
The Institute for Intellectual Disco Dancing has spun its recent debacle at Minnesota thus: The dyspeptic and ad hominem blogger/biologist Dr. P.Z. Myers was there and brought a Darwinist claque. Note that in passing it is not a fallacy...
Posted on December 2, 2007 8:24 PM • 5 Comments •
Oh, I just know this is going to get enmeshed in arguments about framing, but I don't care. A new movement in the UK, home of democracy as we know it, involves scientists getting out there and active in...
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Posted on November 3, 2007 11:18 PM • 1 Comments •
Michael Ruse has a new article up on creationism in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. There's not much new to those who know his work, but the following comment resonates - dare I say thunders - in the Science...
Posted on October 28, 2007 10:36 AM • 39 Comments •
An article at Wired by Clive Thompson notes that the antievolutionists use rhetorical ploys, playing on the ambiguity of language to imply that "theory" just means "wild-arsed guess" (or words to that effect). He proposes that we should stop...
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Posted on October 23, 2007 10:24 AM • 11 Comments •
I found this interesting and still surprisingly modern essay by David Starr Jordan in 1897, at William Tozier's blog, where he had scanned it from a journal called The Arena. They had some good public discussion journals at the...
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Posted on October 6, 2007 11:08 AM • 7 Comments •
On Monday night last, Jason Grossman, a philosopher form the Australian National University rang me with an idea. He was coming to my university to give a talk entitled "How to Feyerabend", arguing that Feyerabend was a dadaist rather...
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Posted on October 5, 2007 9:46 AM • 24 Comments •
Jason Rosenhouse, of Evolutionblog, has posted a rather snarky review of a book review by the historian and philosopher Ian Hacking that was published in The Nation. Jason titled his comment "How not to defend evolution". Here's my take...
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Posted on September 21, 2007 2:12 AM • 38 Comments •
Larry Caldwell, a well-known proponent of antievolutionism, tried and failed to get "the controversy" taught in the school district of his kids' school. He failed, so he sued the school board because he was "discriminated against... for being Christian"....
Posted on September 13, 2007 10:55 PM • 3 Comments •
I have decided that I am sick and tired of the antievolutionists. When I got into this game about 15 years or more ago, I thought that if we just argued and presented information about what evolution really is,...
Posted on September 2, 2007 12:18 AM • 21 Comments •
Oh honestly. Christianity Today reports the travel of the Australopithecine fossil "Lucy" to the US with the closing paragraph: It should be interesting to see what the interest in Lucy is, given that according to opinion polls roughly half...
Posted on August 29, 2007 1:36 AM • 11 Comments •
The National Geographic and the news services are touting a new ape fossil found in Ethiopia as "forcing a rethink on human evolution". As usual, the headlines are hyperbolic. This ape is fragmentary, and so far only teeth and...
Posted on August 22, 2007 2:59 PM • 13 Comments •
Popper's view of science has been supplanted by a number of later views, not least being the sociological accounts of Kuhn and Lakatos, which, being sociological, don't tell us what
is science but only how it proceeds descriptively. Prescriptive views of science are much more nuanced than Popper these days, and they lack a simple slogan like the cry of "falsifiability!" They typically focus on the heuristics (rules of inference) and how they have developed overall and in particular disciplines. If you want to argue that ID is science, go read van Fraassen, or Hacking, or Giere, or Laudan and get back to me.
Posted on August 15, 2007 1:02 AM • 19 Comments •
Laelaps has a very nice essay that ranges from the number of ribs humans have, the book of Genesis, creationism, and the variety of stories told about human evolution from the nineteenth century to now. Go read it. It's...
Posted on August 12, 2007 1:18 AM • 3 Comments •
There has been a bit of a resurgence of science versus religion posts and chatter in various forums* that I inhabit when I'm not working lately. It occurred to me that it might be time to do one of...
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Posted on July 15, 2007 1:12 AM • 61 Comments •
A religious body or faith community that speaks only with only exclamation points but no question marks misses the complexity of creation and the beauty of evolution. Rabbi Kendall in Stuart, Florida...
Posted on July 14, 2007 7:48 AM • 0 Comments •
The Register is reporting that the UK government has ruled that intelligent design is not acceptable in science classes. [via Slashdot]...
Posted on June 26, 2007 1:11 AM • 6 Comments •
In case you are getting all confused about which creationist organisation ot oppose and why, Duae Quartunciae has an excellent roundup of the present AiG/CMI dispute....
Posted on June 11, 2007 2:07 AM • 0 Comments •
Via Stumble!...
Posted on June 10, 2007 3:54 AM • 1 Comments •
This is the last section I will discuss in detail. It is, of course, the story of Cain and Abel. Cain is a farmer, and Abel is a herdsman. Both of these are agrarian pursuits, in the new agricultural...
Posted on June 8, 2007 6:52 PM • 5 Comments •
John Wilkins is an eternal student, who thinks philosophy of biology is at least as interesting as politics or sport and twice as important. He has a PhD from the University of Melbourne and a position as a Sessional Lecturer at the University of Queensland, in Australia. After a varied career, involving factories, gardening, civil service, publishing, graphics, public relations but not, unfortunately for the CV, driving a truck, John finally completed his thesis on species concepts in 2004, which he has worked into two books.
