Popular culture

( To comment, kindly go here) Last time, we showed how Wikipedia’s article on Intelligent Design flagrantly distorts the history of the origins of ID as a modern movement. Today, our focus is on a subtler distortion: From the mid-1990s, intelligent design proponents were supported by the Discovery Institute, which, together with its Center for Science and Culture, planned and funded the “intelligent design movement”.[16][n 1] They advocated inclusion of intelligent design in public school biology curricula, leading to the 2005 Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District trial, where U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III ruled that intelligent design is not science, that it “cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious, antecedents”, and that the school district’s Read More ›

First, let’s watch: [youtube FPeyJvXU68k] Then, having watched, let us now discuss, in light of the ongoing debate on the rationality of scientism-rooted a priori evolutionary materialist atheism, here.  Also, the issues that come up as our civilisation metaphorically stands on the deck of a ship in Fair Havens and contemplates what to do. END      

Yesterday, we saw how Wikipedia is one of the most influential sites on the Internet, how it vaunts itself on its commitment to NPOV, a neutral point of view: Editing from a neutral point of view (NPOV) means representing fairly, proportionately, and as far as possible without bias, all significant views that have been published by reliable sources. All Wikipedia articles and other encyclopedic content must be written from a neutral point of view. NPOV is a fundamental principle of Wikipedia and of other Wikimedia projects. This policy is nonnegotiable and all editors and articles must follow it. “Neutral point of view” is one of Wikipedia’s three core content policies. The other two are “Verifiability” and “No original research“. These Read More ›

Yesterday was a hard day, even for those like me who were quite late to the news. We woke up here to the news on BBC — a Caribbean tradition — that someone in China had attacked a classroom with a knife of some kind and had slashed twenty-two children. This, in a country where there is a very harsh one child per family law, backed up by forced abortions etc. And, apparently, it is not the first such recent attack in that country. (Cf article in the Hartford Courant — and yes, that is tragically close to home.) Then, across the course of the day, news emerged of a similar attack in an elementary school in Newtown Connecticut, USA. Read More ›

As I have just noted, the AHA has put up a blog promoting its brand of evolutionary materialist naturalism to children: . . . the AHA has a web site that promotes its brand of naturalism — in effect, atheism rooted in evolutionary materialism, but with the attempt to promote human values and being “good without God” — to children (here) with a section for teens (here). The sneering, condescendingly sophomoric tone and dismissivenes of the site is clear right from its declared (and very familiar-sounding) theme: Welcome to Kids Without God, a site for the millions of young people around the world who have embraced science, rejected superstition, and are dedicated to being Good Without A God! Noted Christian Read More ›

In a recent comment clipped by GP in the Jerad thread, Keiths has used the rhetorically dismissive term “Gish Gallop.” Let me cite: KS: . . . with gpuccio it is sometimes possible to zero in on the crux of a disagreement. You can’t do that with Gish Gallopers. Now, as I will shortly show, this is a loaded and abusive, name-calling assertion that first seeks to smear a specific person, then to invidiously associate all who are skewered with it, with his alleged rhetorical crimes. For instance, this is how the so-called Rationalwiki defines: The Gish Gallop, named after creationist Duane Gish, is the debating technique of drowning the opponent in such a torrent of half-truths, lies,  and straw-man Read More ›

I have noticed that the usual hostile scrutinisers at some objector sites are back on their Saul Alinsky, dismissive mockery and well-poisoning tactics. (I suppose they have not liked the situation where in recent weeks we have had some useful and reasonably civil exchanges here at UD under living room rules, giving the lie to their drumbeat accusations of censorship. They also probably do not like the balance on the merits after several thousand comments in several recent UD threads.) I have therefore responded to some of the most recent specific remarks here. I strongly suggest, too, that such need to check a good legal dictionary before presuming ignorance on the part of design thinkers, and that they need to Read More ›

  In an interview with Playboy, September just past, Dr Dawkins made some dismissive remarks  on the historicity of Jesus, in the context of having made similarly dismissive talking points about Intelligent Design.  As UD News noted: PLAYBOY: What is your view of Jesus? DAWKINS: The evidence he existed is surprisingly shaky. The earliest books in the New Testament to be written were the Epistles, not the Gospels. It’s almost as though Saint Paul and others who wrote the Epistles weren’t that interested in whether Jesus was real. Even if he’s fictional, whoever wrote his lines was ahead of his time in terms of moral philosophy. PLAYBOY: You’ve read the Bible. DAWKINS: I haven’t read it all, but my knowledge Read More ›

As Dr Torley recently highlighted here at UD, Mr Dan Savage, an activist for homosexuality, recently tried to trash Bible-based Christian ethics (at a conference on bullying) by accusing the Bible of advocating slavery. (We need not elaborate on his publicly displayed ignorance on issues linked to the general, historic, NT-based Christian view on the ceremonial law in the Pentateuch, and his conflation of topics under that head with, say, relevant issues in sexual ethics and principles of core morality. Let’s just say that on ethics, I highly recommend Dr Torley’s discussion here.) When several dozen high school students walked away in protest at the tone and substance of his diatribe, he then proceeded to mock them. Oopsie! In response Read More ›

In the ongoing Methodological Naturalism thread, at no. 66, Dr Matzke is on record: massive observational evidence and the logic of our understanding of natural laws rules say that that miracle thing can’t happen. In short he holds that the laws of nature forbid miracles. (And recall, here, we are speaking about the late publicist for the US-based NCSE, for quite some years.) Oopsie. Double oopise. Triple oopsie. And cf. here, too. In a nutshell, Dr Matzke here seems to make a crude form of the error commonly attributed to Hume (and too often seen as a definitive dismissal of the miraculous). He also reveals that behind methodological naturalism, there may often lurk a prior (and perhaps implicit) commitment to Read More ›

Yesterday, UD’s News announced a free chart of fallacies. I thought, oh, yay, let’s download. But, once I began to look at the chart, I noticed that it presented Plato, Socrates and Aristotle in a way that seemed to mock the orthodox Christian triune concept of God. (Did it ever strike the creator of the chart, that Plato is a foundational design thinker? Cf here on.) Clue no 1. Clue no 2 was that many fallacies seemed to have odd names. And, “thou shalt not commit logical fallacies” in that context suggests that, as with too many presentations on fallacies I have seen online, this is an agenda in disguise: you object to “our” views because you are dumb and/or Read More ›