Anti-Creationism
jrosenhouse | December 4, 2006Larry Moran has replied to my previous post criticizing his treatment of Ken Miller's views on science and religion. I'll let him have the last word, except for the quick comment that I still think he's misinterpreting Miller's intent. Certainly Miller believes that God is active in the world and might influence events in ways that are undetectable to science. But he manifestly does not say that there is some gap in modern evolutionary theory that must be filled by divine intervention. That is a crucial difference between his views and those of the ID folks.
On the other hand, maybe Moran…
jrosenhouse | November 29, 2006That last post notwithstanding, I do think Larry Moran deserves criticism for one thing. He has been very unfair to Ken Milller.
For example, in this post Moran writes:
The Neville Chamberlain Atheists object when Behe talks about intelligent design but mum's the word when Ken Miller talks about how God tweaks mutations to get what He wants. Hypocrisy is a strange thing to be proud of.
And in this post we find:
Young Earth Creationsts (YEC's) and Intelligent Design Creationists (IDiots) are anti-science because they propose explanations of the natural world that conflict with science. But…
jrosenhouse | November 3, 2006My new essay for CISCOP's Creation and ID Watch site is now up. This time: Who Designed the Designer? There's a reason it's a classic!
jrosenhouse | October 17, 2006It's a been a while since I checked in with Dembski and Co. over at Uncommon Descent. But this entry caught my eye.
In it, Dembski reproduces eight criteria indicative of groupthink. He writes, “Read the following and ask yourself which side in the ID vs. Darwinism debate exhibits the groupthink syndrome:”
So what the heck! Let's take the challenge. For the purposes of this post I'll even accept his ID vs. Darwinism characterization. For ease of reading, I've placed the eight criteria in boldface type:
1. an illusion of invulnerability, shared by most or all the members, which creates…
jrosenhouse | October 10, 2006Skeptic Magazine publisher Michael Shermer will be in Oakton, Virginia this Thursday, October 12, to discuss his new book Why Darwin Matters: The Case Against Intelligent Design. The talk is being cohosted by The Alliance for Science and the National Capitol Area Skeptics. Regrettably, I will be unable to attend. Having heard Shermer speak several times previously, I can say with some confidence that will be an interesting and informative talk. If you're anywhere near Oakton, I strongly encourage you to attend.
The talk will be from 7:30-9:30, but Shermer will be signing copies of his…
jrosenhouse | October 2, 2006Check out the Dsicovery Institute's Bruce Chapman explaining away the complete inability of ID to produce anything of scientific importance:
I keep getting asked about the scientific research projects underway that relate to Darwinism and intelligent design. So why aren't we talking more about them publicly? For several good reasons:
The most important is that the Darwinist establishment would like nothing better than to “out” research programs before they are finished. The idea is to shut down damaging evidence as early as possible. Strangle the infant in the crib. Demand answers now to…
jrosenhouse | September 28, 2006Michael Shermer answers yes in his latest column for Scientific American. He conveniently organizes his arguments in a series of bullet points, and we will consider that momentarily.
Shermer gave me my big break in the evolution biz by publishing my reviews of Ken Miler's Finding Drawin's God and John Haught's God After Darwin in Skeptic magazine. I'm usually a big fan of his writing. But in this case I'm afraid he is way off base. In fact, I have a nagging fear that he wrote this tongue-in-cheek, and that by writing a serious reply I am basically falling for a joke. Nonetheless, I will…
jrosenhouse | September 27, 2006Over at the utlra-right-wing website World Net Daily, Jonathan Wells has posted a characteristically ignorant and dishonest essay entitled “Why Darwinism is Doomed.” Yawn. P. Z. Myers takes care of business with this smackdown. Worth reading both for the joy of seeing Wells' rhetorically dismembered, and for the clear description of some recent research into the evolution of the human brain. Ed Brayton also piles on.
Incidentally, I 've been staring at the computer screen for a while trying to devise a new topic for my series of CSICOP essays. Alas, it seems that ID has been so utterly…
jrosenhouse | September 12, 2006It all started when Pat Hayes, of Red State Rabble, posted this blog entry describing a recent talk given by Ken Miller at the University of Kansas. Miller, you will recall, is the author of Finding Darwin's God. The first half of this book is brilliant in explaining some of the evidence for evolution, and explaining why the major arguments made by creationists and ID folks are wrong. Sadly, in the second half of the book Miller makes an argument defending the compatibility of Christian faith and science. Personally, I found his argument so weak and easily refuted that I found myself…
jrosenhouse | September 11, 2006From the Connelsville Daily Courier, a Pennsylvania newspaper, comes this blunt assessment of the merits of evolution. The essay is by guest columnist Rosemary Fike:
The United States of America no longer can be called a Christian nation. In fact, we could be called a nation of fools. We are quietly allowing our schoolchildren to be taught Charles Darwin's theory of evolution although it is not supported by the evidence.
To the contrary, it has been proven that evolution is a scientific impossibility. It appears as if a fanatical cult has overtaken the scientific community, bringing…
jrosenhouse | September 6, 2006Mathematician John Allen Paulos offers these worthy thoughts on the subject of creationist arguments based on probability theory:
But there's another contributing factor to this opposition to evolution that I'd like to discuss here. It is the concerted attempt by creationists to dress up in the garb of mathematics fundamentalist claims about human origins and to focus criticism on what they take to be the minuscule probability of evolutionary development. (Even the conservative television pundit and ace biologist Ann Coulter has lent her perspicacity to this mathematical endeavor in her…
jrosenhouse | August 26, 2006How bad have things gotten for the ID folks? They're pathetically excited about the publication of Jonathan Wells' new book The Politically Incorrect Guide to Drwainism and Intelligent Design.
It used to be that the ID folks were keen to persuade us that they were going to revolutionize science. They published books like Darwin's Black Box and No Free Lunch, which at least put forward some actual scientific ideas.
But then the scientific community laughed en masse at those ideas, and the ID folks found themselves with nothing left to say. So now they have to take satisfaction when sleazy…
jrosenhouse | August 25, 2006I am currently holding in my hands a little book called Evolution and Christian Faith, by Stanford University biologist Joan Roughgarden. I don't agree with Roughgarden's religious views, but she sure does a good job of nailing ID:
Furthermore, neo-Darwinism can account for complex structures. When you get together eye experts, lung experts, feather experts, blood clotting experts, and so on, it always turns out that they can suggest plausible neo-Darwinian sceanrios for how these structures originated. (p. 89).
And:
So, when the intelligent design folks announce with great fanfare that…
jrosenhouse | August 23, 2006The Daily Howler has this disturbing report about the Q&A session from a recent presentation by Ann Coulter. Try to believe that a sentient human being actually asked the following question:
QUESTION FROM SOMEONE EZRA KLEIN DOESN'T KNOW (7/28/06): Hi. My name is --, I'm a sophomore at Bucknell University and a summer intern at the Clare Booth Luce Policy Institute. In your book, Godless, you completely tear apart the theory of evolution and I was just wondering how scientists can still believe in such an implausible theory, especially since you don't disprove it based on Biblical facts…
jrosenhouse | August 22, 2006My latest essay for CSICOP's Creation Watch site is now up. This time: Why you should be suspicious of creationist and ID arguments even if you know very little of the science involved. Enjoy!
jrosenhouse | August 22, 2006A few weeks ago, Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary joined the team over at William Dembski's blog Uncommon Descent. This presented her with a bit of a conundrum. On the one hand, she is surely aware that she knows nothing at all about science. But here she was expected to write regularly on the subject. How would she handle that state of affairs?
Well, she has now posted enough to give us a partial answer: By relying on childish, above-it-all arguments that will allow her to sound savvy and street-wise to UD's sycophantic admirers, without actually having to engage any science.
For…
jrosenhouse | July 24, 2006Michael Ruse has this interesting op-ed in the Florida newspaper The Tallahassee Democrat. He begins:
This has been a good year for evolutionists. First, at the end of 2005, a judge in Pennsylvania - a conservative appointed by President George W. Bush - decreed that so-called Intelligent Design Theory is not genuine science and hence cannot be taught in publicly funded science classrooms.
Intelligent Design Theory - Creationism Lite - is the latest attempt by religious fundamentalists, biblical literalists, to argue that the origins of organisms were not evolutionary but the result of…
jrosenhouse | July 22, 2006In my recent post criticizing John McCain for his remarks about teaching ID, I quoted the following remark, from the article in the New York Sun reporting on McCain's speech:
Responding to a question about a report that he thinks “intelligent design” should be taught in schools, the senator mocked the idea that American young people were so delicate and impressionable that they needed to be sheltered from the concept, which says God had a hand in creation and which has been challenged by Darwinists as unscientific.
I responded with:
Incidentally, in light of my previous post, we shouldn't…
jrosenhouse | July 21, 2006How bad have things gotten for the ID side? Completely unable to make good on their promise to generate any ID based research, they have now taken to outright lying about the work done by real scientists. Okay, so maybe they've been doing that for quite some time. Still, William Dembski's latest blog entry strikes me as even more brazen than usual.
Dembski writes:
Here is an ID research paper published in PNAS. Note that some important principles of evolutionary theory are criticized in the abstract. This research shows how ID is capable of being applied in biology.
PNAS refers to the…
jrosenhouse | July 18, 2006Recemtly there was a bit of a kerfuffle over at Virginia Commonwealth University regarding the bioogy textbook Essentials of Biology, Sylvia Mader. An adjunct biology professor at VCU protested that the book gave short shrift to evolution and was soft on creationism.
I've not managed to locate a copy of the book for mysel, but I note that Keith Pennock, writing for the Discovery Institute's blog, has this post up, in which he quotes two paragraphs from Mader's textbook. Pennock's intention is to show how silly the adjunct professor was being. Alas, I think there's a different message to be…