06.04.11
Creationism in France
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/06/04/981358/-This-week-in-science
Bachmann and ID
Student To Michele Bachmann: ‘Presidential candidates shouldn’t be able to make stuff up’
05.29.11
More on accomodationism
The (Lack Of) Conflict Between Science and Religion in College Students
Commentary: http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2011/05/29/another-study-supposedly-proving-sciencefaith-accommodation/
Let’s see Xtian accomodationists (who use the term ‘religion’ to refer to their own religion) try their tactics with Buddhism, with respect to Xtianity, and with respect to science.
Buddhists are the other problem for these accomodationists.
05.19.11
C. S. Lewis on Evolution and Intelligent Design
05.18.11
Proof of Jesus outside the Bible?
Proof of Jesus outside the Bible?
By BARTY77
Updated: Tuesday, 17 May 2011 at 5:29 PM
http://richarddawkins.net/discussions/627373-proof-of-jesus-outside-the-bible
Now, having been to an Alpha course I have heard this claim a lot – as I am sure have those of you who have also partaken in the same delight. I also heard this claim from an atheist friend of mine earlier today who, like the people at the Alpha course, failed to reference the source to me.
Now, I would like to know two things:
1.Is there any proof outside the Bible for Jesus even existing? – I have often taken the position that he never existed, because I personally have never seen any evidence.
2.If so, can I (finally) get a reference on that? – It seems to me that without referencing information, that information cannot be trusted.
Also, if you manage to hit points 1 and 2 for me: Is there any mention of the supposed miracles outside the Bible and can I get a reference if there is (though at this stage I am doubting it highly).
05.17.11
Sam Harris on accomodationism
http://richarddawkins.net/articles/626387-sam-harris-on-accommodationism
This debate is almost completely useless. The real issue is that the ‘new atheism’ is the wrong vehicle to challenge religion. Many science types, like Mooney, sense this and bring in the issue of accomodationism.
But the fact remains that the new atheism will backfire and, if anything, restrengthen Xtian belief.
The first thing to observe is that Mooney and Kirshenbaum are confused about the nature of the problem. The goal is not to get more Americans to merely accept the truth of evolution (or any other scientific theory); the goal is to get them to value the principles of reasoning and educated discourse that now make a belief in evolution obligatory. Doubt about evolution is merely a symptom of an underlying condition; the condition is faith itself—conviction without sufficient reason, hope mistaken for knowledge, bad ideas protected from good ones, good ideas obscured by bad ones, wishful thinking elevated to a principle of salvation, etc. Mooney and Kirshenbaum seem to imagine that we can get people to value intellectual honesty by lying to them.
Harris trumpets the ideology of reason but appears confused himself about the evolution question. Or, perhaps, he is being cagey and omits reference to natural selection on purpose.
The point here is that the evidence for evolution is very strong, but the questioin of natural selection hides behind this but is far less established. So is Harris trying to pull a fast one: does he mean purely the fact of evolution? Or is he sneaking in natural selection, and then accusing its critics of rejecting evolution?
The ideology of reason promoted by Harris et al is completely sterile. Few problems are solved by true believers in Reason. I think nonetheless the heritage of Enlightenment reason is one we should study intensively, keeping in mind that practical creative problems very often come from a more complex combination of factors, including the ‘rational’ faculty.
But the question of Reason could never be monopolized by the cult of scientism, or the new atheists, whose irrationalities are a novelty in the history of atheism.
The use of the term ‘reason’ by modernists (what to say of philosophers of antiquity, like Plato) needs caution its usage, that of the philosopher Hegel with his dialectic being one of its variants, apt here given the narrow usage of science types with the phrase.
“Stephen Hawking (and I) reject ‘the God of the gaps’”
05.16.11
Hawking as Science Pope
Hawking’s new stance is a new dogmatism. He should know (but he denounced philosophy as superfluous) that there is no way to prove anything about an afterlife, and in fact the state of physics suggests a host of future venues for the discovery of the larger dimension of the organism beyond space and time, so this cranky Science Pope pronouncement syndrome deserves a shrug. Note the confusion of Xtian ideas of ‘heaven’ with the broader question of the self beyond death.
Stephen Hawking: ‘There is no heaven; it’s a fairy story’
By IAN SAMPLE – GUARDIAN.CO.UK
Added: Sunday, 15 May 2011 at 11:02 PMhttp://richarddawkins.net/articles/627237-stephen-hawking-there-is-no-heaven-it-s-a-fairy-story
In an exclusive interview with the Guardian, the cosmologist shares his thoughts on death, M-theory, human purpose and our chance existence
Stephen Hawking dismisses belief in God in an exclusive interview with the Guardian. Photograph: Solar & Heliospheric Observatory/Discovery Channel
A belief that heaven or an afterlife awaits us is a “fairy story” for people afraid of death, Stephen Hawking has said.
In a dismissal that underlines his firm rejection of religious comforts, Britain’s most eminent scientist said there was nothing beyond the moment when the brain flickers for the final time.
Hawking, who was diagnosed with motor neurone disease at the age of 21, shares his thoughts on death, human purpose and our chance existence in an exclusive interview with the Guardian today.
The incurable illness was expected to kill Hawking within a few years of its symptoms arising, an outlook that turned the young scientist to Wagner, but ultimately led him to enjoy life more, he has said, despite the cloud hanging over his future.
“I have lived with the prospect of an early death for the last 49 years. I’m not afraid of death, but I’m in no hurry to die. I have so much I want to do first,” he said.
05.15.11
ID footholds in schools
ID footholds in schools
Intelligent Design Making Headway into Texas Public Schools…note the link to Johnson’s Darwin on Trial. Why has the biological community abdicated to people like Johnson. This book should have been written by a scientist three decades ago (and in fact was). Btw, this book doesn’t even mention ID.
Thus note, ….
The scientific community is letting this one slip away, as noted here repeatedly, and it is in some ways their own fault. The warning, so to speak, came in the seventies, about the time DNA science as taking off, Eldredge and Gould began talking about punctuated equilibrium, Hoyle pointed to the absurdities of random evolution and probability claims, Gould pronounced the synthesis dead, the left critiqued sociobiology and dumbed water on E. O. Wilson, and people like Soren Lovtrup, an embryologist, sank Darwinism. He is merely symbolic of the concealed reality: the problems with Darwinism are known to science, but kept from the public. This was thirty years ago, or more, and if the scientific community had acted then to challenge its own theory of Darwinism, and taken a more intelligent stance toward its own findings, the religious right might never have been able to really take off with anti-Darwinism, which was always so poorly considered that nothing could come of it. But at the point where the challenges within science were seen for what they were, the religious critics were closing on taking over the critical step of any science: critique and paradigm change. It was no longer pseudo-science, it was cutting edge critique, soon frittered away in ID confusions, but, amazingly, more intelligent than what mainstream science students were getting with their endless indoctrination into Darwinism, and its dumbing effect.
And the next phase, still part of the original phase, was that of Denton, whose Evolution: A Theory in Crisis is the source of Johnson’s Darwin on Trial, and a book of considerable acumen. It made no reference to ID, but simply restated and amplified the problems with Darwin’s theory. This book, despite some problems and mistakes, was so devastating and so clear that even the religious right could get it straight, and Johnson’s Darwin on Trial attempted to restate the gist of that book.
And then a strange thing happened, in part because of Behe’s book on complexity (the history is complicated, and the ID gambit began perhaps a bit earlier): the creationists were able to construct a viable alternate ‘paradigm’ based on the revived design argument, soon the provocative Intelligent Design argument. People like Dembski with better math skills than most biologists was able to constuct a maginal, highly debatable, but coherent methodology of ID, not the same as a science of ID, but a new brand (a la Hoyle) of probabilistic design argument. This disaster is one that biologists can’t seem to get past, frantically denouncing it as pseudo-science. It is neither science nor psedo-science, but an upgraded version dressed in advanced math of Hoyle’s basic critic of probability nonsense.
If the religious critics had simply stayed with the scientific critics of Darwin like Denton, et al., their challenge might have done the job science should have done a decade earlier, the job that, in many ways, Gould should have done, but didn’t. But instead in the wake of Philip Johnson and Behe we find the attempt to create a science of ID a la Dembski and others. Again, who’s to say you can’ t try here. But the problem is that the metaphysical character of ID gave the Darwin establishment a foil to counterattack and in the process defend Darwinism as proper science. The ID movement weakened their challenge, and left the situation confused on both sides. But that hasn’t stopped a host of school systems and disparate religious groups from standing their ground on a refusal of Darwism. They know that the mainstream science groups and educational systems are promoting an easily challenged paradigm, and that its defenders will refuse to think clearly about their own science.
What a golden opportunity handed to the religious right.
The science community needs to stop peddling Darwinism, acknowledge the limits of its science, and from that stance be able to point to the problems with ID, taking back the basic critique of Darwin for science. The question of ID can be addressed with the simple tactics of dialectic: the yes/no of evolutionary theories, and teleological issues. That science is doable only within the limits of this dialectic might stop the false debate in its tracks, by making it ‘dialectical’. Subjects that are not yet scientific will be dialectical, or elses debates ad infinitum. Science evolution is not yet a science (it can’t resolve teleological antinomies, as Kant warned) it is likely to be vulnerable to lesser versions of the real design argument, teleological methodology, i.e. the crypto-theistic Intelligent Design sophistries, and their clever packaging. Why on earth then hasn’t science taken control of the inevitable dialectic with its antithetical dialectic? This tactic was cleverly emerging in a work such as The Cosmological Anthropic Principle by Barrow and Tipler, and had all the elements of a way to challenge evolutionary nonsense withing science.
But the moment was lost. I think scientists are too conditioned by the educational system to be able to think anymore on this question, and blunder along to the glee of the religious right who correctly see stumbling Darwin phantoms easy to pick off at their leisure.
I think there is still time: biologists must be their own harshest critics and take the false brand out of circulation.
In any case, the scientific community has no right to impose Darwinism in schools in communities that really don’t wish that. Why should they? Figures like Johnson have shown them the lie behind this.
The question of church and state is important. If dissenters had stayed with Denton, or Johnson’s initial position, there would be no question about religion: it was bad science. ID was a ‘bridge too far’.
It is debatable whether ID actually violates church/state issues. But if it does (and many of its adherents will bungle the job and certainly violate church/state boundaries) the same can be said about the promotion of atheism in the name of Darwinism. Why should scientists be able to promote reductionist scientism with a theory made the foundation stone of the New Atheism, the destruction of public religion, and the hidden paranoia over eugenics, Nietzchean nihilism, and a total revision of ‘human nature’ to create a phantom man that never existed, and even humble readers of the Bible can tell is wrong-headed. Whatever happened to science education?
Small wonder that the religious right should ask the same question and stonewall endless on evolution education.
I think that teaching evolution is still close to the teaching of history, where theories have little foothold and the study is that of the facts of history. That is the actual condition of biological evolution: no theories work yet, so just study the facts of evolutionary history, keeping theories, Darwinian or ID, at bay.
Please note the behavior of biologists in practive in many situations: they follow the history of evolution in deep time with a series of depictions of its successive chapters. The moment they attempt theory, controversy starts. Fine. But make the cutting edge the simple fact based study of evolution.
There is no simple way to resolve the evolution question, because ‘science’ as now defined can’t handle the task. If the scientific community would simply level with the public, some fresh air could enter, and the hijacking by the right would stop. But too many cynical operators have guessed they can get away with the Darwin fake by conditioning the suggestible public. That strategy has blown up in the face of Big Science, and the damage to science will prove lasting.
05.13.11
Greta Christina’s crypto-fanaticism
Are All Religions Equally Crazy?
Are less established religions really crazier than older mainstream ones? Or are mainstream religions just more familiar
Greta Christina is derailing with this trend toward extreme statements, new atheists please note (although, no dobut, they would be in the cheering gallery, mostly). She started out with some popular posts at Alternet, but now she seems to be driven to dangerous statements about religion in general, statements that show the latent contradictions of the New Atheism, which tends to attach theism, but then, for some unknown reason and with totally misplaced ‘consistency’, proceeds to attack a ‘generalization’ called religion. Why not just tilt at windmills.
Here’s an example of the confusion possible here: ancient Athens spawned the first democracy in the context of a polytheistic art-culture of majestic sublety and breadth (even as the birth of science was taking place in the Greek Enlighentenment). This flowering of the Greek Enlightnement was a multidimensional phenomenon of almost unfathomable depth.
So should we oppose thie phenomenon on the grounds of its hybrid religious elements and strains? Can you, like Solomon, to divide the baby, where art and religion blend, politics and religion blend?
There are hundreds of examples like this.
The New Atheists need to define what they are doing more carefully, because what they have now is crazy, and will turn into fanaticism.
You may say this is a special case, but Christina’s generalization attempts to reject all religion. Her universal statement is deliberate, and most ill-considered.
Too much heat, not enough light in the creationism war
Too much heat, not enough light in the creationism warThe near hysterical way in which intelligent design is treated online only suits those who seek to politicise evolution
Creationists and the ID lobby are hardly the full problem: the contribution of Darwin ideologists trying to monopolize the idea of science for evolution drives dissent, as it should. ID may not be science, but Darwin’s theory is not really science either. And the issue is not entirely science: the issue is whether ID can explain evolution (I doubt it), not whether it is science. The definition science is crippling the attempt to understand evolution. No wonder some try a different approach
05.10.11
Santorum
Santorum Debates Out of Both Sides of His Mouth
When it comes to big government moralism, few Republicans can match Rick Santorum. He has always been one of the more extreme theocrats within the GOP and nothing has changed since Pennsylvania voters wisely threw him out of the U.S. Senate in 2006. Santorum is an advocate of the junk science called “intelligent design” and is a leader in the anti-gay movement.
He said that polygamy, adultery and sodomy are all “antithetical to a healthy, stable, traditional family.” An ultra-orthodox Latin-Mass Catholic, Santorum went so far as to blame the epidemic of Catholic priests molesting children on “political and cultural liberalism,” based on the assumption that Boston “lies at the center of the storm.” Apparently, the senator was unaware that the problem was worldwide and just as prevalent in conservative areas as liberal ones. Nor can one ignore the fact that priests are part of a very conservative Catholic culture.
05.08.11
Catholics and ID
http://www.evolutionnews.org/2011/05/catholics_and_intelligent_desi_3046411.html
05.07.11
Charles Darwin’s use of theology in the Origin of Species
‘Has science buried God?’
Has science buried God?
No, far from it, an Oxford professor insists
Evolution Battle Brews In Texas
http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/142452/20110507/texas-controversy-over-teaching-evolution-brews.htm
05.06.11
More on Kauffman
Comment on Kauffman
Stephen
76.103.217.68 Submitted on 2011/05/05 at 2:02 pm
More Kauffman news:http://trinitybook.wordpress.com/2011/04/26/stuart-kauffman-starting-to-figure-it-out/
More Kauffman news:
http://trinitybook.wordpress.com/2011/04/26/stuart-kauffman-starting-to-figure-it-out/
Stephen
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/serenityandtolerance/
1
David Barton’s Revistionist History
David Barton’s Revistionist History & Liars for Jesus
By HEMANT MEHTA – FRIENDLY ATHEIST
Added: Thursday, 05 May 2011 at 10:05 PM
http://richarddawkins.net/videos/623636-david-barton-s-revistionist-history-liars-for-jesus
David Barton, the Christian conman who’s revising history to have a far more Christian slant to it than it deserves — and influencing several state history curriculums in the process — was on The Daily Show last night. The extended interview is now on their website.
05.04.11
Letter on Templeton
Letter on Templeton
By RICHARD DAWKINS
Added: Wednesday, 04 May 2011 at 10:26 AM
http://richarddawkins.net/discussions/622977-letter-on-templeton
The current issue (2nd May) of New Statesman published the following Letter to the Editor, in response to an article by Martin Rees, attempting to justify his acceptance of the Templeton Prize:-
The Editor New Statesman
Sir
You quote me as calling Martin Rees a ‘compliant quisling’ for accepting the Templeton Prize. That is not strictly accurate. My only comment on his acceptance was (a paraphrase of his predecessor as President of the Royal Society, Robert May): “That will look great on Templeton’s CV, not so good on Martin’s”. I said it in a spirit of genuine concern for the reputation of a great astronomer and, I would like to think, personal friend.
It is true that in March 2010 I wrote “[Templeton] use their money shamelessly to satisfy their doomed craving for scientific respectability. They tried it on with the Royal Society of London, and they seem to have found a compliant quisling in the current President, Martin Rees, who, though not religious himself, is a fervent ‘believer in belief’. Fortunately, enough Fellows made a stink about it to ensure that the Royal Society will not flirt with Templeton in future.”
Unfortunately, there remains one vestigial connection. In 1951 the Duke of Edinburgh was honoured by election to Fellowship of the Royal Society. He later, probably in all innocence, agreed to present the annual Templeton Prize at Buckingham Palace. He is a man who takes science seriously and might therefore listen sympathetically if Martin Rees’s successor as President of the Royal Society were to convey to him how poorly the Templeton Foundation is regarded in the scientific community. The monarchy is supposed to be above public controversy, and Templeton lurks somewhere between controversial and discredited. Royalty should not be playing into their hands by abetting their tireless quest for respectability.
Richard Dawkins FRS
Oxford
05.01.11
‘Imagine no religion’
http://richarddawkins.net/events#event_6af5dc6f77fbe70c8638343133a347e3
04.30.11
Rees and the atheists
Martin Rees: Atheists should drop anti-religion campaigns
Astronomer royal urges Darwinists to adopt ‘peaceful coexistence’ with moderate groups to beat fundamentalism
I can see no reason why scientists shouldn’t criticize religion, so the real issue here is the inability of those trained in science to criticize religion properly, atheist or not. The New Atheists are an embarrassment to science because of their inability to study and discuss the history of religion. In fact, the atheist stance is a suspiciously convenient mantra to chant, as a tactic to attack religion without bothering with the details.
04.28.11
Booknotes: The Language of Science and Faith
BioLogos and Theistic Evolution: Selling the Product
There’s nothing wrong with selling one’s ideas. But it needs to be done honestly, and that’s just what I don’t find in this book.
Creationism headed to Texas classes?
http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/04/27/6544304-creationism-headed-to-texas-classes-
04.25.11
Re: Coyne letter
http://darwiniana.com/2011/04/25/jerry-coynes-open-letter/
The previous post contains an open letter from Jerry Coyne re: the NCSE.
I am not a party to either side of this debate, since I don’t support ‘accomodationism’ and don’t support Darwinism and its hoarde. I think however that the NCSE senses that using evolutioinism to attack theism isn’t going to work, and move to some kind of compromise. The danger of compromise is that a new establishment consensus will arise that makes Christianity and Darwinism the standard dogmas, together. I can see why the New Atheists balk, even as I can see why the NSCE (et al) are trying to bypass defeat in the useless effort to combat religion with the tenets of Darwinians and Dawkins groupies.
Real accomodationism proceeds apace, as the trend toward postdarwinism and a real evolutionism are matched by the erosion of Xtianity and the ‘New Age’ search for 1. a new religious understanding and 2. a robust secularismm that is not beholden to religion, nor so narrow as to exclude it from a pluralistic society.
So we can see that both sides are useless here, wrongheaded and wrong, and in the case of many Darwin defenders plying atheism, suspiciously shifty eyed about the limits of evolutionary dogma: we must suspect that Darwinism is all too convenient as a prop for this new brand of atheist fundamentalism.
In the meantime, if the issue is education, then it is false to claim that teaching Darwinism is the foundation of good science education. Sadly, it is the religious right that has stolen a march on science, by picking up some of the classic critiques of Darwin’s theory. That they overreached with ID is another issue. These religious groups have discovered that Darwinism is bad science and the joke is on the science groups, who don’t get it, most probably because the science education they got was phony, a form of indoctrination of the young that is all too familiar in the history of religion. The Darwinists/new atheists have chosen get their asses kicked. There is not much I can do to help, even if I wanted to.
04.24.11
Rees on anti-religion campaigns
Martin Rees: Atheists should drop anti-religion campaigns
Astronomer royal urges Darwinists to adopt ‘peaceful coexistence’ with moderate groups to beat fundamentalism
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/apr/24/martin-rees-atheists-drop-campaigns
Martin Rees speaks out, and that is good, although for me, the issue of the New Atheists is their incompetence. They should stop criticizing religion, not because of some need for accomodationism, but because their commentary on religion, if anything, makes it stronger.
The religions are open to critique, but the perspective of the New Atheist simply shows their ignorance.
I note that Rees is still stuck on Darwinism, and that weakens his perspective. A settlement of bad Xtianity and Darwinism is of no use to anyone. The current broil just advance the situation if both sides tear each other to pieces.
04.22.11
Michael Dowd’s Evolutionary Christianity
The New Evangelism: Michael Dowd’s Evolutionary Christianity
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