Benefits, except for bombs, Tuskegee, and a few other cases.

“This is a highly charged political issue—both science and secularism are under political attack.”

So he’s for free inquiry, yet complains because when people inquire freely he feels it is an attack?

Well he got that much right, although he seems confused and doens’t seem to realise that he is the one undermining it.

Exactly so. One suspects their fear and loathing of ID is energized by an instinctual realization that Darwinian randomness does not, cannot, and will never, account for the origin of the function-specific information now found to be a key driving factor in the genome.

The ID paradigm threatens to unravel the materialistic foundation and philosophy of the Darwinists’ worldview. Kurtz’s and similar other Darwinist think-tanks and sundry efforts are driven by an emotional need to undermine ID’s imminent and inevitable success in every conceivable way they can.

This has rightly been called the Information Age. How apt that Intelligent Design, with its focus on genomic information, is the bright rising star on the scientific horizon.

In sum, the Center for Inquiry hopes to become a full-fledged player in the public-policy arena, aspiring to the ranks of organizations such as Brookings, Heritage, and Cato, all of which serve as both think tanks and public-policy advocates …

Declared Kurtz, “We have a vital role to play. We are part of the mainstream of American life—part of the Founding Fathers’ Enlightenment tradition—and essential for the vitality of future scientific research; we need to make that point abundantly clear.”

More likely they will remain is ineffectual as Ayn Rand’s followers who have a similar mission to change the world into a world ruled over by “rational” people (i.e. them). They claim that science in under attack when in reality they are the ones attacking science by refusing to acknowledge legitimate scientific challenges to their doctrines simply because they do not like the implications that those challenges force them to admit as plausible.

They are irrational and unscientific in their fear and loathing of ID. It’s one thing to fear and loathe religions e.g. because they usually seek to enforce behavior, t is another thing entirely to fear and loath ID. It is their irrationality and unscientific attitude towards ID that showcases their real purpose. That purpose isn’t to “defend science”, whatever that is supposed to mean. Their purpose is to attack faith. They hate ID with a passion because it gives scientific credibility to faith. That giving of a scientific “rational” cause for faith is something which strikes at the heart of the rationalist/humanist/objectivist combine whose sole purpose is in attacking faith as lacking a rational and scientific basis.

They are actually advancing the cause of bigotry and irrationality and suppression of science. Their ideology guides them, not rationality nor pure scientific objectivity. Their pretentious babbling masquerading as truth, light, and the American way is delusionally self reverential to the point of hilarious absurdity.

http://www.findarticles.com/p/.....i_n6145305

These disputes are not between faith and reason but between alternative visions of the good person and the good society that have roots in both modes of thought. What makes them potentially destructive (among other things) are claims that one party’s views are purely rational and scientific, while the other’s rest on pure faith. Such claims eliminate the possibility of dialogue, since, according to modernist conceptions, rationality relies on inductive logic and objective evidence, while faith is validated by other means entirely.

I myself submit that neo-Darwinism, based on its “findings”, is as much a matter of “faith” as most far less harmful “religious” tenets.

As James P. Hogan wrote of Darwinism in Kicking the Sacred Cow

But even if the facts were as presented, what would it all add up to, really? Light moths do better against a light background, whereas dark moths do better against a dark background. This is the Earth-shattering outcome after a century and a half of intensive work by some of the best-known names in science developing a theory that changed the world? Both light strains and dark strains of moth were already present from the beginning. Nothing changed or mutated; nothing genetically new came into existence. If we’re told that of a hundred soldiers sent into a jungle wearing jungle camouflage garb along with a hundred in arctic whites, more of the former were still around a week later, are we supposed to conclude that one kind “evolved” into another, or that anything happened that wouldn’t have been obvious to common sense?

He also summarizes Spetner’s arguments nicely — see the below link. My conclusion — Kurtz has no interest in “dialog”. So be it.

Bill and others should continue their inquiry. As Aquinas wrote in his Summa Theologica I.1.8 “Grace does not abolish nature, but completes it.” We have but the need of the attitudes of humility and respect, which are sadly lacking in the above statement of Mr. Kurtz.

http://www.baen.com/chapters/W.....88___7.htm

You beat me to it, my friend. Well put.

Sure, scientific naturalism brought about all the major social progress in the last couple of hundred years!! Makes me feel better. Oh yes, Mahatma Gandhi, the architect of non-violent protest and the father of modern day India — whoops, a spiritual leader. Hold on, I got it, Martin Luther King, the great civil rights leader — oh darn, another prominent spiritual leader. Oh, I got it, the abolitionist movement, what could be more important? What’s that you say, it was fed and cared for in churches? Harriet Beecher Stowe (Uncle Tom’s Cabin) — say what, a big time Christian? This is got to stop. William Wilberforce, the catylyst behind ending the slave trade in UK another passionate Christian!! This is blowing my “faith” in this new Think Tank. Please, somebody help.

Yep, by all appearances Paul Kurtz looks like a warm-hearted, happy, jovial fellow. Check it out. Just the sort of qualities that Atheism is sure to bring to your life. Sign me up!!

http://www.pointofinquiry.org/?p=16