Jody Bottum is one of the best writers we have.   I believe this even when I disagree with him, which is more often than one might think.  Today’s piece in “On the Square” is a gem.

The next volume of the Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies is going to focus on evolution and Intelligent Design, as well as the interweaving of the two. For those who are unaware, the Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies (JIS) is a publication of the Institute for Interdisciplinary Research (IIR), and has been in publication since 1989, and has contributors from around the world. The last issue, for instance, had contributors from Romania, Poland, and the US, including institutions such as Loyola and Princeton, as well as a paper by Templeton Prize winner Michael Novak. According to the IIR website: It is becoming increasingly clear that neither man nor his world can be fully understood from the standpoint of any single discipline. A Read More ›

In your idiotic ideas file you no longer have to go back to the ancient myths, or even to centuries-old folly such as bloodletting, for we now have evolution–an idea that is promoted at this very time. One of the many inanities of evolution is its serendipity. If evolution is true, then we must believe that all manner of complex biological structures and machinery evolved (somehow) for one function, only then to enable new, revolutionary advancements to occur. Call it evolution’s Law of Unintended Consequences.  Read more

 Rod Dreher writes: Time and time again, an experimental gadget gets introduced — it doesn’t matter if it’s a supercollider or a gene chip or an fMRI machine — and we’re told it will allow us to glimpse the underlying logic of everything. But the tool always disappoints, doesn’t it? We soon realize that those pretty pictures are incomplete and that we can’t reduce our complex subject to a few colorful spots. So here’s a pitch: Scientists should learn to expect this cycle — to anticipate that the universe is always more networked and complicated than reductionist approaches can reveal. …Karl Popper, the great philosopher of science, once divided the world into two categories: clocks and clouds. Clocks are neat, Read More ›

Journalism dean Marvin Olasky notes, Today’s three great cultural flashpoints are abortion, same-sex marriage, and evolution. We can hedge on them and justify our hedging: Playing it cool here will help me gain for Christ people who would otherwise walk away. I’m not knocking such considerations. Nor am I assuming that anyone who tries to meld eternal truth and contemporary trends lacks courage: Some do so on evangelistic principle, others because they believe what they’re saying is true. But attempts to unify antitheses generally defy logic. Over the past 15 years I’ve tried to explain some of the problems of Darwinism. Last year I raised questions about the “theistic evolution” that Francis Collins espouses, but didn’t offer answers—and several WORLD Read More ›

Apparently, Canadian Marci McDonald’s Random House anti-Christian book is a commercial flop. Go here, here, and here for intelligent-design related “marcis” = obvious errors such as claiming that proud Presbyterian Phillip Johnson, author of Darwin on Trial , had become a Catholic. At some point, truth needs evidence, not conspiracy thinking. It’s about time that some of this stuff started to just plain flop. The thinking public deserves better.  [Note 1: I don’t know  how to comment on Sal Cordova’s useful quotation from Ez Levant because, for some reason, this post is not allowing comments. Too bad, because there was a useful one demonstrating the tank in ratings of “The Armageddon Factor”.   Essentially, there is no Armageddon factor in Canada.  Read More ›

The following anthology, coedited by me and Mike Licona, is now available at Amazon.com: Here’s the table of contents for the science section: Section Two: The Question of Science 8. Creator and Sustainer: God’s Essential Role in the Universe — Robert Kaita 9. The Pale Blue Dot Revisited — Jay W. Richards and Guillermo Gonzalez 10. Oxygen, Water, and Light, Oh My! The Toxicity of Life’s Basic Necessities — Joe W. Francis 11. The Origin of Life — Walter Bradley 12. What Every High School Student Should Know about Science — Michael Newton Keas 13. Darwin’s Battleship: Status Report on the Leaks This Ship Has Sprung — Phillip E. Johnson 14. Debunking the Scopes “Monkey Trial” Stereotype — Edward Sisson Read More ›

In 1951 the leading evolutionist George G. Simpson stated that there really is no point nowadays in continuing to collect and to study fossils simply to determine whether or not evolution is a fact. The question, concluded Simpson, has been decisively answered in the affirmative. Simpson was by no means the first to make this high claim—even stronger statements were made in the nineteenth and even eighteenth centuries—but in the twentieth century this sentiment came to dominate the life sciences. It became more than merely broadly accepted, it became mandatory. This set up evolutionary theory as what Thomas Kuhn would call “normal science.” Evolution became the standard, the dominant paradigm, within which the life sciences operated. From high school biology Read More ›

After Darwinist Steve Matheson debated Stephen Meyer at Biola, various essays appeared on the internet pointing out Matheson’s numerous errors and oversights. In the face of having his assertions publicly discredited (see a summary in Fact Free Science of Matheson), he wrote an open letter to Stephen Meyer. Your Discovery Institute is a horrific mistake, an epic intellectual tragedy that is degrading the minds of those who consume its products and bringing dishonor to you and to the church. It is for good reason that Casey Luskin is held in such extreme contempt by your movement’s critics, and there’s something truly sick about the pattern of attacks that your operatives launched in the weeks after the Biola event. It’s clear Read More ›

Here

As followers of this controversy will remember from previous posts, the California Science Center (CSC) denied screening of Illustra Media’s film Darwin’s Dilemma: The Mystery of the Cambrian Fossil Record.  A lawsuit ensued, in which the California Science Center was sued to disclose documentation, of which they are legally bound under the Public Records Act to disclose, in an attempt to discover what provoked the obvious discrimination. The outcome of the suit is that the CSC has to disclose the documentation and pay the attorney’s fees of the Discovery Institute.  Here is a short podcast from the Discovery Institute on the matter:

California Science Center to Pay Attorneys’ Fees and Sett…

Intelligent Design The Future

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The genome of Ectocarpus siliculosus, a brown algae, has been sequenced and analyzed. As usual the evolutionary model fits about as well as the flat earth theory. Evolutionists claim their theory is crucial for predicting the contents of such newly sequenced genomes. But in practice we see a different story. Most obvious are the many differences found between allied species. The E. siliculosus genome is no different in this regard:  Read more

Rob Crowther reports: California Science Center to Pay Attorneys’ Fees and Settle Open Records Lawsuit by Intelligent Design Group

The California Science Center (CSC) has agreed to settle a lawsuit with the pro-intelligent design Discovery Institute and release records that it previously sought to conceal regarding its cancellation of the screening of a pro-intelligent design film last year.

“After months of stonewalling by the Science Center, this is a huge victory for the public’s right to know what their government is doing, especially when the government engages in illegal censorship and viewpoint discrimination,” said Dr. John West, Associate Director of Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture.
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“I think this will come to be a classic story of orthodoxy derailing objective analysis of the facts, in this case for a quarter of a century…The failure to recognize the full implications of this-particularly the possibility that the intervening noncoding sequences may be transmitting parallel information in the form of RNA molecules-may well go down as one of the biggest mistakes in the history of molecular biology.” —John Mattick, Molecular biologist, University of Queensland, quoted in Scientific American Steve Matheson, a teacher and Darwinist promoter at a religious school, repeats the biggest mistake in molecular biology. In contrast, Richard Sternberg, an evolutionary biologist at the Biologic Institute, defends objective analysis of the facts. See Sternberg’s defense of the facts Read More ›