In Their Own Words
sb admin | May 10, 2009Back in December 2006 I referred to Francis Beckwith as an ID supporter. This resulted in he informing me that he "has never been much of fan [of] design arguments, ever [and that his] interest in the debate focuses on the jurisprudential questions involving the First Amendment and what could be permissibly taught in public schools under that amendment." At that time I retracted and removed any reference to Beckwith as a supporter. More recently, Beckwith has objected to others referring to him as a creationist and an ID supporter. Tim Sandefur has replied, and now Barbara Forrest has offered…
jlynch | May 10, 2009Back in December 2006 I referred to Francis Beckwith as an ID supporter. This resulted in he informing me that he "has never been much of fan [of] design arguments, ever [and that his] interest in the debate focuses on the jurisprudential questions involving the First Amendment and what could be permissibly taught in public schools under that amendment." At that time I retracted and removed any reference to Beckwith as a supporter. More recently, Beckwith has objected to others referring to him as a creationist and an ID supporter. Tim Sandefur has replied, and now Barbara Forrest has offered…
jlynch | April 29, 2009Earlier this month we celebrated Paul Nelson Day. Today is yet another ID-related (and as it happens, also Paul Nelson related) anniversary. Four years ago, I posted a piece (reprinted a year and a half later here) on Nelson's forthcoming monograph on common descent. By now, it has been "forthcoming" for eleven years. At the time of my original post, Nelson claimed that he was "carefully doing a good job with a rich and difficult topic" but also noted that he and Dembski "have been working on a shorter article, with some of the monograph's main points, which we plan to submit to the best peer…
jlynch | March 15, 2009The peanut gallery over at Uncommon Descent seems to be uncommonly interested in beating the Darwinism/Racism meme to death (see here, for example, for my comment on one such post and here and here for Barry Arrington's latest ejaculations on the matter; the latter features this historically inaccurate gem: "Darwin was a firmly committed Racist.").
Dave Springer saw fit to post a piece on "Racism Sans Darwin" which quickly disappeared down the memory hole and got him banned by Arrington for not toeing the party line regarding Darwin being the Uber Racist. Hilariously, Arrington writes:
The…
jlynch | March 8, 2009The Koolade over at ARN is particularly strong today. Robert Deyes speaks of "biologist Casey Luskin". Seriously. At best, Luskin was a geologist MS in earth sciences before becoming a lawyer. He has one (second-author) paper:
Lisa Tauxe, Casey Luskin, Peter Selkin, Phillip Gans, and Andy Calvert, “Paleomagnetic results from the Snake River Plain: Contribution to the time-averaged field global database,” Geochemistry Geophysics Geosystems (G3), 5(8) (August, 2004).
Creationist credentialing once again, I fear.
Equally as problematic is Deyes' claim:
We learn many a lesson from Conan Doyle's…
jlynch | February 22, 2009Creationists have long used credentials to make their case for them. Demsbki has posted a link to a SSRN (i.e. grey literature) paper by Edward Sisson (who is an architect and lawyer) in which he “relates lessons learned not only about evolution, molecular biology, and ‘intelligent design,’ but also about the accumulated ‘bad habits’ that have developed and encrusted the conduct of science in the 130 years since the foundation of the research-oriented universities in the 1870s.” It’s actually an address to architecture students, but I guess by the standards of ID literature it counts as a…
jlynch | December 31, 2008Quoth Fuller:
But I happen to think that there is something more worth arguing about here, and a better way to think about the stakes is to ask, Suppose the matter of evidence remains unresolved or equally balanced: What difference does it make whether I endorse ID or Darwinism? Does it lead me to do science differently - in terms of the research questions chosen, the range of interpretations given to research results, as well as science's broader cultural significance? The answer to these questions seems to me to be clearly yes - and this is what the battle is about. Only some leftover…
jlynch | December 28, 2008I have a dislike of hip-hop and rap. But when it is mixed with ID, well, I'm speechless. Witness Atom tha Immortal's silken rhymes:
Apocalyptic G-d presence/ Feeling the fire of G-d's essence/ You need Rosetta Stones to unlock my poem's message/ Born in a body of sand since early dawn/ Adam spawned genetic code of early on/ Written on the rocks of Hebron, The Earth Is Gone/ Reverted from an Information Age to Early Bronze/ Punishment of Civilization/ The only reason why this wicked nation ain't burning is G-d's patient/
Chorus: -----…
jlynch | April 16, 2008Richard Weikart:
Today's Darwinists are not Nazis and not all Darwinists agree with Dawkins, Wilson, Ruse, Singer, or Watson. However, some of the ideas being promoted today by prominent Darwinists in the name of Darwinism have an eerily similar ring to the ideologies that eroded respect for human life in the pre-Nazi era.
There you have it folks - if we're not careful and muzzle those "prominent Darwinists" we're heading for Nazi Eugenics Version 2.0.
jlynch | April 12, 2008 One of the central themes within Expelled is the equation of Darwinism with Nazism. We are treated to a somber Ben Stein visiting the death camps. Without Darwin they wouldn’t have existed goes the simplistic viewpoint. Yet, before we criticize Stein and the producers of the movie, we must acknowledge that there are scientists - biologists even - who harbor(ed) anti-Semitic views. Witness the following:
By their own will, [Jews] prefer to live a separate life, in apartheid from the surrounding communities. They form their own communes (kahals), they govern themselves by their own rules and…
jlynch | April 11, 2008 David Bolinsky of XVIVIO has posted an open letter regarding the copyright infringement by Expelled. Interestingly, Mike Edmondson who was the animator for the movie has been scrubbed from the Expelled website and Dembksi has hinted that the producers had squirreled away money for copyright lawsuits. Sayeth Dembski:
I’ve gotten to know the producers quite well. As far as I can tell, they made sure to budget for lawsuits. Also, I know for a fact that they have one of the best intellectual property attorneys in the business. I expect that the producers made their video close enough to the…
jlynch | April 3, 2008
Remember the e-mail I received stating that tonight’s Expelled screening in Tempe was canceled? The e-mail simply stated:
The Tempe, AZ Screening has been canceled.
Well, Ken McKnight called the theater today two or so hours before the screening. Ken says:
I just called the Arizona Mills Harkins theater and said that I had heard that the private screening of Expelled had been moved from 7:00 to 6:00 (I didn’t mention that I had been emailed that the showing was canceled). The person I spoke to confirmed that the movie is showing today at 6:00. Clearly the promoters are somehow screening the…
jlynch | March 28, 2008Never one who is afraid to paint with a very broad brush, Ben Stein gives us this gem (from a Christianity Today interview):
I believe God created the heavens and the earth, and it doesn’t scare me when scientists say that can’t be proved. I couldn’t give a [profanity] whether a person calls himself a scientist. Science has covered itself with glory, morally, in my time. Scientists were the people in Germany telling Hitler that it was a good idea to kill all the Jews. Scientists told Stalin it was a good idea to wipe out the middle-class peasants. Scientists told Mao Tse-Tung it was fine to…
jlynch | March 28, 2008Caroline Crocker is one of the ID martyrs for the faith featured in Expelled (and in now Executive Director of IDEA). The bogus nature of her case has been well known for a while, but over at Tiny Frog there is a useful "mash-up" of the available information about Crocker.
jlynch | March 22, 2008The Expelled boyos seem to be tightening up their act. Now you can’t RSVP for future events all of which have been removed from the list. Compare this (yesterday) with this.
There’s a screening scheduled for Harkins Arizona Mills at 7pm on April 3rd. I RSVPed last night and got the following in reply:
Dear John Lynch,
This is a confirmation of your RSVP for the free "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed" movie screening.Venue information is below.
Theater: Harkins Arizona Mills
5000 Arizona Mills Circle
Tempe, AZ 85281
Date: April3
Time:7:00 PM
Number of seats reserved: 1
YOUR NAME WILL BE ON A…
jlynch | March 21, 2008Phil Plait on the reductio ad Hitlerum that is central to Expelled!:
For the producers of this movie to continue this Big Lie tying evolution and Nazis together is an irony almost too big to comprehend, given that this is precisely how Nazi propaganda worked. In a rich field of creationist ironies, this may be the elephant in the room. They are projecting onto their enemies the very thing they are guilty of.
For Ben Stein to go to concentration camps and promote creationism is beyond the pale. It’s a lie, it’s ugly, and it should spark universal condemnation from every thinking human on the…
jlynch | March 21, 2008Truth:
This was a private screening with no admission charge, and you had to reserve seats ahead of time; you also had to sign a promise that you wouldn’t record the movie while you were there, and they were checking ID. Everyone in my family reserved seats under our own names, myself included. There was no attempt to "sneak in" [emphasis mine]
Lie:
Others may be crashing because they want to trash it before it even gets reviewed by the media. P.Z. Myers, who was not let into a showing last night in Minnesota, probably falls in the latter category.
No surprises. Myers (and Dawkins) did not…
jlynch | February 14, 2008In The Chronicle of Higher Education (12/21/01) William Dembski had this to say about his publication strategy:
"I've just gotten kind of blase about submitting things to journals where you often wait two years to get things into print. And I find I can actually get the turnaround faster by writing a book and getting the ideas expressed there. My books sell well. I get a royalty. And the material gets read more."
which makes the following all the more ironic. On commenting of Dawkins' $3.5 million contract for Only A Theory? he says:
$3.5million is a lot of money. The question I have is…