Anti-Creationism
jrosenhouse | March 2, 2007On February 24 there was a pro-ID confab. in Istanbul. Among the attendees was David Berlinski, whose boneheaded essays for Commentary appear with depressing regularity. The conference website includes a brief abstract for Berlinski's talk. So, how about we wrap up the week's blogging by having a look:
Charles Darwin completed his masterpiece, On the Origin of Species, in 1859. At once, the theory that is introduced became popular. One hundred years later, it was widely celebrated as an outstanding success. Thereafter, the time of troubles began. For the past forty years, the great global…
jrosenhouse | March 1, 2007Christianity Today has published this lengthy review of The God Delusion. The review's author is Alvin Plantinga, who is often described as America's foremost philosopher of religion.
As regular readers of this blog are aware, I find the central truth claims of Christianity to be rather implausible, to put it kindly. I am also aware, however, that rather a lot of people feel differently. I have no trouble with the idea that all of those people are mistaken, but I do find it difficult to dismiss them all as fools. So I keep reading religious literature, in the increasingly vain hope that I…
jrosenhouse | February 28, 2007During my recent hiatus Phillip Johnson emerged from his hidey hole and posted some new expectorations regarding the current state of ID. I realize other bloggers have already ripped into Johnson's ill-considered comments, but why should they have all the fun!
He begins with his standard tripe about finch beaks:
The claim that evolutionary science has discovered and verified a mechanism which can account for the origin of biological information and complexity by involving only natural (unintelligent) causes is supported by an immense extrapolation from limited evidence of minor, cyclical…
jrosenhouse | February 27, 2007If there's one good thing about spending an extra night in Buffalo, without access to a computer and with a rather limited selection of channels on the television, it's that you get a lot of reading done. I managed to plow through all of Edward Humes' book Monkey Girl: Evolution, Education, Religion and the Battle for America's Soul. It's mostly a blow-by-blow account of the big Kitzmiller v. Dover case. It also provides a fair amount of historical context.
Overall it's an excellent book, difficult to put down. The trial scenes are especially compelling. I was following the trial…
jrosenhouse | February 27, 2007I'd like to thank Barry Karr of The Center for Inquiry for the invitation to speak at their Darwin Day event. The event itself went off smoothly, and I was well taken care of during my travel woes. All in all, a highly successful weekend.
The afternoon began with a screening of Inherit the Wind. The last time I saw the movie was in high school, long before I had developed any serious interest in this subject. I liked it then, and I like it even more now. It's impressive not only as a movie, but is actually more historically accurate than I remembered it being. The only really big thing…
jrosenhouse | February 12, 2007From today's New York Times:
There is nothing much unusual about the 197-page dissertation Marcus R. Ross submitted in December to complete his doctoral degree in geosciences here at the University of Rhode Island.
His subject was the abundance and spread of mosasaurs, marine reptiles that, as he wrote, vanished at the end of the Cretaceous era about 65 million years ago. The work is “impeccable,” said David E. Fastovsky, a paleontologist and professor of geosciences at the university who was Dr. Ross's dissertation adviser. “He was working within a strictly scientific framework, a…
jrosenhouse | February 9, 2007This Monday, February 12, I will be giving a talk to the JMU Freethinker's Club on the subject of evolution and creationism. The talk will be from 7:00-8:00 in room 303, Taylor Hall on the James Madison University campus. If you live anywhere Harrisonburg, VA, stop on by!
Then, on Saturday, February 24, I will be speaking at the Center for Inquiry in Amherst, NY. There will be a screening of “Inherit the Wind” in the afternoon, followed by my talk in the evening. The topic: Legal Developments in Evolution and Creationism. This assumes, of course, that upstate New York is not buried under…
jrosenhouse | February 7, 2007From CNN comes this useful article about a planned display of fossils at a museum in Kenya:
Deep in the dusty, unlit corridors of Kenya's national museum, locked away in a plain-looking cabinet, is one of mankind's oldest relics: Turkana Boy, as he is known, the most complete skeleton of a prehistoric human ever found.
But his first public display later this year is at the heart of a growing storm -- one pitting scientists against Kenya's powerful and popular evangelical Christian movement. The debate over evolution vs. creationism -- once largely confined to the United States -- has arrived…
jrosenhouse | January 20, 2007Kent Hovind, one of the slimiest of the young-Earth ignorance peddlers, has been sentenced to ten years in prison for tax fraud:
Pensacola evangelist Kent Hovind was sentenced Friday afternoon to 10 years in prison on charges of tax fraud.
After a lengthy sentencing hearing that last 5 1/2 hours, U.S. District Judge Casey Rodgers ordered Hovind also:
-- Pay $640,000 in restitution to the Internal Revenue Service.
-- Pay the prosecution's court costs of $7,078.
-- Serve three years parole once he is released from prison.
Hovind's wife, Jo Hovind, also was scheduled to be sentenced. Rodgers…
jrosenhouse | December 29, 2006Update: December 30, 2006: Somehow it slipped past me that P.Z. Myers had already shredded the Hitchens piece. Sorry about that. By all means have a look at his eloquent demolition as well.
Here's Peter Hitchens weighing in on the evolution/ID dispute, writing for The Mail on Sunday, which I gather is a British newspaper:
The large response to the item about 'Intelligent Design' only underlines the need for a proper debate about this interesting intellectual development, here in Britain. This might start with a bit more fairness and open-mindedness. I was, because I am not a scientist,…
jrosenhouse | December 19, 2006John Lynch has an excellent summary of what a rotten year it's been for ID:
January
Dembski:
Just as a tree that has been “rimmed” (i.e., had its bark completely cut through on all sides) is effectively dead even if it retains its leaves and appears alive, so Darwinism has met its match with the movement initiated by Phillip Johnson. Expect Darwinism's death throes, like Judge Jones's decision, to continue for some time. But don't mistake death throes for true vitality. Ironically, Judge Jones's decision is likely to prove a blessing for the intelligent design movement, spurring its…
jrosenhouse | December 19, 2006In other news, the Cobb County sticker kerfuffle has now been settled.
You might recall that this was the case where a small Georgia school district decided to paste warning labels inside their high school biology textbooks. The labels asserted the following:
This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully and critically considered.
Some parents in the district sued, claiming a First Amendment violation. The Judge agreed, and found that the…
jrosenhouse | December 19, 2006In the course of his lengthy discussion of the report on the Sternberg affair, mentioned in the previous post, Ed Brayton links to this discussion of the ID paper that started all the controversy in the first place. The discussion is by Ronald Jenner, of the Section on Evolution and Ecology at the University of Califronia at Davis. Jenner has many enlightening things to say about the merits, or lack thereof, of the paper in question. But there is one place where he gets it sadly wrong. First, we have this:
Let's take a deep breath, sit back in our chair, and calmly take the measure of…
jrosenhouse | December 19, 2006Ed Brayton has the must-read post of the day.
Remember Richard Sternberg? He's the former editor of the journal Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington. A while back he published a pro-ID paper in the journal. Sternberg was a research associate at the Smithsonain Institution at the time. It quickly became clear both that the paper itself was total garbage, and that the normal editing procedures of the journal had not been followed in its publication.
The result was a big black eye for the Smithsonian and for the journal. But things got worse when Sternberg began alledging…
jrosenhouse | December 14, 2006Everyone knows the first rule of holes: When you're in a hole, stop digging.
Apparently no one told Discovery Institute lackey Casey Luskin. He's still trying to pretend that their inane charges against the Judge in the Kitzmiller decision have any merit. Recall that their latest brainstorm is that Judge Jones, in following standard procedure by using verbatim portions of the plaintiff's proposed findings of fact in his opinion, somehow rendered himself a pawn of the ACLU.
Luskin persists in trying to make an issue out of this. Over at The Panda's Thumb, Tim Sandefur offers a reply.
So…
jrosenhouse | December 13, 2006Time for another installment of, “How bad have things gotten for the ID folks?”
It is now almost a year since the big ruling in the Dover case. As I'm sure you recall, that's the one where the ID folks put their most formidable legal and scientific talent in front of a Court, and the Court promptly laughed in their faces. Still smarting from this, they have decided that attacking Judge Jones is the way to go. But since there is no legitimate point on which Judge Jones can be criticized, they have decided to go to the old standbys of trumped up charges followed by phony outrage.
Here's the…
jrosenhouse | December 13, 2006New Scientist has this article about the latest attempt by ID proponents to pretend they care about science:
This is my second attempt to engage in person with scientists at Biologic. At the institute's other facility in nearby Fremont, researchers work at benches lined with fume hoods, incubators and microscopes - a typical scene in this up-and-coming biotech hub. Most of them there proved just as reluctant to speak with a New Scientist reporter.
The reticence cloaks an unorthodox agenda. “We are the first ones doing what we might call lab science in intelligent design,” says George Weber,…
jrosenhouse | December 12, 2006Larry Moran has an excellent review of Francis Collins' silly book The Language of God. You don't really appreciate Ken Miller until you have contemplated the far daffier arguments made by Collins. Moran writes:
The second persuasive argument is the presence in all of us of a God-shaped vacuum. What the heck is that, you might ask? C.S. Lewis supplies the answer. It's the sensation of longing for something greater than ourselves. It's the “joy” you feel when you read a good poem, listen to Beethoven, or view the beauty of nature. The emptiness we are all supposed to feel cries out for an…
jrosenhouse | December 12, 2006Be sure to have a look at Sahotra Sarkar's essay at The American Prospect. He describes the recent shift of emphasis on the ID side away from biology and towards physics instead. Sarkar writes:
Initially largely unnoticed by their critics, creationists began to co-opt the fine-tuning argument when, in their book Rare Earth (2000), paleontologist Peter T. Ward and astronomer Donald Brownlee emphasized that complex life is very uncommon in the universe. Though their claims were subsequently subjected to scathing criticism by David Darling in Life Everywhere (2001) as well as other…
jrosenhouse | December 6, 2006Remember the ISCID? That's the International Society for Complexity, Information and Design. From their website:
he International Society for Complexity, Information, and Design (ISCID) is a cross-disciplinary professional society that investigates complex systems apart from external programmatic constraints like materialism, naturalism, or reductionism. The society provides a forum for formulating, testing, and disseminating research on complex systems through critique, peer review, and publication. Its aim is to pursue the theoretical development, empirical application, and philosophical…