God and gorillas
Anthropologist Barbara J. King explains what our distant cousins can tell us about religion and why it’s OK for scientists to believe in God.
Wow, that’s expert advice.
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Al Herr Integrates Evolution with Intelligent Design in New Book, Rupturian Vision of Reality
In Rupturian Vision of Reality, overview of the three volume Last Call from Earth series, Al Herr lays out a new vision of reality, integrating up-to-the-minute thinking about evolution with theories of Intelligent Design. The book presents no less than a reimagined cosmology. In compelling detail, Herr describes the nature, origin and evolution of the soul; its physical component: soulstrings; its transfiguration into spiritual energy, and concepts for soul’s transplantation to another body.
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UW-Whitewater 9th Annual DARWIN DAY, 2007.
Time to award this years ‘Grubby Whigs Award’. Dawkins and Dennett are currently the two finalists.
Am I being deceived?.
Reasonable Kansans, the blog, puts the confusion over methodological naturalism nicely.
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Is Bacterial Resistance
to Antibiotics an Appropriate Example of Evolutionary Change?
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Wells vs Mutant Mice
By Ian Musgrave
Ian Musgrave convincingly debunks one more fallacious thesis suggested by pseudo-biologist and fighter against science, the “moonie” Wells. Discussion of this post can be seen at the Panda’s Thumb blog (http://www.pandasthumb.org/archives/2007/01/wells_vs_mutant.html).
published: Jan 31, 2007
What We Don’t Know with comment at Horganism,
A Whack For Kevin Kelly;
Everyone is humble about what they don’t know, until it comes to Darwinism.
The Ego and the ID
by Richard Fortey, Telegraph
Snare? Darwinists have fallen into their own trap.
Why I hate this intelligent design story. It’s simply IDiotic, writes Richard Fortey
Scientists have found themselves trapped into appearing to be unreasonable in their pursuit of rationality. A snare has been cleverly set by the proponents of Intelligent Design in their quest to prove that Charles Darwin got it wrong.
One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge. Read the rest of this entry »
Wild Neighbors: Bug Bombs: The Stink Beetle Meets the Killer Mouse
I’ve always been fascinated by evolutionary arms races. In his The Ancestor’s Tale Richard Dawkins makes the point that if you can see progress anywhere in evolution, it’s in these ongoing duels between predator and prey. Each, over time, gets better at attack or defense, or dies out. At a minimum, as Geerat Vermeij has argued, arms races have made the natural world a more complex place.
This passage is a giveaway for the basic Darwinian fallacy, with its dangerous consequences. Darwinism can’t define evolutionary progress and sinks back to the disguised ideologies of conflict to define, a potentially disastrous confusion that Darwinists are simply incapable of correcting.
The harm being done by Dawkins in the educational system is fairly evident here.
PZ Myers exchanges theories with Richard Dawkins
Paul Z. “PZ” Myers, assistant professor of biology at the University of Minnesota, Morris, has a theory of evolution that he recently took right to the source – the birthplace and home of Charles Darwin. Myers’ long-time colleague, Larry Moran of the University of Toronto, arranged for Myers to accompany him on a trip to England. While in England they talked with Richard Dawkins, who currently holds an endowed chair as the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University.
Russian Schoolgirl Flees to Dominicana Over Compulsory Darwinism Course.
A high school girl from St. Petersburg, who is suing Russia’s education authorities over the compulsory teaching of evolution in schools, has left school and the country, citing pressure from teachers and anonymous threats, the RIA-Novosti news agency reported on Tuesday quoting a statement by the girl’s father and lawyer.
Maria Shraiber and her father, Kirill Shraiber have said their suit does not seek to abolish the teaching of Darwinism in schools, which was official dogma in Soviet times, but to give schoolchildren the right to study other theories regarding the origins of life.
If you reject the Big Bang as being intelligent – after acknowledging that it created so many books and other works of art, it leaves you with no test for intelligence.
I take the practical approach – that something is intelligent if it unambiguously performs tasks that require intelligence. Writing Moby Dick required intelligence. The Big Bang wrote Moby Dick. Therefore, the Big Bang is intelligent, and you and I are created by that same intelligence. Therefore, we are created by an intelligent entity.
I don’t see how an atheist can think otherwise.
Pulitzer winner explores Dover case in ‘Monkey Girl’
and check out Amazon Read the rest of this entry »
Darwin Vs. the Old Time Religion.
ID, then — a religious view — can only be taught, says Rasor, “if you’re teaching…different religious traditions as history or literature or comparative religion. But you couldn’t have a religious course where a particular religious view is taught as truth.”
And though ID certainly cannot be taught as a science, “evolution could be intelligent design” with “a designer who started the process.” But that’s still “a religious theory” because, unlike scientific theories, “it is not subject to testing or disproving.”
Perhaps, as noted here repeatedly, Darwinian natural selection is another ‘design theory’ that flunks the test of science.
And a design argument claiming to disprove the existence of God is as vulnerable as its antithesis.
Reading: The Bloodless Revolution: A Cultural History of Vegetarianism from 1600 to Modern Times by Tristram Stuart
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Churches shouldn’t buy into Darwinists’ ploy
Jonathan Wells
As Jonathan Dudley pointed out in his recent column (“Evolution Sunday not so benign,” 1/24), hundreds of Christian churches across America will celebrate Darwin’s theory on Feb. 11.Why will they do this? A little background is helpful here.
How We Make Life-and-Death Decisions.
When it came to moral “reasoning,” David Hume emphasized the quotation marks. We like to think our views on right and wrong are rational, he said, but ultimately they are grounded in emotion…
Robert Wright gets called up to put the finishing touches on the Time consciousness article. A house-trained sociobiologist is an asset here (but how does Time manage the switch to religious cover stories?). Read the rest of this entry »
Terrall, Mary. 2002. The man who flattened the earth: Maupertuis and the sciences in the enlightenment. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.