The ID Report

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

In late October, celebrated (former) atheist Antony Flew's long-awaited There IS a God, with Roy Varghese, appeared. It is an elegant little book, as one might expect from a British philosopher. Its sparkling clarity does more than illuminate Antony Flew's change of mind on the subject of God. It provides a window into the true views of great twentieth century scientists who are routinely portrayed as atheists. Flew is in an excellent position to correct the record because he understands clearly the concepts they were wrestling with. But more on that in my upcoming review.

I do not review apologetic literature in this space, and I am not making an exception here because There IS a God is not an apologetic in any meaningful sense. It is a retraction of earlier (negative) views on the existence of God, on account of new evidence from science about the nature of the universe. Flew's prior prominence as an atheist merits a closer look at the evidence that convinced him to change his mind, which I will shortly address in a followup review.

Flew did not become a Christian but a deist - that is, a person who believes that the existence of the universe is best explained by a divine mind that is not part of the universe but rather outside it. Some of his Christian friends would like him to become a Christian, just as some of his atheist friends would like him to revert to atheism. As of this writing (December 31, 2007), he has done neither.

When the book first appeared, its substance was overshadowed by a controversy over whether Flew really wrote it. The implication, drawn out at length by Mark Oppenheimer in The New York Times, was that Flew was senile and was being manipulated by zealous Christians.

Flew denied that, stating,

"My name is on the book and it represents exactly my opinions. I would not have a book issued in my name that I do not 100 percent agree with. I needed someone to do the actual writing because I'm 84 and that was Roy Varghese's role. The idea that someone manipulated me because I'm old is exactly wrong. I may be old but it is hard to manipulate me. This is my book and it represents my thinking."

In any event, a long "hit" book review in the Sunday Times by Anthony Gottlieb confirms suspicion that the theists and the atheists had been fighting over Flew for years. The theists won, and the atheists are now determined to trash his value in consequence. For example, we read:

Oddly, Flew seems to have turned into an American as well as a believer. His intellectual autobiography is written in the language of an Englishman of his generation and class; yet when he starts to lay out his case for God, he uses Americanisms like "beverages," "vacation" and "candy." It is possible that Flew decided to make some passages easier on the ears of American readers or that an editor has made trivial emendations for him. But it is striking how much of Flew's method of argument, too, has changed from that in his earlier works, and how similar it now is to the abysmal intellectual standards displayed in Varghese's appendix. In fact, Flew told The New York Times Magazine last month that the book "is really Roy's doing."

Oh, come on. If Flew had suddenly, dramatically, turned back to atheism, would the same people suggest that he was senile or that he didn't really write the (later) retraction? Is that truly the atheists' best shot? Then their case is worse than I had realized. As a matter of fact, people who are senile tend to confirm their earlier views more strongly, rather than change them decisively. Change might require intellectual resources they no longer have.

In my view, the authorship attribution, "with" Roy Varghese, is the weak point that those who wish to discredit Flew latched on to and tried to exploit. The word "with", in respect to authorship attribution, is ambiguous. It can mean that the author has accepted help with style. But it can also imply that the named author could not write publishable work.

For example, if a world heavyweight champ who never went to school but has an inspiring story to tell writes an autobiography "with" a popular sports journalist, we needn't be in much suspense about which of the two is literally writing the book. To raise the question is to risk sounding naive. But Flew has written dozens of challenging books, so the question of whether he could still do so matters. Most critically, it impacts the reader's willingness to take his change of mind seriously.

In fact, Flew is identified as having written most of the book (pp 7-158) and Varghese as having written the Preface (vii-xxiv), the Introduction (pp. 1-6), and a long Appendix (161-183). There is also a long appendix by Anglican bishop N. T. Wright (pp 185-213) on the veracity of accounts of Jesus in the New Testament. But that long essay, while quite interesting, seems quite distinct from Flew's account of how he came to be a deist and Varghese's supporting documentation.

I found myself impatiently flipping through the book trying to figure out who Roy Abraham Varghese even is, and finally took to the Internet, where I learned:

Roy Abraham Varghese, author of The Wonder of the World, is the editor and author of various books on the interface between science and religion. Of these, Cosmos, Bios, Theos, included contributions from 24 Nobel Prize winners and was described as "the year's most intriguing book about God" by Time magazine. This was the best-selling book from the publishing house Open Court. Cosmic Beginnings and Human Ends won a Templeton Book Prize in 1995. Great Thinkers on Great Questions was published by OneWorld of Oxford, England, and distributed worldwide by Penguin. God-Sent and the best selling God-Fleshed were two works of popular theology published by Crossworld Herder, the US division of the German publishing house Herder and Herder. Varghese was a panelist at the science and religion forum in the Parliament of World Religions held in Chicago in 1993. He was also an invited participant in the Millennium World Peace Summit of Religious and Spiritual Leaders held at the United Nations in August 2000. He has organized several conferences with dialogues between noted atheists and theists including a conference at Yale University on Artificial Intelligence. He has worked on conferences and publications with some of the best-known atheists in the English-speaking world, ranging from Antony Flew and Sir Alfred Ayer of Oxford to Marvin Minsky of MIT as well as with prominent scientists (including a number of Nobel Prize winners).

Varghese has been elsewhere described as a "businessman and amateur philosopher." If this information is in the book, it is not emphasized.

I am not the only person who has noticed this problem. John Haldane, Director of the Centre for Ethics, Policy and Public Affairs in the Department of Moral Philosophy at the University of St. Andrews, had a ringside seat during the flap, and records:

... the predictable reactions to a book published last month entitled There is a God: How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed his Mind, described as being "by Antony Flew with Roy Abraham Varghese." I quote the form of the authorial assignment for it is part of Oppenheimer's suggestion that Flew had little if anything to do with the book and that it is the latest and most brazen attempt by a member of the theist forces to co-opt a declining mind to their cause.

Haldane doesn't buy the thesis:

As with the defences and denunciations on the weblogs, readers will interpret these statements and Oppenheimer's article in line with their own prejudices, but to my mind the presumption should be in favour of innocence.

I don't buy the he-didn't-write-it thesis either. As I was already aware of the controversy, I read the book carefully as an editor might, and I think that there is no question that Flew wrote the material that appears under his name. And if he didn't, he would certainly have tried to. I remember Flew from the compulsory first year religion course at the U (1967), and after all these years, ... this is still Flew. But it is also true that substantial portions of the book were contributed by Varghese, who is a "with" author and by Wright, who is not named on the cover.

That's one irritant and another has been the publisher's billing of Flew as "the world's most notorious atheist." Many have scored cheap goals by pointing out that Flew was never that. He might be better defended as (formerly) the world's best-respected academic atheist. Throughout his section of the book, a hallmark of Flew's style is a meticulous search for the best evidence, wherever it leads. I can hardly doubt that the many distinctions he earned were just and that his change of mind was reasonable. But "notorious"? Not Flew. Not unless others made him so by their calumnies.

Why did the publisher bill him thus? No big story there. Truth in advertising, I have been through the process myself with The Spiritual Brain, from the same publisher. I am well aware of the readiness with which a vigorous marketing team latches onto a vision they can really RUN with - and the dreadful difficulty of substituting a more mundane and realistic description of a book.

In my view, the book should have been attributed as follows: "Anthony Flew and Roy Abraham Varghese", not "Antony Flew with Roy Abraham Varghese", as it actually is, with appropriate notice on the jacket of an appendix by Bishop Wright, who is a highly regarded New Testament scholar. By choosing to reduce Varghese and make Wright almost disappear, the publisher unintentionally creates an opening for some to claim that Flew wrote no part of the book. But the evidence is against that, as most readers will see.

I will shortly post a review proper. In the meantime, I strongly recommend There IS a God as a key work in helping us understand the significance of evidence for design in the universe.

Note: Here and here are some of my comments at The Mindful Hack as the controversy was developing.

Update note January 12, 2008: Roy Abraham Varghese advises me that "notorious" was Flew's own self-deprecating choice. I wouldn't have guessed, but Marketing must have loved it.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the forthcoming The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Today at the Post-Darwinist

Alley Oop, if you lie to me one more time ...

Human evolution: It all began in Pasta City, see ...

Elite atheist scientists' views on people of faith: Bash them with a crowbar, or only a baseball bat?

Today at the Mindful Hack

Research that tells you something you already knew. Givers are happier Do people give because they are happy or are they happy because they give? Actually, it is more likely a feedback loop - it is mutually reinforcing if you keep it up.

Does religion really poison everything? "Mark Musick of the University of Texas thought, when he started his research on volunteerism worldwide, that education would best predict who volunteers, but he found that attending religious services was the strongest predictor, stronger than either education or income."

Mario Beauregard is a neuroscientist who has been studying the brain for years. His findings are surprising: he believes he has found a neurological reason to believe in the existence of the
soul.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the forthcoming The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

2006 and 2007 have been years in which a number of key science papers addressed things we know - that ain't so. One story is the serious challenges to the long contested "molecular clock" theory.

[ ... ]

In the science literature, many adjustments are offered to make the fossil record and molecular data match. Of course, some adjustment is certainly inevitable, but after a while a question arises. One can live with a clock that is routinely ten minutes slow. But if it is variably slow, slower at some times than others, there may come a point when one asks, why consult a clock anyway? Or, more to the point, should this device properly be called a clock?

Read the rest here.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the forthcoming The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Stephen Jay Gould, the great American paleontologist, liked to say - particularly in A Wonderful Life, that if the tape of evolution were replayed a million times, a species like ours would not necessarily evolve. He made this point in, and a debate rages to this day about whether he meant chance, as Daniel Dennett claims, or contingency, as Michael Shermer claims.

Biochemist Michael Denton of the University of Otago in New Zealand has an interesting take on the question in Nature's Destiny.

Go here for more.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the forthcoming The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Ann Coulter, whose wit has savaged many Important People, asks an interesting question: Why do media reports focus on potential Republican presidential candidate Huckabee's doubts about the Darwinian version of the history of life, but not on those of peole who may be suspected of knowing more about it:

The media are transfixed by the fact that Huckabee says he doesn't believe in evolution. Neither do I, for reasons detailed in approximately one-third of my No. 1 New York Times best-selling book, "Godless: The Church of Liberalism."

I went on a massive book tour for "Godless" just last year, including a boffo opening interview with Matt Lauer on NBC's "Today," a one-on-one, full-hour interview with Chris Matthews on "Hardball," and various other hostile interviews from the organs of establishmentarian opinion.

But I didn't get a single question from them on the topic of one-third of my book.

If the mainstream media are burning with curiosity about what critics of Darwinism have to say, how about asking me? I can name any number of mathematicians, scientists and authors who have also rejected Darwin's discredited theory and would be happy to rap with them about it.

Ann, you and I both know why. What you would tell them is just what legacy media types DON'T want to hear or broadcast. The story is so much easier to tell if we ignore the fact that the evidence does not support Darwin's mechanism as the main explanation for the evolution of life.

What's wrong with science education today. Is it the young earth creationists>?

David Warren on how Darwinism blocks our view of the past, the present, and the future.

Who actually believes in science? The answers may surprise you.

John Davison has a new blog.

New at THe Mindful Hack:
Should churches criticize bestselling atheists?

Alzheimer NOT an immediate mental death sentence

Is your brain full of anachronistic junk?

Pos-Darwinista aims for 100 000 site visitors by Christmas

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the forthcoming The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Interview with Guillermo Gonzalez, the "Privileged Planet" astronomer who was recently denied tenure at Iowa State University:

"Now if you talk about evidence of design in physics or cosmology, you are put under the category of intelligent design, and you are immediately labeled a fundamentalist or worse." - Guillermo Gonzalez

Also: Gonzalez on intelligent design: Both falsified AND unfalsifiable, right?

If you don't think that makes sense, keep it to yourself! - the Darwinbots are probably watching you.

On a good day, they could knock us over with a feather, or with laughter ...

Note: If you want to post a comment at the DoL blog: A technical problem has prevented me from approving comments. Regular tech support is currently on vacation. So am I, technically, for a few days, though I will try to post anyway. My favourite tech support person has promised to write a page for the site on how to post comments, and I hope that service in the new year will meet every reasonable person's expectations.

Also at The Mindful Hack:

Can people simply decide to die?

It used to be all my mom's fault, but now it's all my brain's fault?

Change your mind, change your brain seminar at Colorado Free University in Denver

Jewish community life takes root again in Germany

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the forthcoming The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Dennis Overbye, writing in The New York Times, explains how physicist Paul Davies had to address Internet hate.

He had written a piece for the New York Times in which he had stated:

SCIENCE, we are repeatedly told, is the most reliable form of knowledge about the world because it is based on testable hypotheses. Religion, by contrast, is based on faith. The term "doubting Thomas" well illustrates the difference. In science, a healthy skepticism is a professional necessity, whereas in religion, having belief without evidence is regarded as a virtue.

The problem with this neat separation into "non-overlapping magisteria," as Stephen Jay Gould described science and religion, is that science has its own faith-based belief system. All science proceeds on the assumption that nature is ordered in a rational and intelligible way. You couldn't be a scientist if you thought the universe was a meaningless jumble of odds and ends haphazardly juxtaposed. When physicists probe to a deeper level of subatomic structure, or astronomers extend the reach of their instruments, they expect to encounter additional elegant mathematical order. And so far this faith has been justified.

But that didn't please the materialists, because they wanted THEIR faith to be certified as true, really and totally true, beyond questn and argument:

Dr. Davies asserted in the article that science, not unlike religion, rested on faith, not in God but in the idea of an orderly universe. Without that presumption a scientist could not function. His argument provoked an avalanche of blog commentary, articles on Edge.org and letters to The Times, pointing out that the order we perceive in nature has been explored and tested for more than 2,000 years by observation and experimentation. That order is precisely the hypothesis that the scientific enterprise is engaged in testing. David J. Gross, director of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara, Calif., and co-winner of the Nobel Prize in physics, told me in an e-mail message, "I have more confidence in the methods of science, based on the amazing record of science and its ability over the centuries to answer unanswerable questions, than I do in the methods of faith (what are they?)."

Reached by e-mail, Dr. Davies acknowledged that his mailbox was "overflowing with vitriol," but said he had been misunderstood. What he had wanted to challenge, he said, was not the existence of laws, but the conventional thinking about their source.

Anyone who doubts the current dogma in science - whatever it is - is liable to be misunderstood.

Also: Today at the Mindful Hack

Can people simply decide to die?

It used to be all my mom's fault, but now it's all my brain's fault?

Change your mind, change your brain seminar at Colorado Free University in Denver

Jewish community life takes root again in Germany.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the forthcoming The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

The blog for the Design of Life textbook supplement went live this morning (I'm the lead blogger).

The first three posts:

1. Welcome to the Design of Life blog!

Excerpt: " Here at this blog you will see the evidence run through a filter that accepts the possibility of purpose and design. That means that sometimes you will see the same evidence but without the just-so stories that rescue Darwinism. You will see lots of evidence you wouldn't otherwise know about. In no case will you see the kind of thing you hear increasingly from popular (and sometimes tax-supported) media. For example, here are some things we WON'T tell you: 1. What Pleistocene man "would have done". For example, he "would have had several mates in order to spread his selfish genes." Actually, I don't know what Pleistocene man would have done. Do you? Did he? When we don't know that something actually happened, we won't tell you that it did. We certainly won't tell you that it "would have happened" in order to promote some otherwise useless or failed Darwinist theory."

2. The Big Bang of flowers - an abominable mystery? Or an opportunity to really understand?

Can scientists shed light on Charles Darwin's "abominable mystery" - the Big Bang of early plant evolution? Flowering plants evolved quite quickly into five groups, according to scientists at the University of Florida and the University of Texas at Austin (ScienceDaily, November 27, 2007) ...

3. The "Copernican" myth, and other science myths - the undead still walk!

The myth that Copernicus's model of the universe "dethroned" humans is a vampire that refuses to die. In Physics Today, Mano Singham tries yet again! to drive a nail through the monster's heart. Singham writes (December 2007, page 48) about the promoters of the myth ...

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the forthcoming The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved. --Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species

What would happen if teachers in a public school classroom notified students of a book in the school library that offered scientific challenges to Darwin's theory of evolution? Call it The Book, and assume it gave a fair portrayal of evolution by natural selection but, in addition to clearly outlining Darwin's thoughts on the matter, also identified specific challenges to Darwinism. What if The Book raised the prospect of gaps in evolutionary theory for which there is no evidence? Even worse, what if The Book contrasted the ideas of Darwinism with that of creationists, clearly focusing on the diametrically opposite religious implications of the evidence? Would such notification by teachers be legal in the United States?

Two years ago this month, in a courtroom shared with Charles Darwin's great-great-grandson, a federal judge in Dover, Pennsylvania made minor history with major histrionics by ruling that a similar notification by teachers in a public high school was an establishment of religion by the government. Establishing a religion in the United States is easy, of course, when "religion" equals "any hint of Christianity" and anything remotely "biblical" is suspect by default. But in this case the establishment was even more egregious; it seems the offending book in question, and the notification to the students, crossed all constitutional limits by mentioning the two words that set Darwinists and the differently religious into a delirium: intelligent design.

Intelligent Design! The complainers in the Dover case feigned outrage over intelligent design even being mentioned because, in the words of one plaintiff, "it forces their children to confront challenges to their religious beliefs at school." Poor children. Fortunately for them, however, the good judge in Dover, being steeped in "Christianity equals religion" and "everything non-Christian is religiously neutral" ran to their side. Displaying little patience with the local school board's establishment of Anything-Friendly-to-Christianity, the judge set out with all his heart, soul, and strength to protect the plaintiff's tender religious beliefs instead. Reveling in the high-profile monkey-trial media circus, he clearly salivated at the chance to bash a few misguided school board members for their "breathtaking inanity". Being the scientific expert he is, perhaps along with the eye itself this supreme authority of science might next venture to explain how beams evolved in one eye and splinters in others.

Judge John E. Jones III, the disciple whom Darwin loves, has become the latest beloved of atheists everywhere who heralded his 139-pages of largely plagiarized wisdom as reason to rest, once and for all, calmly on Darwin's breast. After all, why bother defending a theory when one can coax a federal judge to decree one scientific idea (Darwinism) that supports a favored religious view (naturalism) acceptable against another scientific idea (intelligent design) that supports a disfavored view (theism)? But making white lab coats subservient to black law robes is the business of scientific cowards--mainstream origins science has become sadly dependent upon federally protected and subsidized truth. But science-by-robed-decree, whether by Papal Bull or judicial bunk, is rarely sustainable against contrary evidence. And no more evidence than the Dover trial is needed to show that defending evolution is more about religion than science.

Not only did Judge Jones ban the words "intelligent design" from the biology classroom, but he went so far as to make it a violation of the United States Constitution to make students read anything that disparages Darwinism. Our Founding Fathers would be rightly distressed to see such petty mishandling of their noble document. But Jones's circle of federal marshals protecting Darwinism from criticism may yet find a greater challenge. Jones's religiously motivated reasoning is beautifully misguided because while focusing on one book in the school's library, the ACLU-led inquisition totally overlooked another: The Book.

The Book details Darwinism with great precision but treats it as a scientific theory open to challenges, including an insistence that a conclusion that all species descended from other species be supported by a showing of exactly "how the innumerable species inhabiting this world have been modified, so as to acquire that perfection of structure and coadaptation which justly excites our admiration." Thus, The Book sets out a challenge for Darwinism to show, for example, how massive amounts of non-material information could self-assemble in increasingly complex DNA molecules by natural processes alone. To date Darwinism has no demonstrable naturalistic explanation for such self assembly, and no natural mechanisms can even theoretically do the job. The Book rightly points out that until such mechanisms can be identified, Darwin's theory can be legitimately challenged.

Among The Book's greatest attributes is its frank recognition that Darwin's theory is fairly challenged by theories of those who "believe that each being has been created as we now see it." Although such a notion is not exactly what intelligent design theorists believe (most non-materialist theories allow for change over time from original forms), the fact that The Book speaks of such a theory as a legitimate scientific challenger to Darwinism is noteworthy. In fact, The Book speaks deferentially of creationist theories, embracing thoughts of a Creator with respectful toleration. Fortunately Judge Jones is, like most Darwinists, ignorant of The Book, or else it might become unconstitutional in public schools as well.

The Book makes its strongest case against evolution by pointing out that, among the "crowd of difficulties" with Darwinism, the foremost difficulty is that the fossil record does not support Darwin's theory of gradual descent with modification. The Book asks the common sense question: "why, if species have descended from other species by fine gradations, do we not everywhere see innumerable transitional forms?" There are no unambiguous transitional forms, and few purported forms in a fossil record that should be teeming with millions upon millions of such creatures. Such knowledge is common among educated scientists, but most Darwinists treat speaking such truth as tantamount to being a knuckle-dragging, redneck creationist. Atheists in Ohio, for example, last year forced out a state science standard instructing students on the current state of the fossil record, ostensibly because letting high school students in on the "trade secret" of paleontologists establishes another government church in the classroom (in competition with their church of naturalism). But the trade secret, as arch-evolutionist Stephen J. Gould announced, remains--the fossil record does not support Darwinian gradualism. And The Book agrees.

Related to the lack of support in the fossil record for Darwin's descent with modification, The Book draws attention to the growing line of evidence that the geological record likewise contradicts Darwinism. The Book details what no public high school students will learn--that several cases are on record of the same species presenting varieties in the upper and lower parts of the same geological formation. Creationist scientists, for example, have long documented such "anomalies" in places like the Grand Canyon. Even worse for Darwin's theory, the real problem with the geological record (as The Book notes), is the sudden appearance of whole groups of species in certain formations. Put forth as a "serious difficulty" for Darwinism, The Book accurately records how species of several main divisions of the animal kingdom suddenly appear in the lowest known fossiliferious rocks, particularly the Cambrian. The entire absence of fossils beneath the Cambrian strata, The Book notes, is one reason that many eminent paleontologists such as Cuvier, Agassiz, Barrande, Pictet, Falconer, E. Forbes, etc., and all the greatest geologists, such as Lyell, Murchison, Sedgwick, etc., have "unanimously, often vehemently, maintained the immutability of species." The Book is a good book.

Like most books on Darwinism, The Book gratuitously states there is "no good reason why the views given in this volume should shock the religious feelings of any one." And if The Book were more widely read and its scientific principles more widely followed, few "religious" feelings would be touched at all, much less shocked. But here science gets interesting, because it seems there is remarkable irony in The Book's view of "religious feelings". For like the plaintiffs in Dover and the atheists in Ohio, it is today's devotees of naturalism whose religious feelings are shocked by any opposition to Darwinism, including the very challenges expressed in The Book. If Darwinists were honestly consistent they would attack The Book with great vigor. But fortunately most Darwinists, atheists, and materialists are unaware of The Book's content.

What is The Book that Darwinists don't yet know they hate? None other than Charles Darwin's own On the Origin of Species.

What wonderful, wonderful evidence of current Darwinism's scientific bankruptcy. Charles Darwin himself would be run out of Dover, Pennsylvania. Teachers in Ohio who dare teach straight out of his On the Origin of Species would be charged with a "violation of church and state", and likely fired. Professors in Iowa and Texas who freely profess to follow the evidence of design as a challenge to Darwinism face tenure denial. And one good scientist in Massachusetts who refused to take a religious oath to Darwinism was simply fired. All because Darwin, the honest scientist, has been replaced by Darwinists, fear mongering religionists who cook up religious motivation in every scientific challenge to Darwinism.

Poor Darwin. Like Christ removed from Christmas, Darwin has been removed from Darwinism. His spirit of religiosity lives, but his practice of science is dead. Icons have little hope of survival when their own fail to render honor.

Roddy Bullock, JD, BSME, is the Executive Director of the Intelligent Design Network of Ohio (www.idnetohio.com) and is the author of The Cave Painting: A Parable of Science, published by Access Research Network. Send comments to: roddybullock@idnetohio.com.

Copyright (C) 2007 Roddy M. Bullock, all rights reserved. Quotes and links permitted with attribution.

References:

For more "icons of evolution", see Jonathan Wells, Icons of Evolution: Science or Myth: Why much of what we teach about evolution is wrong (Washington D.C.: Regnery, 2002), p. 7. http://www.amazon.com/Icons-Evolution-Science-Teach-About/dp/0895262002/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1197690273&sr=1-2

Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, online here: http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?itemID=F391&viewtype=text&pageseq=1
Quoted language and cited concepts found at pages 2, 63, 133, 143, 144, 146, 150, 275, 286, 416, 422, 428, 430.

"Trade secret" quote from Stephen J. Gould, The Panda's Thumb, (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1980), p. 181. Gould states:

"The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology. The evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have data only at the tips and nodes of their branches; the rest is inference, however reasonable, not the evidence of fossils. Yet Darwin was so wedded to gradualism that he wagered his entire theory on a denial of this literal record: ". . . He who rejects these views on the nature of the geological record, will rightly reject my whole theory."

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Recently, I received and published this comment on this post about Oxford mathematician John Lennox's book, God's Undertaker, from "curwen":

As an historian, with some background in the cultural and social history of Darwinism, I'm interested in how philosophy effects scientific practice. In my search for current material on the subject, I ran across this post, and became interested in your blog.

I am interested in your opinion on this: in what ways would scientific practice change if materialism, as a philosophy of science, was eventually replaced by design? In other words, would research and experiment be structured differently? Would standards of evidence change? Does Lennox comment on this? I apologize if this is something you've already dealt with at length, so even if you responded with relevant posts that would be helpful.

I told curwen that it is an excellent question, and I'd answer it.

I am also going to ask around and post other answers.*

My area of interest is the popular culture that grows up around science (not surprising given my background as a journalist, author, and blogger), so here are my thoughts on that:

[ ... ]

2. If the hold of the materialist atheists is broken, we will see evidence restored to its rightful place as the hallmark of science. Instead of hearing empty rhetoric like "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution", we will hear "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evidence." How will this affect research? Well, for one thing, people will be able to follow the evidence without fear of losing their positions. That will - necessarily - lead to the discovery that many materialist truisms are poorly supported. Honest discussions will be possible again. I reasonably believe that advances in knowledge will result.

Note: George Hunter's Science's Blind Spot meticulously records the decline of the importance of evidence in science, as opposed to ideology. See also Evolution in the light of intelligent design for a limited list of topics on which reasonable discussion can become possible.

3. Another key change I expect is this: Promissory materialism will cease to be obligatory mental furniture - the monstrous overstuffed sofa that lurks in the picture window of the minds of most educated people today.

As a result, people who insist that

- computers are going to become conscious - soon!
- apes can write autobiographies with appropriate training
- the mind is a user illusion
- there must be aliens out there because otherwise we would be special (and we "know" we're not special)
- there is a "God spot" in the brain which explains religious convictions and experiences
- there is no free will and you are controlled by your selfish genes

will slowly cease to be treated as authorities by popular media, as they presently are. They will come to be seen for what they in fact are: Materialist cranks flogging up ideas that do not withstand scrutiny or evidence - people whose positions are largely maintained by the organized ridicule or persecution of the holders of better supported alternative positions.

4. Some unproductive projects will probably be simply abandoned. For example, origin of life research is presently handicapped by the fact that such research MEANS research on how life came about by chance. Virtually everyone I have read in the field stoutly defends the view that that is what OoL research means - and the only thing it can ever mean. They would actually regard any other conclusion as a failure - even though, as Design of Life demonstrates, their efforts have gone nowhere and come up with nothing for the better part of a century. Unable to consider the possibility that life didn't come about that way, they battle each other over theories that are probably all incorrect. I suspect that human evolution research suffers from the same problem: Researchers search for a hairy, half-conscious proto-human who may never have existed at all. But he must exist according to materialist theory, and therefore he does. And in the present state of science, materialist theory trumps honest examination of the evidence.

5. Last and best, science may be separated from religion, to the benefit of both. Much that is called "science" in the popular media is simply the metaphysics of materialist atheism, using science as stage props. We will no longer endure experts who claim to know things like "the cave man was unfaithful to his mate so he could spread his selfish genes" Oh, was he now? That expert knows what cave men did in the same way that a witch doctor knows when my ancestors are displeased with me and a local fundamentalist knows exactly what God wants me to do.

When general acceptance of the religious view that drives any form of non-evidence-based knowledge declines, it ceases to be considered knowledge. Atheistic materialism is long overdue for that.

Do you have thoughts to share? Go here to post them (in the comments box).

*Note that I am interested in hearing from people who think that design is a reasonable inference. If you don't, materialist blogs are anxious to hear from you so go there.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the forthcoming The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

It is unfortunate that Oxford mathematician John C. Lennox's book, God's Undertaker: Has Science Buried God? (Lion, 2007) has received so little attention in North America. (It originally appeared in German, later English).

Although well respected as a mathematician and a Christian apologist, Lennox, who had been an atheist in his youth, is currently best known for his debate with Richard Dawkins (More information here).

God's Undertaker is a solid contribution to the debate over design in the universe and life forms. It comes down clearly and without waffling on the side of design, but what impresses me is that Lennox manages to avoid a number of sinkholes that have engulfed many other fine contemporary minds.

Who is John C. Lennox?

John C. Lennox MA MA (Bioethics) DPhil. Ph.D. DSc.
John Lennox is Fellow in Mathematics and the Philosophy of Science at Green College, Visiting Fellow at the Mathematical Institute, and Lecturer at Wycliffe-Hall, all at the University of Oxford. He Studied at Emmanuel College, Cambridge University and was subsequently Reader in Pure Mathematics in the University of Wales at Cardiff. He has been a Senior Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the University of Wuerzburg and Freiburg im Breisgau in Germany. He has published over 70 articles in Algebra (Group Theory) and co-authored two research monographs in the Oxford Mathematical Monographs series - "The Theory of Subnormal Subgroups" (with S.E. Stonehower) 1987 and "The Theory of Infinite Soluble Groups" (with D.J.S. Robinson) 2004. He is currently particularly interested in the interface between science, philosophy and theology and lectures in Science and Religion at Oxford University.

In Christian apologetics, he is also David W. Gooding's co-author on Key Bible concepts and The Definition of Christianity.

Next: Part Two What a design argument is - and what it isn't

Parts:
Part One Introduction God's Undertaker?: Well, you know, that undertaker is 001 in the unemployment line, ... and still waiting
Part Two What a design argument is - and what it isn't
Part Three Information is the key to understanding
Part Four What, if anything, is the use of creationism? Plenty!
Part Five God's Undertaker - little known but much recommended!

With admirable clarity of thought, Lennox avoids confusing design in the universe and life forms with either creationism or Scriptural literalism. A design argument asserts that the evidence for design in the universe and life forms should be taken at face value, that is as evidence that the entities are designed. And Lennox does just that.

There are several contrary materialist positions:

1. Design is an illusion. In recent years, that has increasingly come to sound like whistling in the dark.

2. Or perhaps there are uncountable numbers of flopped universes out there and ours just happens to be unusually nice. That idea goes down well in popular culture - just think of the FILMS! It can spawn - but it is presently untestable.

3. Lastly, some argue that the question is not a proper concern of science - in common parlance, "Let's just rule it out of order, and ignore the evidence." That raises the question of what science is, if it is not an effort to learn more about the universe we live in.

But a design argument is not an argument for special creation -. the sudden appearance of multicellular life forms out of nothing. Design does not require such events and does not provide direct evidence for them either. In a designed universe such events are at least a possibility, but other inferences and evidence must establish them. The mere fact of design does not establish them.

There is much confusion on this point in North America. Many on both sides profit from the confusion. The materialist atheist benefits the most because he evades the looming falsification of his central idea - an accidental, purposeless universe - by loudly insisting that design means special creation or a universe created in six days (144 hours). Because he usually has the ear of a sympathetic media corps, he can buy a lot of time for his interpretation.

Meanwhile, the special creationist hopes that the powerful arguments for design can be co-opted as arguments for special creation. Having little incentive to help set the record straight, he doesn't.

And at the same time the Scriptural literalist - usually a young Earth creationist - is primarily interested in finding science evidence that conforms to his favoured interpretation of the words of Scripture. Actually, many people in that camp do not even like design arguments, as such because design arguments are not drawn from the Scriptures and can be advanced and defended in the absence of any scriptures.

Next: Part Three Information is the key to understanding

In the midst of all this confusion, Lennox usefully points out that the central fact about "information" - what life has and non-life doesn't - is entirely consistent with the Scriptures of the Judeao-Christian tradition.,

This key notion,. That the Creator is God the word, is reflected in the repeated phrase 'And God said [Let there be light ...]' of the Hebrew creation narrative and it is emphasized in almost all of the statements made in the Bible relative to creation. Of particular interest for our discussion is the statement, 'By faith we understand that the universe was formed by God's word, so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible.' This quotation from ancient biblical literature is remarkable in that it draws attention to a basic characteristic of information, namely that information is invisible. The carriers of information may well be visible - like paper and writing, smoke-signals, television screens or DNA - but the information itself is invisible. (p. 168, God's Undertaker)

Not only that, but information, as Lennox goes on to demonstrate, is immaterial. Example: The knowledge that the concert you hoped to attend has been cancelled due to an ice storm is immaterial. The storm is quite material, but your knowledge that the concert has been cancelled is immaterial, even though it may have been conveyed by material things.

Shades of George Gilder, actually!

What about the debate between John Lennox and key New Atheist Richard Dawkins

The John Lennox-Richard Dawkins debate, Birmingham, Alabama (October 3, 2007) was sponsored by Fixed Point. (Local details here).

Available for download here.

CD or DVD here.

Live blogged by Daniel Devine

Dawkins's view

Observations from Lennox fans...

Next: Part Four: What, if anything, is the use of creationism?

Lennox also defends creationism as a useful concept for getting people thinking in a scientific way:

" ... the rise of science would have been seriously retarded if one particular doctrine of theology, the doctrine of creation had not been present." (God's Undertaker, p.22)

Why is a doctrine of creation important? Lennox points out that it frees science from the idea that we ought to be able to deduce what is happening in the universe from fixed prior principles. If - in contradiction to such an idea - we assume that God is entitled to create what he likes (trilobites, giraffes, and whales, to name some examples), then our duty is to address what exists rather than to set rules for what can exist. Unfortunately, centuries ago, many scientists attempted to proceed by setting rules about what can exist, according to their theories. Many of their ideas were in conflict with reality, and unproductive conflicts were common.

Having taught sections of the Design or Chance? adult night school course at St. Michael's in the University of Toronto, I also have a clear sense of another issue: A doctrine of creation encourages people to believe that the universe is worth studying because it puts a limit on the things you would need to know in order to understand. For one thing, even by positing an actual beginning of time, it closes off an infinite past in which virtually anything could have, and has, happened.

Assume, for example, that our theory of the universe does not include a doctrine of creation. We might assert - as some cultures have - that the universe is supported on an infinite series of turtles who (in some greater infinity) are swimming in an endless sea. Why study it? The information gained from one turtle may be no use in interpreting another, and then - even if you could get to the end of the turtles (which you cannot, because the series is infinite) - you would then confront the endless sea. All the information you have accumulated is a mass of interesting sludge, really. The prospect of understanding the universe is actually impossible. Lennox aided my understanding of this question by noting that the Jesuit Fathers who visited the advanced kingdom of China in the early modern period had difficulty at first persuading the Chinese scholars that many features of the universe can be understood by simple equations. They had not expected to find the unverse comprehensible in that way.

So a doctrine of creation imposes limits on what we must understand in order to gain a picture of our universe. That is critical for science as we understand it. If we assume that if the Big Bang happened roughly 13.7 billion years ago (conventional dating), then anything that could not have taken place within that period by random movements alone either did not happen or happened because of exterior or prior guidance. Or something else? At any rate, we are justified in seeking an explanation.

Next: Part Five Lennox's book - little known but much recommended!

Oxford mathematician John Lennox's book God's Undertaker is an excellent introduction to the key issues in the controversy between intelligent design and unguided evolution.

Other reviews: There is a dearth of other reviews I can point to just now, apart from Colin Tudge in the Guardian, who attempts to smooth things over by declaring that Lennox shows that the materialists might not be intellectually triumphant.

No, they aren't triumphant, but the problem isn't merely that their claims are not true. The materialist currently hopes to prevail by brute force: political correctness (the last refuge of a false idea), summary dismissals of dissenters, claims that human rights are violated by dissent from materialism, et cetera.

At present, the materialist view is no longer subject to any process that takes evidence into account. Yes, the materialist's claims would fail on the evidence but ... evidence no longer matters. God's Undertaker is a welcome change from this increasingly claustrophobic environment.

Looking in the Distance blog offers some thoughts.

Return to:
Part One Introduction God's Undertaker?: Well, you know, that undertaker is 001 in the unemployment line, ... and still waiting
Part Two What a design argument is - and what it isn't
Part Three Information is the key to understanding
Part Four What, if anything, is the use of creationism? Plenty!
Part Five God's Undertaker - little known but much recommended!

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the forthcoming The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

The tyrannosaur and his buddies ain't talking, so the world's cartoonists have come up with a great many guesses.

Well, they either died this way or that way. Or maybe this way (if you are a young earth creationist)?

Or was it that they SMOKED? No! Say it's not TRUE!

Here is another series of key dinosaur extinction theories, including key theoretical concepts like downsizing and divorce woes.

Political correctness department: Here's a politically correct theory about SUVs and here's one about global warming.

Still and all ... it's coming down to a tight race, folks ... .

Note: For a serious look at extinctions, try paleontologist David Raup's excellent book, Extinction: Bad Genes or Bad Luck?

Also: A chicken discovers his dinosaur heritage and raising a baby pterosaur.

Here, US president George W. Bush is denounced for doing nothing to stop dinosaur extinctions. And just think, he had all that time, too.

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

(This was posted at Uncommon Descent.)

Since the revelations from Monday's press conference in Iowa regarding the true reason for Guillermo Gonzalez's tenure denial, I have been studying the comments of Darwinists, to this and this post. The comments intrigue me for a reason I will explain in a moment.

Some commenters are no longer with us, but they were not the ones that intrigued me.*

I've already covered Maya at 8, 10, and 12 here, arguing a case against Gonzalez, even though the substance of the story is that we now KNOW that her assertions have nothing to do with the real reason he was denied tenure.

Oh, and at 15, she asserts, "The concern is not about Gonzalez’s politics or religion but about his ability to serve as a science educator."

So ... a man can write a textbook in astronomy, as Gonzalez has done, but cannot serve as a science educator? What definition of "science" is being used here, and what is its relevance to reality?

And getawitness, at 18, then compares astronomy to Near East Studies, of all things. NES is notorious for suspicion of severe compromise due to financing from Middle Eastern interests! I won't permit a long, useless combox thread on whether or not those accusations are true; it's the comparison itself that raises an eyebrow.

Just when I thought I had heard everything, ...

For the rest, go here.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the forthcoming The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Well, the jig is up now, re the Guillermo Gonzalez case. I've just seen the whack of documents Discovery Institute is releasing. [Note link at bottom for updates. Also go here for reflections on the amazing revelations in the case.]

1. It appears that the decision had been made to turn Gonzalez down for tenure before he had actually applied for it, and the reason was his advocacy of intelligent design.

Read this story in the Des Moines Register last week by Lisa Rossi

ISU President Gregory Geoffroy said in June that Gonzalez's advocacy of the "intelligent design" concept was not a factor in the decision to turn down his request for tenure.

Geoffroy said he focused his review on Gonzalez's overall record of scientific accomplishment as an assistant professor at ISU.

and then this one, to get some idea what I mean:

The disclosure of the e-mails is contrary to what ISU officials emphasized after Gonzalez, an assistant professor in physics and astronomy, learned that his university colleagues had voted to deny his bid for tenure.

[ ... ]

In response to a question about why the influence of intelligent design in the physics and astronomy tenure decisions was not acknowledged publicly by the university earlier, McCarroll said, "I can't speak for every one of those individuals" who voted on Gonzalez's tenure.

2. The alleged tenure review was in fact a fishing expedition whose purpose was to find any grounds at all for denying tenure to a man who emerges clearly an outstanding scientist (in flat contradiction to some of President Geoffroy's other claims), and far more so than the colleagues who were doing the fishing. For example, the fact that some of his widely cited papers were cited less often than others was grounds for a focus on the less widely cited ones. The fact that he published a textbook was dinged as an unwise use of his time.
Much of the most damaging stuff won't make it to Gonzalez's Regents' appeal on a technicality, but it's now going to be out there for all to see.
Anyway, brava! to journalist Lisa Rossi for exposing the vast credibility gap between what President Geoffroy was claiming to the media and the facts of the case. When oh when will administrators learn, do NOT tell stretchers to the media.? Even journalists who support you get mad if they think you are lying. As I said, more later.

Go here for updates.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the forthcoming The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

There is nothing to fear except the persistent refusal to find out the truth, the persistent refusal to analyze the causes of happenings. -- Dorothy Thompson

Q: How many materialists does it take to change a light bulb?

A: None. Given time the light bulb will change itself.

No joke. Light from darkness, life from non-life, mind from matter; it's all a mere marvel of matter in motion. Never mind where matter came from, and no matter where mind came from, for matter-only materialists everything that is came unplanned from everything that was in a string of unguided eternal change. Magically transforming the mundane into the marvelous, it seems nothing is impossible with change--time makes light work of miracles. For the life sciences branch of materialist philosophy, Darwin's theory mandates the same explanation for all life: unguided change over time gave us eyes to close and mouths to open in the service of a dead philosophy emanating from a brain that thinks it has a mind. Who would have thought?

"Evolution" is described by those who know better as simply "change over time". And why not? After all, change over time is observable, and observable change over time is incontrovertible and uncontroversial. Observed change over time in biology works its magic by changing beak sizes among finch populations, changing antibacterial resistance among bacteria populations, changing virtually nothing of interest in fruit fly populations, all showcased as "evolution in action". But is "change over time" alone really sufficient to make life, and life more abundantly? It seems not; no unguided change agent has been observed to make anything but finches from finches, bacteria from bacteria, and legions upon legions of hapless fruit flies that cannot become something more than they are already. At best the observed change over time in the unguided forces of nature due to undirected energy acting on matter always acts in one direction: toward less order and more disorder. It seems that unguided change is more bumbler than tinkerer.

"Directional" change doesn't sound so bad. In fact it isn't bad if you aren't constrained by a philosophy that requires "directional" to mean unguided progression of matter to increasing (and increasingly) improbable complex specified order. But for materialists who depend on unguided, undirected change to produce massive amounts of the increasing improbable change theorized by Darwinism, the observed directional nature of change is a disaster. Because in nature the observed change of unguided, undirected matter always conforms to physical constraints. Under immutable physical laws the change is at best to simple order, as in crystal formation where matter is rigidly constrained by unguided atomic forces, or to random disorder, as in the diffusion of food coloring in water (which is nevertheless still simply obeying constraints of atomic forces). The disordering of matter in nature when left to undirected energy in time is so well understood that it's one of the few features of nature described by a law, and not just any law--one of the most robust laws known: First Theory of Evolution meet Second Law of Thermodynamics.

Unfortunately for truth (but fortunately for those who wish to suppress it) the Second Law of Thermodynamics, while conceptually simple, is expressed in various scientific disciplines in complex-sounding language. Setting aside strange concepts like "entropy", "Gibb's free energy" and "closed or open systems", the Second Law of Thermodynamics can be simply understood as the idea that left to the undirected forces of nature, undirected energy always expends to cause existing matter to go from a more ordered state to a less ordered state.

If you grasp the words of that last sentence, you will always and forever know why "evolution" is a dead-end theory when stated in its strong form, i.e., the massive ordering of increasingly complex information by unguided forces of nature to produce new and more complex features (like wings and eyes) in living organisms. Very simply, it is easier to make a mess than to clean up a mess; it is easier to destroy a house than build a house; and it is easier to corrupt computer software than to program computer software. And "easier" is not the real issue, the real issue is one of possibilities due to intelligent intervention--in every example above, the former condition can be effected by mindless activity but the latter must, in every case, involve a mind. Nature has no secret mind substitute.

Here's the catch missed by the evolution-is-merely-change-over-time crowd: there are two kinds of scientifically observable change: intelligently manipulated change (or guided change) and unintelligently occurring change (or unguided change). On the observable effects side, scientific evidence shows two corresponding categories: guided change results in improbable complex order (e.g., computer codes or DNA) while unguided change results in probable simple order (e.g., iron filings to a magnet or crystals) or what appears to be random disorder (e.g., bits of shattered glass or pattern of fallen leaves). Unguided changes are well-studied in nature, and in complete agreement with the Second Law of Thermodynamics they always in every observed case result in systems going from a more ordered state to a less ordered state. It is the Law.

On its face, therefore, the Second Law of Thermodynamics stands diametrically opposed to any theory, including biological evolution, that requires matter to go spontaneously unguided and undirected from a simple, random form to a more complex, specified form. The stock reply from virtually all Darwinists, invariably flashed like a fake ID to get past all but those who actually care, is that the Second Law applies only to closed systems. In our case, Darwinists say, the Second Law's tendency to prevent the incredibly improbable creations necessary for "evolution" is circumvented by including the sun's energy input in our local earth system. But as any free thinker knows (and even a few Darwinists), it is not the mere presence of raw, undirected energy in a system that matters. Even in an open system in the absence of energy direction (like the coded instructions used in photosynthesis), the raw energy of the sun must obey the Law, and the result of the sun's energy on matter will be to rot, fade, decompose, decay and otherwise destroy.

Usually Darwinists dismiss the Second Law flippantly, as if its inapplicability to evolution is hardly worth elaboration. For example, in preemiminent evolutionist Ernst Mayr's 318-page book What Evolution Is, fully one paragraph of seven lines is employed on page 8 to assure us:

"[T]here is no conflict, because the law of entropy is valid only for closed systems, whereas the evolution of a species of organisms takes place in an open system in which organisms can reduce entropy at the expense of the environment and the sun supplies a continuing input of energy."

Here Mayr flashes his fake ID, stating that the Second Law (i.e., what he calls "the law of entropy") applies only to systems closed to external sources of energy input, and our earth system has unlimited energy input from the sun. True enough, but so what? Even granting the entire universe as the "system", where's the link between massive amounts of raw supplied energy flowing in and massive amounts of law defied complexity growing out?

Other Darwinists try to make the link and inadvertently prove themselves wrong while pretending to give a scientific answer to the question. Consider Dr. Tim M. Berra, a Darwinist who in his book Evolution and the Myth of Creationism addressed "Some Creationist Claims" including the claim that "evolution violates the second law of thermodynamics". In the same book, Berra sought to refute another "creationist claim" and unwittingly showed the opposite. By showing four Corvette automobiles from different years to illustrate Darwin's descent with modification, Berra actually showed the necessity of creation by design. This show of Darwinist pretend-thought was rightly referred to by Phillip E. Johnson as "Berra's Blunder". Perhaps we now have Berra's Blunder II; clumsily brandishing his fake ID, Berra blubbers:

"These statements conveniently ignore the fact that you can get order out of disorder if you add energy. For example, an unassembled bicycle that arrives at your house in a shopping carton is in a state of disorder. You supply the energy of your muscles (which you get from food that came ultimately from sunlight) to assemble the bike. You have got order from disorder by supplying energy. The Sun is the source of energy input to the Earth's living systems and allows them to evolve."

Dr. Berra's blunder is easy to see; it doesn't take a PhD. to see that Berra's science is doctored with philosophy. Obviously, it is not raw, undirected energy from the sun that is supplied to the bicycle parts; a large dose of intelligent direction is also necessarily present. If Berra wants to use the bicycle analogy, he must explain how raw, undirected energy from the sun might combine with unguided natural processes to do anything but cause the bicycle parts to decay, rust, or otherwise deteriorate. As he has set up his illustration, Berra has succeeded in proving that an intelligent being is necessary to direct and manipulate energy to have the "change over time" of the type to result in an assembled bicycle (even if all the parts are in existence, and the energy ultimately comes from the sun). Like Berra's bicycle, living organisms also need a "maker" otherwise the component parts would simply bask in the sun until they break down into even greater and greater disorder.

Very few Darwinists think freely on this issue. But a few courageous collections of atoms like Paul Davies at least admit that simply throwing energy at the problem of the Second Law's applicability to evolution is not a solution. In his book The Fifth Miracle, The Search for the Origin of Life, Davies brandishes a custom-made fake ID as he bravely mounts a failed attempt to show how natural laws based on chance and necessity can convert raw energy into information-rich, complex, specified structures. His explanation, translated into plain language: even bumblers get lucky and as long as there are more unlucky bumblers than lucky, the Second Law is satisfied and "evolution" can happen. Good luck, ye Bumblers, this evidence-starved concept goes beyond clever pretend-think to wishful-think. Ignorance of the Law is no excuse.

Like all the rest Davies fought the law, and the law won. Simply invoking the sun into the earth's system as a cure-all for evolutionary complexity ignores the fact that raw, undirected energy is not known to be capable in itself, i.e., in the absence of a directing law or process (or person, such as Berra's bicycle maker), of providing order out of disorder, much less specified complex cellular information. The undirected energy of the sun has the opposite effect-in the absence of an imposed ordering principle (like photosynthesis), the sun's radiation tends to break down matter into less ordered states of rot and decay.

Fake ID's are only effective for those who don't know or don't care. For the rest of us, the evidence of change in nature compels a logical inference of true ID: intelligent design. Darwinist disciples of Bumbelology have yet to mount a serious explanation of how "evolution" in its strong form can happen in spite of the Second Law. That is, Darwinists have yet to propose any natural law, process, or mechanism that can explain the origin of new information-rich, specified complexity exhibited by living organisms. Appealing to the sun to explain Second-Law-defying phenomena is like assuring us that somewhere a bicycle is assembling on its own simply because the sun is shining brightly. A light bulb will sooner change itself.

Roddy Bullock, JD, BSME, is the Executive Director of the Intelligent Design Network of Ohio (www.idnetohio.com) and is the author of The Cave Painting: A Parable of Science, published by Access Research Network. Send comments to: roddybullock@idnetohio.com.

Copyright (C) 2007 Roddy M. Bullock, all rights reserved. Quotes and links permitted with attribution.

References and further notes:

Portions of this essay adapted from Roddy M. Bullock, The Cave Painting: A Parable of Science, (Access Research Network, 2006), End Note 63. Write for a free copy of the End Note to roddybullock@idnetohio.com.

Ernst Mayr, What Evolution Is (New York: Basic Books, 2001), p. 8. Note the Second Law, or thermodynamics in general, is not even mentioned in the index to Mayr's book. The only other mention of "entropy" is in the glossary in which it is evident that Mayr apparently does not even understand the concept. Entropy is defined by Mayr as "The degradation of matter and energy in the universe to an ultimate state of inert uniformity. Entropy can be reached only in a closed system" (Mayr, p. 285). The first sentence is not a definition of entropy, but it is at least an acceptable description of the effects of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and can pass for a description of "entropy" for the lay reader. However, the second sentence is simply nonsense. Entropy is a measure of something, like other measures such as temperature, weight, or distance. The second sentence is analogous to saying "Temperature can be reached only in a closed system." Mistakes are excusable, but such cursory treatment of a topic otherwise given short shrift by someone of Mayr's stature is difficult to understand.

The National Association of Biology Teachers stated in their "Statement on Teaching Evolution," as one of their "tenets of science": "Evolution does not violate the second law of thermodynamics: producing order from disorder is possible with the addition of energy, such as from the sun" (National Academy of Sciences, Teaching About Evolution, p. 127).

"Berra's Blunder II" found at Tim M. Berra, Evolution and the Myth of Creationism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), p. 126.

For a serious Darwinist perspective on the Second Law of Thermodynamics, see Paul Davies, The Fifth Miracle, The Search for the Origin of Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999), p. 52. Davies notes, for example:

"Some eminent scientists have been deeply mystified by this contradiction [i.e., natural examples of an increase in order]. The German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz, himself one of the founders of the science of thermodynamics, was one of the first to suggest that life somehow circumvents the second law. ... Eddington likewise perceived a clash between Darwinian evolution and thermodynamics, and suggested either that the former be abandoned or that an "anti-evolution principle" be set alongside it. ... Even Schroedinger had his doubts. In his book What Is Life he examined the relationship between order and disorder in conventional thermodynamics and contrasted it with life's hereditary principle of more order from order."

Davies makes a sound attempt at reconciling the Second Law with Darwinism. For a response to Davies' argument, see Roddy M. Bullock, The Cave Painting: A Parable of Science, (Access Research Network, 2006), End Note 63. For a free copy, write to Roddy M. Bullock at roddybullock@idnetohio.com.

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Reflections on key recent events: Eminent science journal advises meat puppets to get over the "image of God" rubbish

Is a giant cold spot evidence for parallel universes? Or of pop science journalism?

Wrap-up reflections on the University of Toronto intelligent design course - does there have to be a designer? That depends on where you live.

The Internet and the intelligent design controversy

The Economist on the surfboard Theory of Everything

British journalist Melanie Phillips weighs in for the ID guys

What I told the most recent batch of filmmakers shooting up Toronto about why there is an intelligent design controversy.

Why do people still take Steve Weinberg's opinions seriously?

Selfish gene? How about the selfish genius?

Antony Flew: author or puppet?

The Spiritual Brain as an audiobook: Hear a sample

How did religious affiliation become so important in politics, columnist asks

Is being bossy in your elder sister's genes? Or does she just enjoy her role?

British journalist blasts the anti-God nutters

AntiMatters reviews The Spiritual Brain

Intelligence: How much is heredity and how much is environment?

US anti-religious group loses standing to fight lawsuits

Religious freedom: Canadian broadcaster airs documentary on Falun Gong

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the forthcoming The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Apparently, Bill Dembski is taking some heat over the occasional use of some animated footage captured from the Internet that turned out to belong to Harvard:

Back in September of 2006 I announced at my blog UncommonDescent that a "breathtaking video" titled "The Inner Life of Cell" had just come out. The video was so good that I wanted to use it in some of my public presentations, but when I tried to purchase a DVD of it (I sent several emails to relevant parties), I was informed it wasn't ready. Moreover, at the time, the video did not have a voiceover explaining the biology of what was being shown.

So some people who are invested in materialism and want to put off the question of whether materialist theories can explain everything from the origin of the universe and life to the rise of consciousness - of course - want their Enron of Biology to be the issue instead.

Well, this certainly brings back memories! In the universe before the Internet, I was a permissions editor for a few years. The most important part of my job was helping to address the problem of what to do when we discovered that we did not actually have permission to use something that was already in print. That can happen much more easily than people who are not in the publishing business suppose. Some rights holders are untraceable or do not answer their mail or have unintentionally behaved in such a way as to create the impression that they do not care if their work is public domain, or otherwise behave in a confusing way. I used to spend hours putting together a single file.

Still, it wasn't a big deal. The publishers whose rights we had infringed had probably infringed ours (all unintentionally), and everyone just wanted to smooth it over correctly.

However, the Internet is a new world because anybody can publish. Stuff can easily appear without attribution and disappear without notice. I am glad I don't do that job today. Anyway, when the matter was brought to his attention today, Dembski said he would use another item.

As if keeping him from using a particular film clip is going to change the current massive direction of the evidence against random assembly and development of life.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the forthcoming The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

These entries will shortly be added to the Encyclopedia of evolution in the light of intelligent design

Appendix (human appendix) - despite it's name, no longer considered superfluous or rudimentary (Tyler)

Cambrian explosion - jellyfish in Cambrian as representatives of modern jellyfish

Compsocidae - an example of stasis. See also Stasis

Consciousness - attempts to deconstruct consciousness Douglas Hofstadter

The paradox is that materialistic science wants to be realist and to have truth as a goal, but its approach to human consciousness can only support a post-modern philosophy which emphasises the socially constructed nature of reality and substitutes relativism for truth. And, for materialists, individuals have to seek for meaning and self-worth in existential experiences (an escape from reason) because the universal acid of rationalism has completely corroded realism and truth in human psychology.

(Tyler)

Eozoon - a claimed fossil strenuously defended by the 19th century science establishment

Eozoon was not a fossil and the dissenters were correct to challenge the consensus. Clearly there are parallels with today: the role of scientific elites, the status of peer publication, the protocols required to be accepted as members of the scientific community, the way debated issues can be presented as fact to the public, the disdain shown to dissenters, the lobbying of editors to restrict access by critics of the Establishment, and the exploration of alternative ways of communicating minority views to peers and the public. This is the very human face of science. We are seeing these characteristics today in numerous areas where scientists have reached different conclusions.

(Tyler)

Evolutionary psychology - grandmothers who care

This is 'black box' biology, with natural selection being asked to do an amazing number of things in a short period of time to achieve the (relatively small) fitness benefits. It should be noted that genetic changes are not directly passed on to offspring, as in the normal portrayal of the way Darwinism works. We are dealing here with complex changes in females that marginally affect the survival of grandchildren. Additionally, one wonders how many caring grandmothers there actually were in the hypothetical social groups of early man where life expectancies were low.

Exoplanets See also Hot Jupiters

Hot Jupiters lack water (Tyler)

Jellyfish - reinforcing challenge created by Cambrian explosion

New fossils from the Middle Cambrian of Utah "have very well preserved soft tissue, which the authors interpret as evidence that representatives of modern jellyfish existed by the middle Cambrian period."

(Tyler)

Neanderthals - language and FoxP2 (Tyler)

Platypus's complex electrolocation sense evolved early.

... there are extreme constraints on time for any evolutionary story of the origin of platypuses and their electrolocation device. We appear to have a situation where intelligent design is demanded by the evidence of short timescales and the complexity of the "implausible" electrosensory system.

(Tyler)

Pycnogonids - pycnogonids (sea spiders) (Tyler)

Retraction - Homer Jacobson's retraction of 1950s origin of life quotes to prevent use by creationists.

This response recalls the Miller-Urey experiments (which are currently regarded as peripheral by most OOL researchers). The element of conjecture is apparent here also, as Jacobson can only argue that the right conditions "could have existed under early Earth conditions". The empirical support for this is highly controversial. More generally, it is worth noting that evolutionists are very reluctant to calculate probabilities - because some regard it as very high (but we don't yet know the mechanism) whereas others regard it as very very low (but think it was a lucky chance anyway). Based on what we know, the probabilities are extraordinarily low, as Koonin has demonstrated. For more on this, go here.

Jacobson is perfectly entitled to make a retraction, but the issues are not going to go away. Jacobson may gain some personal satisfaction, but the challenge of IC systems remains and the improbability of chemical evolution appears insuperable. Far better for Jacobson and those who think like him to face up to these challenges and address the data as we know it (rather than indulge in fantasies about "might well have occurred" and what conditions "could have existed").

Stasis Compsocidae as an insect example of stasis from Cretaceous era

Stasis - pycnogonids (sea spiders)

Here is yet another life form, stretching from the lower Palaeozoic to the present, that displays stasis in its morphology with relatively minor differences over time. Why is it that the dominant feature (stasis) gets so little attention, when "evolutionary history" gets so much?

(Tyler)

Teleology - "promiscuous teleology" and design inferences

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the forthcoming The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

The origin of life: Unsolved problem now shopped to off-market solutions?

The Darwinian left discovers group selection

Darwinism and popular folklore: Neanderthal man died out on account of equal opportunity?

Fred Flintstone vs. the law

He said it: Origin of Life pioneer on the challenge of origin of life research

Antony Flew: Is he too old Also, New York Times spin: Elderly ex-atheist is just senile.

Intelligence: How much is heredity and how much environment? - the Flynn effect

Books at home predict student success better than parents' education

US anti-religion group loses standing to fight lawsuits

Faking out brain injury tests - yes, it can be done

Health:

AIDS numbers downsized: a learning experience

Pudging the Truth

Grandma was right: Just eat and be thankful

Our weighty obsession - this one should be required reading for teen girls. Eating disorders very often begin with a diet.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the forthcoming The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Publisher braces for controversy as definitive book on intelligent design hits market DALLAS – November 19, 2007 – The Foundation for Thought and Ethics has just published The Design of Life. This definitive book on intelligent design (ID) comes as a shot across the bow to dogmatic defenders of Darwinian orthodoxy. Written by two key ID theorists, mathematician William Dembski and biologist Jonathan Wells, it presents the full case for intelligent design to a general audience. Critics, in dismissing The Design of Life, contend that intelligent design has collapsed in the wake of the 2005 Dover trial. Author William Dembski responded, “Those same people have been announcing intelligent design’s demise every year since 1990. Strangle it as they might, intelligent design just won’t die. The Design of Life shows why the better arguments and stronger evidence are now on the intelligent design side.”

According to FTE president Jon Buell, The Design of Life is not intended for high school students; it is aimed rather at college/university students and adults who want a clearer understanding of why a growing number of scientists doubt Darwin. “FTE enlisted William Dembski and Jonathan Wells because the public needs a book that compares the argument for design, point by point, with the argument for no-design,” noted Buell. The book covers the origin of life, origin of species, and origin of consciousness, as well as other controversial areas. “We now know so much more than Darwin did,” said author Jonathan Wells, who also wrote The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design (Regnery 2006). “Instead of just papering over more cracks, it’s time to take a fresh look. The Design of Life shows why it is no longer possible to be an intellectually fulfilled Darwinist.” The Design of Life, which goes on sale today, retails for $35. It is available through online booksellers and at a discount directly from the Foundation for Thought and Ethics at www.thedesignoflife.net.

About the Foundation for Thought and Ethics FTE is a nonprofit educational organization based in Dallas. It publishes books on topics impacting the public understanding of worldview, morality, and conscience. From its inception over 25 years ago, the organization has maintained a special interest in intelligent design, publishing books in this area and fostering dialogue about it among leading scientists, scholars, and educators. FTE’s web site is www.fteonline.com.

Posted by Denyse O'Leary 4:12 PM EST

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

A friend was kind enough to provide a transcript of a podcast of Phillip Johnson talking about the recent PBS Nova episode on the Dover Trial. The interviewer is Casey Luskin of the Discovery Institute.

Here are points I thought particularly salient:

Johnson: ... What's going on here is a process of soothing. The scientific establishment has decided that the way to get a reluctant American public to put aside their doubts and believe what they're being told in the mass media, and in the textbooks, and in the museums about evolution is absolutely true is to reassure them that it doesn't threaten [their] religion. Then after they have been talked into accepting the theory, then the types like Richard Dawkins will come out and say, "Well actually now that you've accepted it, we have to tell you that it does destroy your religion."

...

Luskin: And all this raises a question that I would be very interested in your answer in Professor Johnson, because you have followed this debate for many years. You're aware that for decades the scientific community has been issuing statements to the effect of science and religion do not conflict. They may even say they're totally different spheres that can't even conflict in principle. And yet public skepticism of evolution remains very high. What does this say to you? Why are these attempts to, as you put it, soothe religious people regarding evolution, really seems like it is failing (at least) the public that is largely religious and is still very skeptical.

Johnson: Yes, they are still very skeptical, and they don't believe the reassurances. They know in fact what's going on. The fact is that the public is not as stupid as the experts wish them to be.

Um, no.

Here's the whole of my friend's partial transcript.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the forthcoming The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

ARN correspondent

Recently, I received many posts from Darwinists (including Christian Darwinists) who protested my mentioning the fact that the recent school shooting in Finland was driven by social Darwinism. Some of them have resolved never to read my blog again as a result.

(Be still, my heart! How can I be sure they will keep their promise?) Anyway, I wrote this:

This tragedy has provoked an enormous outburst of protest from Darwinists on account of my noting that the shooter's motive was social Darwinism. On the rare occasions when a shooter's motive has been anti-abortion advocacy ( Rudolph) or fundamentalist madness ( Yates), I have NEVER been excoriated by an anti-abortionist or fundamentalist for openly discussing that fact. Indeed, these types of cases were openly discussed among Christian journalists at a number of gatherings in which I participated over the last decade, with conspicuously little defensiveness. We had long accepted that some forms of anti-abortion advocacy and fundamentalism are toxic.

So this storm of comments has been a real eye-opener for me (and I probably rejected more than I accepted, so readers never saw all the somniferous posturing I did). The storm suggests that - despite claims - Darwinists have never dealt with the legacy of social Darwinism in an emotionally healthy enough way to just put it all behind them. Now that may be because the actual worldview of Darwinism necessitates social Darwinism. Or it may be because no one has said, "let's just do it." Or someone has said that, but the troops didn't get it. It's not really my problem though.

More here.

Also, at the Hack,

Do recent studies of out of body experiences show that there is no soul?

Should evangelicals be worried about the "Spiritual Brain" book?

College no longer best place to lose your faith?

Religious freedom: Not a mere luxury, says political theorist

Theories of brain evolution: Evolving brain or revolving door

Theocracy, theocracy, a theme for thee but not for me!

Sure, I love praise from people I respect. Who doesn't?

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the forthcoming The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard and I will be on American radio host and columnist Dennis Prager's show today, at 1:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, to discuss the findings from our recently published book The Spiritual Brain (Harper One 2007). Here's the podcast.

I will also be on Radio Maria, November 8, on Culture Watch with Tony Gosgnach, from 6:05 to 7:05 p.m. Go here and click the Listen Live icon. The show will be repeated as follows:

Repeat: November 13, 11 a.m. - 12 noon
Repeat: November 15, 6:05 - 7:05 p.m.

If podcasts are available, I will link them.

P.S.: For all those whose acid comments I have rejected recently at the Post-Darwinist: Start your own blog. And yes I HAVE heard it all before. And no, it didn't get more interesting with time. That (and Access Research Network for that matter) is a news blog, not an olds blog. When I start an olds blog, I will hear you at length.

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

I just got done rejecting a large number of comments from people who claim to enjoy this blog but nonetheless consider the report last evening of the Darwinist sympathies of the Finnish school shooter to be in poor taste.

(I suppose the Finns didn't know they were supposed to suppress that part of the story, so that it would only be discovered thirty years from now by a gutsy researcher ... )

First, it's rubbish that anyone who enjoys this blog was upset. This blog has published many more pungent stories and I urge anyone who doubts that to investigate the archives. While you're there, have a look at the way in which scholar Richard Weikart found himself the target of similar attacks for his careful study of social Darwinism in From Darwin to Hitler.

Second, if people honestly think that the boy's social Darwinism played no role in his shooting spree, I assume that they also think that toxic religious beliefs play no role in Middle Eastern-directed suicide bombings.

I disagree in both cases. Beliefs have consequences. Read the rest here. (There are significant updates as well. One from the lawyer of Columbine families and another about the fact that the shooter's video is dissapearing from the 'Net. Vital sources still linked. - d.)

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the forthcoming The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

You've probably heard about all the apes who have been taught to communicate using sign language in recent years. As Mario Beauregard and I discuss in The Spiritual Brain, the discovery that American Sign Language could, in principle, be taught to apes spurred a number of interesting research projects - and some pretty unrealistic claims. In Dragons of Eden (1986), for example, Carl Sagan dreamed of a day when

Although a few years ago it would have seemed the most implausible science fiction, it does not appear to me out of the question that, after a few years in such a verbal chimpanzee community, there might emerge the memoirs of the natural history and mental life of a chimpanzee, published in English or Japanese (with perhaps an "as told to" after the byline).

What you probably DIDN'T hear much about is the mood of skepticism with which much of the science community has greeted this work in recent years - even as the apes impress hosts on national television programs.

In "Aping Language", a thoughtful article in E-Skeptic, Clive Wynne explains how that happened. Wynne certainly does not have a hitch in his craw about the concept of ape language. On the contrary, would have been pleased to discover that apes can be taught grammar. The trouble is, after the initial flurry of success stories, later, more critical research came to the conclusion that they generally can't.

Why did initial reports sound so favourable? One problem was overinterpretation. The ability to learn a large number of signs is not the same thing as the ability to learn a language whose meaning depends largely on grammar. The former achievement is sometimes found among birds as well as mammals, but the latter seems unique to humans.

The ability to string a sequence of words together does not necessarily mean awareness of grammar. The sentence "Tom shot John" does not mean the same thing as "John shot Tom," and the difference is pretty important. Overly generous assumptions were made about the extent to which apes such as Washoe and Kanzi were using grammar. When they were examined by scientists other than their trainers, they did not perform well.

Also, attuned as they were to individual signs of success, researchers were often not looking at the big picture. Reporting on how one researcher revised his thinking after closer study, Wynne notes,

Terrace now argued that Nim's use of ASL signs was quite unlike how children learn language. Nim failed to initiate conversations, he seldom introduced new vocabulary and just imitated what the humans around him said. Nim's sentences failed to grow in length. In human children there is a close relationship between the number of words known and the number of words used in a sentence. Not so in Nim. Throughout his time in the language project he stuck to using one or two words at a time. And his longer utterances were without any regard for grammatical structure. Nim's longest recorded "sentence" was give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you. Not hard to understand — but not very grammatical either.

The key difference between an ape and a child is that the child is growing in intellectual capability. The ape is not. Thus, the ape isn't under any internal pressure to expand his language competence. Once he knows how to satisfy his fairly simple needs, any pressure he experiences will come from drill by humans - at the expense, one suspects, of things he would rather be doing.

Wynne describes his own disillusion,

For a start Kanzi — like Nim before him — did not show the increase in sentence length that is typical of children learning language. In fact, at 1.15 symbols per sentence, Kanzi's average utterance is even shorter than Nim's. And it turns out that to complete many of the requests that were put to him Kanzi did not need to understand grammar. For example when Kanzi was asked to "Take the hat to the colony room" - which Kanzi did successfully - all he needed was some sense of "hat" and of "colony room."

Wynne's point is that, unlike "John shot Tom"/"Tom shot John" the command given to Kanzi is not reversible - a room cannot be taken to a hat. He concludes that, while Kanji's and his trainers' achievements are significant, as far as grammar is concerned, "on any assessment not tinted with rose-colored glasses, Kanzi just doesn't get it."

Commenting on John Berman's recent Nightline show with 26-year-old Kanzi, he quotes Berman's assessment, "Moments like this are proof that these conversations help scientists learn about apes, from the apes themselves," but says,

I don't disagree, though I fear the conclusion I draw is not the one Berman intended. Moments like this tell us that Descartes was right, there really are no beasts, no matter how fortunately circumstanced, that can make known their thoughts through language.

As I see it, the take home point is that Kanji doesn't really want anything more out of life than his limited language skills give him. That is what makes all the difference between him and a three-year-old child.

Anyway, it's good to see a magazine that bills itself as "skeptical" living up to its billing by exercising its skepticism in an area that has long been in need of it.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the forthcoming The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Semiotic 007 commented at Mike Behe and Bad Design that Christian researchers embrace atheistic notions of science simply as "the rules of the game", for getting things done. He goes on to note,

Everyone wants science to explain phenomena in natural, not supernatural, terms whenever possible. Historically, there were big problems with investigators invoking the supernatural whenever it suited them. I believe it was simply easier for Christians to join Enlightenment philosophers in cutting God out of the picture than to obtain some disciplined approach to admitting the supernatural at times and excluding it at other times.

Okay, but how come they don't see the hook sticking right out of the bait?

First, while it is true that everyone wants science to explain phenomena in natural, not supernatural terms, ... how do we know what is natural and what is supernatural? This becomes a serious question where mental phenomena are concerned.

Mario Beauregard and I discuss this in The Spiritual Brain, in connection with laboratory experiments in telekinesis:

To say that an event is “supernatural” is to say that it comes from above or outside nature.

Perhaps we should ... ask, what is the nature of nature? Can it include events that are not supernatural in the sense given above, but are also not easily accommodated by materialism?

Regarding psi, we can assume one of two things: (1) every single instance of psi is a direct interference in nature, presumably by a divine power from outside the universe; or (2) the universe permits more entanglement than the materialist paradigm does. The second assumption creates many fewer problems than the first. We do not need to assume that every time a middle-aged bus driver beats the odds in a psi experiment, the universe has been invaded from the outside, let alone that, as unidirectional skeptics have often insisted, “science” is in danger or that “religion is invading science,” or that “a new dark age” is upon us.

Research can determine the circumstances under which entanglement can occur above the quantum level, resulting in apparent action at a distance. (P. 177)

But if, of course, we "know" that materialism is true, then telekinesis is supernatural and the supernatural does not occur, therefore telekinesis does not occur - and anyone whose research shows otherwise threatens science.

The "rules of the game" are constructed primarily to defend materialism from disconfirmation!

I would be interested to hear more about the big problems with investigators who invoked the supernatural whenever it suited them. I'm more familiar with big problems when investigators leave out the reality of the mind whenever that suits them. Just one more excerpt from The Spiritual Brain:

Indeed, by the 1960s, materialism was so pervasive in medicine that Benson had a hard time persuading his colleagues that mental stress could contribute to high blood pressure. Mentors warned that he was risking his career when he began to study the physiology of meditation in an effort to understand how the mind influences the body. (233-34)

Get that? Risking his career. Where have we heard that kind of thing before?

Fortunately, the early researchers persisted, and today we have a much better understanding of the influence of mental states on health (see The Spiritual Brain Chapter 8). Nonetheless many today are busy trying to disconfirm the reality of the mind.

Semiotic 007 adds,

I am not at all saying this is the way science should be. I’m simply trying to state why many Christian researchers in fact restrict themselves to natural causation in their explanations of empirical observations.

What they have in fact chosen to do is help the materialist avoid disconfirmation by identifying as "God" or "supernatural" whatever the materialist disapproves of or fears. That includes evidence of design in nature.

I have often had frustrating conversations with Christian scientists who say things like, "Well, when you say design, you really mean God, don't you, and you can't prove God, so it's not science by definition ... " (This is usually spoken rapid fire, like a flight attendant reciting the safety exits, so I would guess it isn't a new thought that has just occurred to him.)

Whoa!

The Christian Darwinist (hereafter St. Darwin) may be absolutely convinced in the privacy of his emotional life that if it looks like design it must be God (but it can't be God and therefore it must be an illusion). But I just don't know. If we have only just begun to consider that design is definitely a part of nature, we are in no position to say things like that.

George Hunter tells me I am an empiricist, and therefore willing to live with uncertainty. (I join the other commenters from that thread in recommending Hunter's Science's Blind Spot, which I reviewed here, as indispensable for understanding St. Darwin.

Because, no sooner has St. Darwin finished reciting the litany above than he starts in with, "Look at all the evil and suffering in the world! What kind of God would be responsible for that? Evolution did that, not God!"

(At this point, I get nostalgic. I still clearly remember my five year old daughter explaining to me, thirty years ago, "I didn't do that, Mommy. My hands did it.")

Well, I would be happy to leave God out of it, but St. Darwin won't let me. He doesn't want to let me because his purpose is to prevent evidence from ever being relevant to his claims for Darwinism or for other forms of materialism. If that's playing by the rules, we need to change the rules.

Here's one rule that I want, but St. Darwin does not want: I won't mention God and neither does he.

Here is one project he doesn't want: We just look at the accumulated evidence for the history of life on this planet and ask a simple question: If Darwin's theory did not exist and was not now the subject of a huge academic industry, would anyone suppose that it explained the Cambrian explosion? The subsequent punctuated history of life? The rise of consciousness?

Darwin's theory is supported in order to prop up materialism, and otherwise has very little use.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the forthcoming The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Blogs for books at Amazon are great! I just wanted to draw your attention to Mike Behe's Edge of Evolution blog, where he tackles the problem of "evil design", in connection with the writings of Christian Darwinist Ken Miller (and all kinds of other stuff):

Behe, a fellow Catholic, has the same problem I do. One of the shell games that I had to learn to detect when I first started covering this beat, while writing By Design or by Chance?, was the "Christian evolution" demand that we "Leave God out of it!"

As in "Surely no Creator would ..." Hey, wait a minute! Weren't we supposed to leave God ... out ... of ... ?

Well, it turned out that you could drag God into it, as long as you were saying that he isn't responsible for the way things are. It all just sort of happened, see. Nonetheless, he is the Lord of Creation?

Shell game city.

Anyway, Behe says,

So, how to respond to such a position? The first thing to say is that it’s very hard to see how the Miller/Ayala position gets God off the hook. The “byproducts of a fruitful and creative [Darwinian] natural world” that Miller alludes to are not simply byproducts — they are deadly, dangerous, vicious byproducts. No matter if malaria were designed directly by God or indirectly by a sloppy process He put in motion, many children of mothers in malarious regions of Africa are going to be just as dead. There is going to be as much suffering in the world one way as the other.

Which reminds me: Until I had read Science's Blind Spot, I didn't really "get" the point of view of the "Christian Darwinists." Why would Christians, of all people, claim that there is absolutely no evidence for design in nature? So people should believe in God without any evidence at all? Hunter makes a persuasive case that such people are mainly interested in getting God of the hook for whatever is wrong with the world. As if.

I figure God can take care of himself.

By the way, also check out our great author blog at The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper One 2007) where we put up links to multimedia resources around the book.

Also: The lazy paddlefish could have hands, feet - but never got round to it?

Philosopher thinks that polytheism would be an improvement! Really! (You heard it here last, okay?)

Book explains mind as evolved meat. But not really.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the just published The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

Here follows a list of podcasts on various topics by persons of interest to the intelligent design controversy. These will be added to the Encyclopedia of Evolution in the Light of Intelligent Design

Aldini, Giovanni, and virulent materialism, with John West (podcast)

Allegory of the Cave SciPhiShow with Jason Rennie (podcast)

analogies interview with Jay Richards on analogies in science (podcast)

antibiotic resistance - problems for evolution theory (animation)

astronomy and intelligent design interview with Guillermo Gonzalez, (podcast)

Campagna, Joey C., Intelligent design - research Wiki Web site for research (podcast)

Canada - intelligent design controversy in Canada - Cultural differences between Canada and the United States, interview with Denyse O'Leary (podcast)

Chambers, Scott, "Cosmological Fine-Tuning and the Multiverse Model" interview (podcast)

Ciencia Alternativa - intelligent design interview with Mario Lopez (podcast)

cosmological fine tuning "Cosmological Fine-Tuning and the Multiverse Model", interview by Casey Luskin with Scott Chambers (podcast)

Cypher's choice Jason Rennie explains the Matrix crux (podcast)

Darwinbots Denyse O'Leary vs. the Darwinbots (podcast)

Darwin Day in America - West, John, on Darwin Day in America (podcast) John West reads from his book Darwin Day in America (podcast)

Darwinism moral relativism and Darwinism John West (podcast)

Darwinism, Judaism, and Christianity with Jonathan Rosenblum (podcast)

Dawkins, Richard, information challenge Casey Luskin's response (podcast)

Dembski, William, on intelligent design and the church, in conversation with Russell Moore (podcast)

Descartes's demon SciPhiShow with Jason Rennie (podcast)

design - unintelligent design - A discussion between Sheirdan Voysey (host), Robyn Williams, and Denyse O'Leary (science journalists) (podcast)

Doan, Andy, interviewed by Jason Rennie, "Miracles and the Q" (podcast)

Dover case (US) Montana Law review articles (podcast)

Evolutionary Informatics Lab Robert Marks's explanation (podcast)

Evolutionary Informatics Lab and Banned Items (podcast)

Evolutionary Informatics Lab - Web site suppressed at Baylor Report by Anika Smith (podcast)

Evolutionary Informatics Lab See also Marks, Robert

Expelled movie, with Ben Stein - interview with Bruce Chapman (video podcast)

Explore Evolution information, textbook (podcast)

falsifiability - intelligent design and falsifiability interview with Jay Richards (podcast)

fine tuning of the universe Discovery Institute's Casey Luskin discusses Newsweek's Sharon Begley's take on fine-tuning (podcast)

Foundation for Thought and Ethics Dover Trial (podcast) Casey Luskin and Seth Cooper ask, was justice done?

fine tuning of the universe "Cosmological Fine-Tuning and the Multiverse Model", interview by Casey Luskin with Scott Chambers (podcast)

fine tuning of the universe - Casey Luskin on Newsweek article by Sharon Begley (podcast)

Gilder, George, on information theory, at Bar-Ilan University (podcast)

Gnosticism Ben Witherington III interviewed by Jason Rennie of the SciPhiShow, on Gnosticism and Christianity (podcast)

Gnosticism Edwin Yamauchi interviewed by Jason Rennie of the SciPhiShow, on who Gnostics were and what they believed (podcast)

Gonzalez, Guillermo, interview on the Privileged Planet hypothesis (podcast)

Gonzalez, Guillermo, astronomy and intelligent design interview with Guillermo Gonzalez, (podcast)

Gonzalez, Guillermo - denied tenure - documents, interview with John West (podcast)

Gonzalez, Guillermo - denied tenure - tenure appeal (podcast)

Haeckel's embryos - use in textbooks, interview with Casey Luskin (podcast)

homology - intelligent design and homology (video podcast)

Hunter, George Cornelius - interview on his recent book, Science's Blind Spot (podcast)

information theory - George Gilder at Bar-Ilan University (podcast)

intelligent design - definitions, Crowther, Robert: "Defining what intelligent design is" (podcast)

intelligent design - definitions, Luskin, Casey: "Confronting misrepresentative definitions of intelligent design" (podcast)

ntelligent design - falsifiability interview with Jay Richards (podcast)

intelligent design - origin of term by Rob Crowther (podcast)

intelligent design - research Wiki Web site for research (podcast)

Jensen, Lyle, neo-Darwiism skeptic (podcast)

Keller, Rebecca, on "Real Science for Kids" (podcast)

magic - SciPhiSHow with Jason Rennie, on science, rreligion, magic, and technology (podcast)

Marks, Robert - Evolutionary Informatics Lab Web site suppressed at Baylor Report by Anika Smith (podcast)

Matrix SciPhiShow with Jason Rennie (podcast)

mind - mind as illusion - Is the mind just an illusion. Anika Smith interviews Denyse O'Leary (podcast)

miracles, Doan, Andy, "Miracles and the Q" (podcast)

moral relativism moral relativism and Darwinism John West (podcast)

multiverse "Cosmological Fine-Tuning and the Multiverse Model", interview by Casey Luskin with Scott Chambers (podcast)

privileged planet hypothesis interview with Guillermo Gonzalez, on the Privileged Planet hypothesis (podcast)

Real Science for Kids - Keller, Rebecca, on "Real Science for Kids" (podcast)

Rosenblum, Jonathan, interview on Deniuable Darwin (podcast)

science journals - double standard re intelligent design interview with Paul Nelson re Michael Behe's work (podcast)

Von Baer's law - interview with Paul Nelson (podcast)

Wels, Jonathan, an interview with Doug Giles at AudioClash on his book, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design (podcast)

West, John, Darwinism moral relativism and Darwinism John West (podcast)

West, John, on Darwin Day in America (podcast)

Following up on Grant Sewell's interesting discussion of consciousness as a hard problem for Darwinism, and my response:

In "Brave Newark World", law prof and columnist Mike S. Adams exposes an Orwellian world of reprogramming inside the dorms at the University of Delaware:

Presently, students are actually pressured or even required to take actions that outwardly indicate agreement with the university's official ideology, regardless of their beliefs as individuals. Such actions include displaying specific door decorations and committing to reduce their ecological footprint by at least 20% and fighting for "oppressed social groups." (There is no indication that one of these groups is made up of University of Delaware residents who are oppressed by RAs who can't stop asking "how do you feel?").

In the Office of Residence Life's internal materials, these programs are described using a chilling language of ideological re-education. In a manual relating to the assessment of student learning the residence hall lesson plans are actually referred to as "treatments."

I wrote a letter to Adams because, while I greatly respect the work of groups like The Fire in fighting intellectual oppression, I also think that a critical dimension is missing - the role that materialism inevitably plays in producing the Orwellian conditions is too often ignored:

Dear Dr. Adams,

Thank you for your continuing campaign to expose thought control and brainwashing. I try never to miss one of your excellent and eye-opening articles.

I believe that a good case can be made for the origin of brainwashing in materialist theories of mind.

Let me ask you this: If the university bigwigs believe that the mind is simply the accidental buzz of electrons produced by the activities of the brain (and that is a STANDARD belief among materialists), then why SHOULD they respect their students' minds?

Of course they attempt instead to direct the meaningless buzz down the desired path - for the same reason as you would wire your house's electricity in a way that suits your purposes.

A person who believes in the reality of the mind may be willing to die for intellectual freedom, but why should a person who does not believe in the reality of the mind suffer anything AT ALL for intellectual freedom?

That is why so few speak out against the abuses today, surely?

Here is the strange part: Contrary to the PR for materialism that you hear from pop science mags, the news from science does NOT support the materialist view of the mind. Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard and I demonstrate that in our book, The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul.

It surprises me that people do not see more clearly that an inevitable outcome of materialist views is loss of respect for intellectual freedom.

In a materialist framework, the primary problem is not that there is no God but that there is no you in you and no me in me. So the university sees nothing wrong with training its students the way we train a dog - not to be a nuisance to himself or his masters.

To summarize, materialism cannot ground intellectual freedom EXCEPT as a form of mere licence. The right to have ideas other than those approved by the administration is like the right to do dope or pack heat on campus - subject to control or prohibition if things get "out of hand", in the view of the controllers. And in their view, it always does seem to get out of hand ...

Also:

Whatever are the new atheists thinking of?, a friend asks

Physician and essayist, though not a believer, has little time for the recent spate of pop atheist works

The philosopher and his mother: A moral tale

Spirituality and the letters of the law

Neurolaw: Your brain is your best defence ... literally!

Non-materialist vs. materialist neuroscience - the crucial difference

The living being is only a species of the dead, and a very rare species.
--Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science

Materialist thinking is to life as a microscope is to music. Regardless the precision, no amount of peering through the cold lens of materialism can hear the orchestrated mystery of life. Even in view of miraculous molecular machinery, the dead-matter orthodoxy of materialists has no category of thought for understanding the non-material essence of life, a fatal handicap for both thinker and thought. Like trying to weigh beauty or smell colors, a life science wed to the no-God-exists faith of matter-only materialism is a tool not fit for its object. How odd that the object would select such a tool.

Materialist thinkers, those for whom matter is all and all that matters, find their greatest challenge in the life sciences because life as they know it defies explanation by science as they define it. For materialists the terms "life" and "science" together create something of an oxymoron; the breadth of the latter being insufficient and contrary to the breath of the former. Life in all its dimensions eludes all categories of thought in the brains of Flatlanders for whom thought itself is an illusion of matter accidentally formed just so. But life, if it matters, must be more than matter. Otherwise, Nietzsche is right--life is nothing more than a subset of meaningless material agglomerations, just another "species of the dead" cluttering up a purposeless universe.

Not surprisingly, then, life does not fare well in the hands of materialists. For starters (all irony aside), materialists have absolutely no explanation for how life may have originated in the first place. Darwin's theory assumes an already living "starter" organism being in place to kick off the amazing unguided, purposeless specified complexity machine. As for the origin of that first lucky life Darwin left his faithful with a gaping hole to be filled, a hole plugged for now with an old and faded IOU, one of materialism's many "promise of the gaps" answers to a plethora of evidentiary problems. To date, materialist mavens have succeeded only in showing endless tolerance for strange, unprovable ideas about alien space travel, "multi-verses" and other theories for which there is absolutely no evidence.

"Chance, luck, coincidence, miracle." With these words hotshot materialist Richard Dawkins opens Chapter 6 of The Blind Watchmaker entitled, "Origins and Miracles." Dawkins, the atheist and Darwinist who never met an evolutionary impasse from which he couldn't imagine an escape, struggles to imagine a life-less origin of life short of a miracle. Others such as Francis Crick, materialist rock star and the co-discoverer of DNA's double helix, speculated (seriously) that life on earth may have been spread from intelligent life forms in other areas of the universe using space travel technology. Still others, like materialist physist Paul Davies, more realistic but no more enlightened, admit that known laws of physics are not sufficient for origin of life, and states: "Real progress with the mystery of biogenesis will be made, I believe, not through exotic chemistry, but from something conceptually new."

Conceptually new and materialistic? Don't hold your breath. But speaking of conception, once life is whispered into day materialists show themselves willing to reduce the clutter of the universe by removing the most unwanted when the most unable to object. Consider Margaret Sanger, atheist (as materialists must be), humanist (as most materialists choose to be), and founder of Planned Parenthood (despite which today's materialists came to be). Honored by atheists in 1957 as Humanist of the Year, Sanger was an ardent, self-confessed eugenicist, with a goal of turning birth control organizations into a tool for eugenics, including advocating mass sterilization of so-called defectives. Sanger called for the elimination of "human weeds" by extermination, for the segregation of "morons, misfits, and the maladjusted", and for the sterilization of the "genetically inferior races". Eliminating races without faces proved to be her lasting legacy, and today Planned Parenthood stands as the materialist's premiere cultural achievement against life, an organization more accurately called Un-planned, Un-parenthood.

Once out of the womb, life continues the day at risk in the hands of materialists. Consider the present tense version of past tense Sanger: Peter Singer. Also honored by atheists as 2004 Australian Humanist of the Year, Princeton University's professor of bioethic's views are so extreme that even some timid humanists reject his ideas as inhumane. Singer's published ideas include his opinion that the natural world has no intrinsic value, and that "killing a newborn baby is never equivalent to killing a person, that is, a being who wants to go on living." Not a fetus, mind you, but a newborn baby. Inhumane? Yes. Extreme? No. Materialism's anchorless ethic knows no extremes. (What might "extreme" be compared to, and who says?) Peter Singer is simply consistent in applying his materialist philosophy of life to utilitarian ends. His applied philosophy, however, is rightly criticized as utilitarian for whom? When life holds no intrinsic value, of two "whoms" only the one with the greater power "to go on living" decides.

Because deciding who gets to "go on living" whether in the womb or out makes for a hard day, materialists of the past hit on a better way: stop entire lines of life before the womb. With the formation of the American Breeders Association in the early 20th century, the American eugenics movement was born (not to be confused with the German version of the time) and materialists set out to implement selective breeding of superior human life-stock. What could be more wonderful than the combination of modern Darwinian science blended with ancient human tendencies to eliminate the biological threat of "inferior types"? Using state fair displays and classroom fare essays, scientists sought to warn all that "some Americans are born to be a burden to the rest." Clearly the breeding of inferior persons must be controlled, and forced sterilizations seemed not only logical, but necessary. Such thinking helped make everything black and white.

Life also ends the day perilously with materialists. Euthanasia lurks like a tempting mistress to those who find the old, the ill, or the simply annoying an inconvenient burden. No doubt there exist situations in which "mercy" might be linked with "killing", but when life is emptied of any non-material special status, what reason is there not to substitute "convenience" for "mercy"? Indeed, Richard Dawkins recently linked the actions of Hitler, Mussilini, and others to materialist thinking, admitting in an interview, "No decent person wants to live in a society that works according to Darwinian laws . . . . A Darwinian society would be a fascist state." Indeed. Which is why Darwinism must be challenged; fascism is nothing less than Darwinism taken seriously.

True materialists have little patience for the hedging of atheistic ideologues behind the Hippocritic Oath of the Humanist Manifesto--that atheists will "affirm life rather than deny it." "Affirming life" can have no more meaning for materialists than "affirming wind" or "affirming fire". "Life" is just a term we use to describe one form of ultimately meaningless matter, and affirming it when it suits us or extinguishing it when convenient is only natural. Reality forces the baseless ideals of humanists to yield to the base ideas of humans when one life wants to live more than another, or when one life becomes inconvenient for another, or when one life simply believes itself to be superior to another. For materialists with ungrounded ethics, no amount of noble niceties can displace the ignoble vices of selfish desire inherent in human beings. Selfishness is an intellectual pursuit, not the stuff of mindless genes, and selfish desire in mindful people is behind each of materialisms bright ideas: abortion, eugenic racism, and euthanasia.

Life is special, but materialists have no explanation as to why. As materialist Paul Davies says: "To be sure, molecular biology has scored some dazzling successes, but scientists still can't quite put their finger on exactly what it is that separates a living organism from other types of physical objects." Exactly. And they never will. Because life is not another "type of physical object" any more than big band music is "another type" of still life. Until materialists decide to overcome their self-imposed deafness, they may see the band, but they will surely miss the dance.

Roddy Bullock, JD, BSME, is the Executive Director of the Intelligent Design Network of Ohio (www.idnetohio.com) and is the author of The Cave Painting: A Parable of Science, published by Access Research Network. Send comments to: roddybullock@idnetohio.com.

Copyright (C) 2007 Roddy M. Bullock, all rights reserved. Quotes and links permitted with attribution.

References:

Nietzsche quote: http://www.philosophersnet.com/quotations/keyword_search.php?keyword=life&num=10

Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1996), p. 139.

Information on Margaret Sanger: http://www.christianworldviewnetwork.com/article.php/939/David_Noebel

Some quotes on Margaret Sanger from: George Grant, Grand Illusions: The Legacy of Planned Parenthood (Franklin, TN: Adroit Press, 1992).

Some quotes on Margaret Sanger from: Edwin Black, War Against The Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign To Create A Master Race (New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 2004), 127.

Jenny Teichman, "The False Philosophy of Peter Singer", The New Criterion Online http://64.233.169.104/search?q=cache:l8mCuB1GcQQJ:newcriterion.com:81/archive/11/apr93/jenny.htm+peter+singer+humanist&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=6&gl=us

On Peter Singer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Singer#Abortion.2C_euthanasia_and_infanticide

From Peter Singer's website (note logical inconsistencies due to moral relativism):

Q. What about a normal baby? Doesn't your theory of personhood imply that parents can kill a healthy, normal baby that they do not want, because it has no sense of the future?

A. Most parents, fortunately, love their children and would be horrified by the idea of killing it. And that's a good thing, of course. We want to encourage parents to care for their children, and help them to do so. Moreover, although a normal newborn baby has no sense of the future, and therefore is not a person, that does not mean that it is all right to kill such a baby. It only means that the wrong done to the infant is not as great as the wrong that would be done to a person who was killed. But in our society there are many couples who would be very happy to love and care for that child. Hence even if the parents do not want their own child, it would be wrong to kill it.

From the Dolan DNA Learning Center, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory: http://www.eugenicsarchive.org/eugenics/list3.pl

Dawkins interview quote: Austrian newspaper, Die Presse (July 30, 2005).

Paul Davies quotes from Paul Davies, The Fifth Miracle, The Search for the Origin of Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999).

In a recent column, Marvin Olasky observes

New York Times columnist John Tierney recently offered a materialist version of "intelligent design": All of us are actually characters in a computer simulation devised by some technologically advanced future civilization.

Fanciful to the extreme, sure, but the growing number of such theories -- life comes from the past (Mars, when it was theoretically livable) or future (Tierney) -- is one more indication that Darwinism no longer satisfies. Reporters pretending to referee the origin debate used to have it easy: slick evolutionists vs. hick creationists, progress vs. regress. Now, Darwinism is looking fuddy-duddy, and sophisticated critiques of it are becoming more diverse.

I interviewed Michael Behe, author of "Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution" and a new book, "The Edge of Evolution": The Search for the Limits of Darwinism." This Lehigh University biology professor points out that "Darwin and his contemporaries knew very little about the cell, which is the foundation of life. Microscopes of that era were too crude to see many critical details. So 19th-century scientists thought the cell was simple protoplasm, like a piece of microscopic Jell-O."

Read more here.

My sense is that Olasky is right. Darwinism is the last attempt to find a mechanism that explains everything in a world that is fundamentally governed by relationship. Quantum mechanics should have made that clear. Slow learners, these Darwinists.

Also:

Behecula strikes! Like, it's getting near Hallowe'en, and intelligent design still lives, right?

Will Florida help create a bigger audience for intelligent design?

How drunken bats get sober - Straight from the lab to your door just when you need it.

David Warren on Darwin as a member of a new priesthood

Neurolaw? Your brain is your best defense ... literally!

Spirituality and the letters of the law - a secular Jew tries living by the Bible ...

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Last Saturday afternoon, I was working quietly in my office, when the phone rang. I recognized the number of course (416 367-2000) - the Toronto Star has had that number about as long as I can remember. A reporter wanted to know what Christians were planning to do to celebrate October 23.

October 23? Well, in my tradition, that's the feast of the saintly John Capistrano, but I don’t expect everyone to know. I didn’t myself, until I looked it up.

It turned out that the reporter had learned that a 17th century Irish archbishop Ussher had methodically dated the origin of the world to this date about six thousand years ago. And, given that I was a "fundamentalist author", he was sure I could tell him about the big celebrations to be expected today.

I pointed out, of course, that describing me as a fundamentalist author was the Toronto Star's mistake in the first place. Repetition, even into millions of copies, does not turn a Catholic into a fundamentalist, or a person who thinks the Earth is billions of years old into someone who thinks it is thousands of years old.. No matter. To the best of my knowledge, young earth creationists (the accurate term for people who think that the earth is only thousands, not billions of years old) do not treat Ussher's chronology as a form of prophecy. (Ussher wrote before modern geology had contributed much to a discussion of the age of the Earth. He relied on genealogy, not geology, to work out his figures but Biblical genealogies probably feature gaps. As I pointed out in By Design or by Chance?, the serious young earthers use geology and paleontology now.

Anyway, I pointed out that Orthodox Jews (not Christians) use a dating system based on the assumption that the Earth is only about 6000 years old. In that case, today is 11 Cheshvan 5768. Why not research that? I suggested. I wonder what he eventually did ...

But you know, his idea is a good one in principle .... Happy Creation to all of you out there! Glad you're here!

Make combox morons reveal their identity, American radio host and columnist Dennis Prager recommends

The links are now up for my U of T Design or Chance: Session One: One universe or many?

Also: Here's the link to the show about the Expelled movie.

From The Mindful Hack:

The crucial difference between materialist and non-materialist neuroscience

Great review of The Spiritual Brain in Quill & Quire

Atheist indoctrination requires discrediting free will

Is free won’t one of the keys to free will?

Mindful meditation catches on in workplace - beaded hippies nowhere in sight

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the forthcoming The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Last Saturday afternoon, I was working quietly in my office, when the phone rang. I recognized the number of course (416 367-2000) - the Toronto Star has had that number about as long as I can remember. A reporter wanted to know what Christians were planning to do to celebrate October 23.

October 23? Well, in my tradition, that's the feast of the saintly John Capistrano, but I don’t expect everyone to know. I didn’t myself, until I looked it up.

It turned out that the reporter had learned that a 17th century Irish archbishop Ussher had methodically dated the origin of the world to this date about six thousand years ago. And, given that I was a "fundamentalist author", he was sure I could tell him about the big celebrations to be expected today.

I pointed out, of course, that describing me as a fundamentalist author was the Toronto Star's mistake in the first place. Repetition, even into millions of copies, does not turn a Catholic into a fundamentalist, or a person who thinks the Earth is billions of years old into someone who thinks it is thousands of years old.. No matter. To the best of my knowledge, young earth creationists (the accurate term for people who think that the earth is only thousands, not billions of years old) do not treat Ussher's chronology as a form of prophecy. (Ussher wrote before modern geology had contributed much to a discussion of the age of the Earth. He relied on genealogy, not geology, to work out his figures but Biblical genealogies probably feature gaps. As I pointed out in By Design or by Chance?, the serious young earthers use geology and paleontology now.

Anyway, I pointed out that Orthodox Jews (not Christians) use a dating system based on the assumption that the Earth is only about 6000 years old. In that case, today is 11 Cheshvan 5768. Why not research that? I suggested. I wonder what he eventually did ...

But you know, his idea is a good one in principle .... Happy Creation to all of you out there! Glad you're here!

Make combox morons reveal their identity, American radio host and columnist Dennis Prager recommends

Also: Here's the link to the show about the Expelled movie.

From The Mindful Hack:

The crucial difference between materialist and non-materialist neuroscience

Great review of The Spiritual Brain in Quill & Quire

Atheist indoctrination requires discrediting free will

Is free won’t one of the keys to free will?

Mindful meditation catches on in workplace - beaded hippies nowhere in sight

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the forthcoming The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Watson is currently suspended from chancelor duties.

Watson's own institute has itself been linked to historical Darwinian racism, even though it dutifully denounced him.

Also, here's a spoof interview from The Brites on the reaction of a paragon of political correctness, trying to hold together Darwinism and egalitarianism. (Of COURSE it doesn't work. As I point out here, you can't have both Darwinism and egalitarianism. The only possible result is PC idiocy.)

More seriously, a friend offers some brief extracts from Watson's book DNA:

"Our discovery had put an end to a debate as old as the human species: Does life have some magical, mystical essence, or is it, like any chemical reaction carried out in a science class, the product of normal physical and chemical processes? Is there something divine at the heart of a cell that brings it to life? The double helix answered that question with a definitive No" (xii).

No?

"Only with the discovery of the double helix and the ensuing genetic revolution have we had grounds for thinking that the powers held traditionally to be the exclusive property of the gods might one day be ours. Life, we now know, is nothing but a vast array of coordinated chemical reactions. The 'secret' to that coordination is the breathtakingly complex set of instructions inscribed, again chemically, in our DNA" (396).

One of the most innovative scientists I know has strictly cautioned me against any kind of "nothing buttery" as observed above.
Watson is nonetheless generous, after his fashion:

I do not dispute the right of individuals to look to religion for a private moral compass, but I do object to the assumption of too many religious people that atheists live in a moral vacuum. Those of us who feel no need for a moral code written down in an ancient tome have, in my opinion, recourse to an innate moral intuition long ago shaped by natural selection promoting social cohesion in groups of our ancestors.

But, unbelievers that we are, Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard and I doubt that any such "innate moral intuition" can be created by the magic of natural selection. The moral intuition of relatedness come rather from the relationship between our limited minds and the mind that created the universe in which we live

Oh, well, it is obvious that Watson is not a corner stool at our local coffee klatsch. He doesn't even like Gattaca, whose limitations I concede myself - but he dislikes it for entirely different* reasons:

In addition to laying out a misleadingly dismal vision of our future within the film itself, the creators of Gattaca concocted a promotional tag line aimed at the deepest prejudices against genetic knowledge: "There is no gene for the human spirit." It remains a dangerous blind spot in our society that so many wish this were so. If the truth revealed by DNA could be accepted without fear, we should not despair for those who follow us. [p 405]

Well, it's just true. There is NO gene for the human spirit. That doesn't mean that science could never discover anything about the human spirit. It means that looking for a God gene (God spot, God module) that creates it is a waste of time.

*I didn't believe that a guy could fake out the fitness tests with a diseased heart. Didn't sound right.

Also:

The US government did NOT falsify accepted age of Grand Canyon

Neanderthal guy was one of us (but still won't use underarm deodorant)

Key atheist argument a shell game?

Another novelist overcomes stroke, produces new book

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the just-published The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

According to the Guardian, following the row that erupted over his characterization of people of African origin as less intelligent (whatever that means, given that no one has ever defined “intelligence” in an empirically meaningful way), DNA pioneer Watson has backed off:

Prof Watson's statement did not clarify what his views on the issue of race and intelligence are, but he hinted that he had been misquoted.

I somehow doubt that. According to the Independent, Watson's own institute has apparently disowned his comments:

"Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory does not engage in any research that could even form the basis of the statements attributed to Dr Watson," the institute's president, Bruce Stillman, said. Dr Watson's comments were entirely his own and "in no way reflect the mission, goals, or principles of [the laboratory's] board, administration or faculty".
Similar condemnation followed from other parts of the US scientific establishment, where the incendiary issue of race and science is intimately bound up in the history of slavery and segregation. "We have enough problems in this country without Nobel laureate American scientists pontificating in error about fields of science outside their own expertise," said the editor of ScienceWeek, Dan Agin, "especially when the issues are vital to public policy and when what they say rips the American social fabric into pieces."

His institute would not have reacted so rapidly if there was much chance he had been misquoted.

In my view, Watson's capitulation illustrates the power of political correctness in our society. Whether PC happens to be fronting something true, false, or nonsensical, it is the new Inquisition. (Yes, of course, PC might happen to be fronting something true, as it is in this case - remember, a stopped clock, even one that stopped back in the 1970s, is right twice a day.)

Here are some comments from friends:

One friend suggests that Watson is behaving like a true Darwinian fundamentalist in that he assumes that if some situation is believed to be true today, it MUST HAVE come about because of natural selection. Thus, anecdote becomes fact, and the newly created "fact" becomes "evidence" for evolution, and ... well then whatever he believes is incontrovertible.

Another friend note that, while Darwinism does not necessarily imply racism, the alleged inequality of races was offered as EVIDENCE for Darwinian evolution in the nineteenth century.

A third notes that if a collection of Watson's goofy remarks were published, it would be a long book. And perhaps it will find a publisher, too.

Also: Decline of materialist TV? Well, Hugh Hewitt thinks it's on the way out; be still, my heart.

Mathematics and Darwinism: Buddhist says no dice

A Canadian high school philosophy teacher tackles Dawkins for the kids

Fun: Some of Murphy's lesser known laws ...

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the just published The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

I'd been hoping Scott Adams, Dilbert's alter ego, would incorporate his recent questions about Darwinian evolution into some of his work. Here is one example to enjoy.

Also, go here for a link to Adams's responses to the Prophet of the Pharyngula, who has denounced him as a sinner for having any questions about Darwinism. Oh and here is a link to Dilbert, the baby engineer.

Also:

More from David Warren on the Darwinoids

New cartoon on the ID-Darwinism controversy, and a link to more cartoons

Can a conscious mind be built out of software?

Why ordinary people do very bad things

The course Denyse O’Leary will be teaching at St. Mikes at the University of Toronto, starting Tuesday, on why there is an intelligent design controversy.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the just-published The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

So ... now, James Watson, who has declared that (Darwinian) evolution is both a law and a fact, has since proclaimed,

... black people were less intelligent than white people and the idea that "equal powers of reason" were shared across racial groups was a delusion.

And this hard on the heels of Richard Dawkins* spilling on about the "fantastic success" of the "Jewish lobby."

Some people wonder what is happening. Bill Dembski was wondering whether Darwinists would get back into the eugenics business big time. Having watched H.L. Mencken-style Social Darwinism morph into sociobiology and then get rebranded as evolutionary psychology, I have some idea what's driving the trend: power

Once people gain the right to simply ban opposing ideas, they can afford to be more up front about what they really think.

By the way, in case anyone wonders about whether evolutionary psychology is simply rebranded sociobiology, well, Dawkins apparently said that himself, as I noted in By Design or by Chance?.

What we sometimes miss is the underlying reason why Darwinists behave this way. If you believe that human beings have minds that are made in the image of - or are a local image of - a divine mind or cosmic law, then the reason why racism is wrong is obvious: Race relates to externals, not eternals. Yes, some people will believe that and still be racists. But here's the difference: to the extent that theists are racists, they are wrong. I don't mean politically incorrect or contrary to the pieties of liberalism. I mean wrong about the very nature of our universe.

They are wrong even though some qualities are distributed unevenly across ethnic groups. Body type, for example, plays a key role in determining the competitive sports in which one might excel professionally, and we get our body type mostly from our forebears. But none of that speaks to the value of a human being, only to how he might best use his time.

But what if you are, as most committed Darwinists are, a materialist? Then a human being is simply a meat puppet. At that point, distinctions that would be discounted in the light of eternity actually determine a person's value. Or else he has no value, in which case ...

Of course, decent people won't just accept that. No, instead, they pass dozens or thousands of political correctness rules against taking the inevitable consequences of Darwinism and materialism seriously. And they flirt with thwarting their self-imposed rules. Or else they concoct grand, improbable schemes like this one and this one, to dispense with nature altogether. But that is all they can do, and in the long run, it leads to absurdities.

Legitimized racism is an inevitable consequence of materialism, and I expect the Darwinists know that as well as anyone else. I suppose at this point their social policy arm (liberalism, in its current form) had better start drafting a whole bunch more daft political correctness rules. It's either that or eugenics.

*Note: I think what upset people about Dawkins's comments is the assumption that there is something unusual about a successful Jewish lobby in Washington. There had better be a successful Jewish lobby in Washington, let me tell you. Any interest group that doesn't have a successful lobby in Washington is a non-starter. Canadians have one of the best lobbies in Washington. Why not bash us then, and give the Jews a rest? Because, for whatever reason, many people don't hate us and they do hate Jews, whom they commonly do not even bother to distinguish from the Israelis.

American mathematician and novelist living in Paristakes on Council of Europe's anti-ID resolution

Philosopher argues for guided evolution: Guided by technocrats

The Spiritual Brain: Recent radio and TV

Upload human memories onto a computer? Some are quite serious about that.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the just-published The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

In this column, George Will reveals that indoctrination and intellectual fascism has crept up on faculties other than science (Surprised? Why?):

A study prepared by the National Association of Scholars, a group that combats political correctness on campuses, reviews social work education programs at 10 major public universities and comes to this conclusion: Such programs mandate an ideological orthodoxy to which students must subscribe concerning "social justice" and "oppression."

In other words, if you are a social worker and you have a different idea from the orthodoxy about how best to help your clients, you is da enemy of da people (in power, that is) ...

Meanwhile, today at the Mindful Hack

So that's why we don't eat Grandma!

A professor of family medicine reviews The Spiritual Brain.

Can atheists have near death experiences? Yes, but only if they are REALLY good ...

Mario's and my interview with Michael Cook at MercatorNet, on why materialism does not make sense.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the just-published Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Are men really from Mars? Women really from Venus?

Palliative care doctor on The Spiritual Brain

The inner lives of people classed as vegetables

Lennox-Dawkins debate: “Redneck” South takes it in stride

The Spiritual Brain's Amazon blog

Do selfish genes explain why you want to hear about your grandfolks?

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the forthcoming The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

An anthropologist offers a critical look at the claims of evolutionary psychology that your selfish genes cause you to care more about your relatives than about other people (because your kin have more of the same genes). Evaluating Harvard cognitive scientist Steve Pinker's attempt in "Strangled by Roots" to account for the current American craze for genealogy by evolution, poster Rex notes that human groups do not even have fixed ideas of who their kin are:

The overall plot of "Strangled By Roots" will be familiar to any one familiar with evolutionary psychology: a New Field Of Research has been opened up that sheds Scientific Light on a previously untheorized and salaciously quirky bit of human life. The Social Scientists, of course, with their Social Science Models, have got it wrong, but luckily New Experiments have revealed the hidden evolutionary basis of said quirky behavior.

Unfortunately - alas!- however adaptive this behavior once was, it no longer suits the rigors of modern life and is currently the source of many social woes.

This time around its kinship. In the article Pinker claims that "for all its fascination, kinship is a surprisingly neglected topic in the behavioral sciences." While "many social scientists have gone so far as to claim that kinship is a social construction with no relation to biology" others disagree. "Genetics and evolutionary theory," Pinker says, "predict that the biology of kinship should have biased our thoughts and emotions about relatives in several ways" - for instance, that we like to share resources with them (this helps perpetuate their genes, including the genes we share with them).

[ ... ]

Pinker’s argument sounds plausible at first - especially if you don't know anything about the centuries-old literature on kinship or lack in-depth knowledge of the cultural complexity of ours species. In Pinker's case the problem is mostly naivete. ... Pinker's failure to review the literature on the topic can be blamed on many things, but our failure to write it is not one of them.

[ ... ]

But let me get to the main point: there are two main problems with Pinker's argument. First, there is that we have no evidence of what social organization was like deep in our evolutionary past. Of course we can imagine what they might have been like, but speculation is not science—especially for someone sufficiently serious about intellectual rigor that they feel the need to conduct experiments to prove the obvious fact that people who are raised together feel related. So his claim that feelings of kinship were once nontrivially adaptive in the evolutionary past but no longer are is in fact based on speculation. There is nothing wrong with speculation - indeed, it is all we have to go on with in some cases - but this point needs to be flagged.

The second problem is with Pinker's claim that kinship is currently no longer adaptive. The problem here is that Pinker, as philosophers say, 'proves too much'. For, as he himself shows and anthropology has already demonstrated, folk theories of relatedness and accurate biogenetic reckoning are so loosely coupled as to be only tenuously connected. In fact they are so tenuously connected that one wonder why he thinks they are or should be connected at all, except for his assumption (based on speculation) that they must have been in the past. Let's take a closer look.

Well, I won’t spoil any more of it for you; it's a great and instructive read, showing that different groups of people have very different ideas about how you should know who your kin are. And the fact that so many of these ideas are not based on degree of biological relatedness at all should be enough to sink the selfish gene theory.

Incidentally, the current North American craze for genealogy most likely relates not to remote human evolution but to (1) the fact that much more information is available, plus (2) the fact that the population is aging. Older people tend to be more interested in that kind of thing, and (3) After four or five generations, non-aboriginal North Americans are becoming more comfortable with the past their ancestors escaped. They can afford psychologically to find out more about it. They may even feel flattered or morally justified to learn of circumstances that were once a source of shame. Such is the veil that time draws over suffering ....

Now let me make two things clear here: I am not claiming that our evolutionary heritage has nothing to do with the way we view things. Indeed, it is quite easy to show the opposite. Humans, (unlike chimpanzees), are predominately right-handed. The fact that so many languages use "right" to mean good or clever (righteous, dexterous) and "left" to mean bad or awkward (gauche, sinister) is surely related. Similarly, "up" is generally a fortunate direction and "down" an unfortunate one - surely that relates to the fact that an upright stance is normal for humans.

So far, so obvious. But what happens when we seek to go beyond that? The key problems I see with evolutionary psychology, as generally practiced by - for example - Steve Pinker, are,

1. Speculation. As Rex notes, evo psycho explanations for human behaviour are usually speculation based on what we suppose life was like hundreds of thousands of years ago. And the practices for which we DO have documentation vary so widely that it is hard to place much confidence in the speculation.

2. Cherrypicking. Can anyone explain to me why, if selfish genes govern our behavior, so many men have had children with slave women and then treated those children with indifference, while doting on their legitimate offspring - irrespective of fitness? Oh yes, I am sure one speculation or other can be pulled out of a hat to rescue the selfish gene. But it would be more economical to assume that fatherhood is, in large part, a social idea and is not necessarily driven by a genetic imperative governed by natural selection.

3. Suspicious last-minute rescues. One theory has it that men play the field because their selfish genes want them to have as many children as possible in order to get themselves spread around. When I point out the obvious - that men who play the field usually do NOT want a whole pack of kids following them around - the reply is, "Well, that's modern. We're in charge of evolution now. But back in the old days, ... " In other words, the times for which we do have information don't count, only the times for which we don't.

Of course, I am out of sympathy with the whole evolutionary psychology project because the underlying message is that people are not motivated by their culture but by their genes. I am on the side of the anthropologists (culture) on that one because I think the latter have more and better evidence. In other words, being human does not give us a specific culture (selected by our genes in order to spread themselves, in the evolutionary psychologist's view). It gives us the capacity to form a culture. Cultures may or may not contribute to survival or spreading genes. If they don't, they won't be around long, but we need not suppose that therefore the successful cultures were selected by anyone or anything for that express purpose. That's an attribution error.

In a longish section of The Spiritual Brain, Mario Beauregard and I look at these questions in relation to religion, and argue that the same thing applies there.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the forthcoming The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

In a careful and well-researched article, Scientific American associate online editor David Biello examines efforts to pinpoint locations in the brain for spiritual experiences. Of course, Mario’s recent work with Carmelite nuns, reported in The Spiritual Brain, demonstrates that looking for a “God spot” as such is based on a misunderstanding of how the brain works. As Biello notes,

The quantity and diversity of brain regions involved in the nuns’ religious experience point to the complexity of the phenomenon of spirituality. “There is no single God spot, localized uniquely in the temporal lobe of the human brain,” Beauregard concludes. “These states are mediated by a neural network that is well distributed throughout the brain.”

Biello also outlines the limitations of what neuroscience can tell us about spirituality, ending with

Moreover, no matter what neural correlates scientists may find, the results cannot prove or disprove the existence of God. Although atheists might argue that finding spirituality in the brain implies that religion is nothing more than divine delusion, the nuns were thrilled by their brain scans for precisely the opposite reason: they seemed to provide confirmation f God’s interactions with them. After all, finding a cerebral source for spiritual experiences could serve equally well to identify the medium through which God reaches out to humanity. Thus, the nuns’ forays into the tubular brain scanner did not undermine their faith. On the contrary, the science gave them an even greater reason to believe.

He also tells me that he "enjoyed" The Spiritual Brain. Wonderful, David, and I enjoyed your article! It is a model of critical good sense that stands out all the more starkly amid so much neurobullshipping and naivete.

Note: I won't be blogging for a couple of days. While searching for a link, I stumbled onthis article on the emotional life of the alligator. Yes, you heard that right. Follow the link.

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

The blog, Anarchic Harmony , operated by William J. Murray, is worth a look. About many world's theory (= every time you turn right instead of left, a new universe is created in which you turned left) Murray writes,

I thought you might be interested in an argument I came up with in a new blog about how the MWI theory, which scientists are now starting to invoke in order to explain the anthropic principle and the origin of life, supports ID theory and indicates it would in fact be a better scientific model to use in many cases.

Say what?

The MWI argument is that out of infinite non-productive variations of universes we have one (or more, but we're in this one) that by chance is so ordered and specific that it has generated product (intelligent, conscious life forms with incredibly specified, complex biologies that are manifest from coded instructions) that utterly defies random, non-directed modeling, as well as an anthropic universe that utterly defies random, non-directed modeling.

Even if our universe is the necessary chance result of infinite, many-world iterations of universes, intelligent design would necessarily be a far better model of description and analysis than non-directed models in many scientific ventures, because an ID model would more accurately described the incredibly ordered, improbable patterns of chance outcomes in this particular universe.

I wonder what Murray thinks of Frank Tipler and versa vice. Tipler is the only genuine Christian materialist I have ever heard of, and he is enthusiastic about many worlds theory.*

I myself am unconvinced by many-worlds theory in any form. One problem is, as Robb Mann, University of Waterloo physics chair, pointed out to me the other day, it means that absolutely every implausible thing must be true somewhere.

Think about it. It's worse than the nihilists utter unyielding despair - you know, there is no truth, truth is unknowable and all that jazz: Rather, absolutely everything you have ever imagined actually exists somewhere! Sounds too much like magic to me.

I will eventually add Anarchic Harmony to the blogroll at your right (Never a Dull Moment ...). I will think about doing it today.

*Christian materialist: Not to be confused with the sort of "theistic evolutionist" who appears WITH materialist atheists in debates AGAINST Christian intelligent design apologists. George Hunter explains Darwin's devout pretty well in Science's Blind Spot. They seek to protect God's honour by insisting that natural selection does all the nasty stuff, and God really doesn't have much to do with it. As if.

Also:

Mindful Hack on the Lennox-Dawkins debate.

The Pharyngulite really, honestly, sincerely struggles with The Spiritual Brain

Canadian mystery novelist turns his brain disorder into winning plot idea

Brain disease research not necessarily wise spending choice

Mindfulness explored as aid in struggle against depression

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the forthcoming The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Friends draw my attention to this Banned Books Week event at Baylor, and this hasty reassurance that we are NOT supposed to think that there is any clear comparison between the suppression of Bob Marks's evolutionary informatics lab and the banning of books. (Hat tip Anarchicharmony's William J. Murray.)

No, there isn't. At Banned Books Week, so far as I can tell from the advertising, you mostly snore through old chestnuts whose ideas have long been accepted or dismissed by most of society. You don't learn about dangerous ideas that genuinely threaten the CURRENT establishment. Oh, and you might hear calls for violent jihad, et cetera, that some have tried to ban.

The jihadis actually do pose a physical threat to subway, train, and airline passengers, as well as restaurant and supermarket patrons. But whether the best way to address the problem is by banning access to detailed information is a question of security strategy rather than ideas as such. I have yet to hear of anyone who wanted to be a jihadi's blast victim - but complained that the government was somehow interfering with that individual's personal liberty by preventing terror attacks ... (Oh, make my day ... surprise me. Tell me about such a case ... )

The best way to see what happens when someone genuinely threatens the current establishment's illusions is not to look at ID guys like Guillermo Gonzalez or non-Darwinists like Rick Sternberg - interesting as their cases are. I always say, look at Larry Summers, once Harvard prez, now Unperson. His crime? Only to say what every thinking person actually knows: That the preponderance of men in maths and hard sciences is most likely based in nature, not social prejudice.

It is instructive to note that the vast majority of the people who would nod approval at propositions as foolish as the Big Bazooms theory of human evolution probably purse their lips at Larry Summers, who has nothing on his side but the preponderance of the relevant evidence. However human evolution happened, it left more men than women with the types of aptitudes that are rewarded in math and hard sciences.

So the tendency for Banned Books Weeks to be, essentially, dinosaur halls of the mind, is part of a trend, actually. Go here, here, and here for recent examples of the pervasive and growing problem that genuinely challenging ideas are increasingly banned or shunned. And go here if you want to help do something about it.

How bad has it got? Pretty bad, actually.

In The Spiritual Brain, Mario Beauregard and I chuckled at the ideas that The Edge (Wedge the Edge! - d.) thought "dangerous" in 2006:

Reading them over, one is struck by how undangerous the ideas actually are. The faculty lounge will only yawn at the idea that “we are nothing but a pack of neurons” (Ramachandran, quoting Crick), or that “there are no souls” (Bloom, Horgan, Provine), or that there is no free will (Dawkins, Metzinger, Shirky), or that the self is a zombie (Clark). No one will perk up on hearing that “the natural world is all there is” (Smith), that God is probably a fairy tale (Weinberg), or that “everything is pointless” (Blackmore). Not only are these ideas not dangerous in contemporary academe, they’re not even surprising or interesting—or, at this point, particularly well supported.

[ ... ]

If you want to say something dangerous, you must create risk where you live. Materialists’ perception of their own ideas as “dangerous” in the contemporary climate is mere branding without substance. The real danger is that their ideas are slowly, systematically being disconfirmed. But that is not a danger they show the slightest sign of eagerness to address.

(pp. 178-79)

Far from it, they will probably do their best to ban serious discussion on any pretext whatever. And they have a very good reason for that.

Note: I am well aware of prejudice against women's achievements. There was a time, for example, when great women novelists wrote under a male pseudonym or the cryptic "by a Lady." But that is a problem light years removed from an inability to actually WRITE the novel! Once the novel became a socially important form of expression, prejudice did not prevent women from writing great novels, only from publishing under authentic female names (at first). I am told, in fact, that more women than men published novels during the nineteenth century. And what if more women than men had been writing theorems in math? Conducting experiments in physics? Designing bridges and steam engines?

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the forthcoming The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Needless to say, I loved this new review of The Spiritual Brain by Bryan Appleyard in the Philadelphia Inquirer, where he says of my lead author Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard:

The great strength of his position is the folly of the materialists. Beauregard continually draws attention to the scientifically dubious basis of their leap of faith. They argue that it must be so and then set about proving it. Their triumphalism - driven by big publishing deals - is their greatest weakness.

There are plenty of examples ...

The nicest thing about a review like Appleyard's is that, agree or disagree, he sees what WE see - plenty of bumph marketed as the "assured results of modern science."

As applied to neuroscience, Mario Beauregard and I call it "neurobullshipping."

By the way, the Philly Inquirer recently published a review of Mike Behe's Edge of Evolution that identified the book's argument, instead of attempting to discourage anyone from reading it.

And re Appleyard: here is a link to Appleyard's review of Frank Tipler. He agrees with me in finding Tipler interesting - more interesting in his sheer eccentricity as a Christian materialist (!) than many dull drudges who churn out approved sludge.

Also at Mindful Hack:

Yes, Mario Beauregard and Denyse O'Leary really ARE non-materialists. And we utter worse heresies yet ...

Dutch expert on near death experiences loves The Spiritual Brain.

Monk-led protest against Myanmar generals' regime now under heavy assault

Why brain scans cannot tell whether you are religious or not

Smart birds spur scientists to rethink intelligence

At the Post-Darwinist: The universe next door: Buddhists confront science - and materialism

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the forthcoming The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

When I first encountered Biola adjunct prof Cornelius G. Hunter's Science's Blind Spot: The Unseen Religion of Scientific Naturalism (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2007), I was intrigued by the possibility that it might help me understand the people who want to destroy the careers of anyone who doubts that Darwinian evolution can produce mind from mud, and ultimately you from goo.

I fear it is somewhat like trying to understand the jihadis. Friends have told me that, to understand jihadis, I must try, at least briefly, to see the world as they do. Similarly, to understand Darwin's most committed followers, I must undergo a similar mental exercise. For me at least, such exercises do not result in conversion to the alien belief system; rather, they help me make decisions about how to deal more effectively with the believers.

Blind Spot led to a surprising discovery: According to Hunter, the Darwinists are much more religious than I am. Many of them - especially the ones who attend church - are zealous for God's honour in a way that I would never think of. For them, God is too great to provide evidence for his work in any sense that I could view and understand. And this universe is not good enough to have been created by him.

From the book, a brief explanation:

The theological mandates for naturalism fall into several categories. Their common theme is that God ought not to intervene in the creation and care of the world. Nature should operate primarily, or even exclusively, via actual laws, and it is not exclusively God's design. Naturalism in the sciences did not arise from an empiricist urge; it arose from several theological axioms and concerns. These concerns were not antireligious. Though at times they were raised disingenuously by religious skeptics, more often they were raised quite seriously by theists who were trying to elucidate the relationship between God and creation. (p. 20)

also

Theological naturalism is not opposed to all things religious - it IS religious. Theological naturalism mandates a nonintervening god; it does not mandate no god. It means that divine action must not be empirically detectable. Hence theological naturalism mandates methodological naturalism-the idea that science ought to pursue naturalistic explanations. It is not that there is no god but that creation must always operate according to uniform natural laws. (P. 31)

And then there is the question of evil and suffering: The idea that God would actually design the world we see, where inelegance sometimes rules, the cat plays with the mouse, and children sometimes die from painful diseases is unthinkable. Theistic naturalists believe that they honour God and rescue his reputation when they insist that there is no detectible design in nature. Things happen because of random mutations and natural laws.

If God would have made nature perfect according to our sensibilities, and it obviously was not, then God must not have created nature. This was Hume's, and after him Darwin's, powerful argument. Too often commentators today miss the crucial point. Darwin advanced naturalism with religious arguments rather than with compelling scientific explanations. (P. 107)

Put simply, God is not a designer, because if he were, he would have to take credit for things that no reputable designer would do, at least in the theological naturalist's view. Defending his interpretation, Hunter quotes many instances of such views from the writings of Ken Miller, Francisco Ayala, Howard Van Till, Ian Barbour, and Keith Thomson. God sees the sparrow fall, but he hasn't explicitly chosen to create a system that lets it fall. The system evolves with no help from God.

Yes, God is somehow behind it all. But he is apprehended by faith alone - faith that requires no evidence, or even despises it. And if you point to any apparent evidence of design in nature ... well, the theistic naturalist asks, what is going to happen to your faith when science proves you wrong? You will lose your faith in God, right? Because science can always show that there is no design in nature. Always.

Part One: Theological naturalism: Why we owe it to God to believe in Darwin
Part Two: Rationalism vs. empiricism: What must be true vs. what the evidence shows
Part Three: Why rationalists cannot live with uncertainty

Next: Part One: Theological naturalism: Why we owe it to God to believe in Darwin

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the forthcoming The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

As noted in the Introduction, Hunter argues that the preference for naturalism is both theologically motivated and theologically justified. Ken Miller, Francisco Ayala, Howard Van Till, Ian Barbour, and Keith Thomson all use essentially theological arguments, as Hunter notes, along the lines of "God wouldn't ..."

Recognizing the pattern he identifies solved one big mystery for me. It explains why the Darwinist argues in good faith that bad design means no design. Now that point is so obviously not true in general (think Edsel) that some thought process that requires unpacking must underlie it. And here is that thought process: The universe is imperfect. God would have created a perfect universe. God's honour is at stake. God must therefore be protected from being seen as the author of the universe in any hands-on way.

Therefore, it follows, we must believe in Darwin. When we confront evidence from nature that doesn't support the idea that natural selection or some similar process acted on random mutation to produce every aspect of life, we must strive to overcome our temptation to doubt. It is best, of course, to rid ourselves of any tendency to even see such evidence.

I suppose I have never been religious enough to see nature the way Francis Collins and Francisco Ayala do. I have always been able to live with the idea that God might not do things the way we expect. But, according to Hunter, that is probably because I am an empiricist, not a rationalist.

Next: Part Two: Rationalism vs. empiricism: What must be true vs. what the evidence shows

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the forthcoming The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Hunter contrasts two views of science: rationalism and empiricism: Rationalism posits a theory of nature and looks for the evidence to support it. Empiricism assembles evidence, and builds on the evidence to form a picture of nature. Without insisting on total symmetry, Hunter uses Rene Descartes as a general example of rationalism and Francis Bacon as a general example of empiricism. Both thinkers made massive contributions to science and are honoured worldwide today.

What difference does it make which approach you take to science?

Well, here are some differences:

1. If you are a rationalist, you will favour the evidence for the pattern you think nature should follow and discount the evidence against it. If you are convinced that there must be no evidence of intelligent design in nature, you can discard any evidence for it without qualms. For example, Hunter notes, "Descartes argued that having a plausible yet incorrect description was better than no description at all." (P. 18)

However, if you are an empiricist like Bacon, you will be much less likely to do that. You would prefer to alter your idea of what the pattern shows.

2. An empiricist makes a distinction between experimental sciences like chemistry and physics and historical sciences like geology and evolution. The subjects of experimental sciences are here before us in the present day and can be directly tested in real time. The rationalist assumes that all past events that fit his rationally derived theory should be treated the same way as the current findings of experimental sciences. Darwin was definitely in this camp:

... Darwin argued for an uninterrupted continuum of natural history. Indeed, for theological naturalists there must be an uninterrupted continuum. There must be no principled distinction between the experimental and historical sciences. Natural laws that explain how the planets move must also be sufficient to explain how they originated. ... Our complex world, they say, must unfold as a result of the interplay of natural laws." (P. 38 )

3. Theistic naturalism is NOT a refundable proposition, because once you are in it, there is no way out. Remember, you are to discard evidence that does not fit the pattern. Hunter writes,

The problem with science is not that the naturalistic approach might occasionally be inadequate. The problem is that science would never know any better. This is science's blind spot. When problems are encountered, theological naturalism assumes that the correct naturalistic solution has not yet been found. Nonnatural phenomena will be interpreted as natural, regardless of how implausible the story becomes. Science has no mechanism to detect the possibility of nonnatural phenomena. It does not consider the likelihood that a phenomenon might not be purely naturalistic. (P. 44-45)

What happens then? If design IS in fact the best explanation for a given phenomenon, theistic naturalism will simply mislead us. As Hunter notes,

Theological naturalism has no way to distinguish a paradigm problem from a research problem. It cannot consider the POSSIBILITY that there is no naturalistic explanation for the DNA code. If a theory of natural history has problems - and many of them have their share - the problems are always viewed as research problems and never as paradigm problems. (P. 45)

As a result, theistic naturalism can never contemplate the possibility that its explanations are wrong (unless they are replaced by other naturalistic explanations):

There are problems with many naturalistic explanations, but this is not why naturalism is ailing. It is ailing because it cannot contemplate the possibility that it may be wrong. It cannot evaluate these problems from a larger perspective. Naturalistic explanations work well in many cases and break down in other cases. But theological naturalists cannot allow their science the latitude to incorporate nonnaturalistic explanations, or even to consider such a hypothesis. For them science must be firmly restricted to naturalistic explanations. (P. 50)

One specific result of theistic naturalism - which we see every day in the popular science press - is that any naturalistic explanation, no matter how foolish, appears more believable to the naturalist than any non-naturalistic explanation. THAT observation helped me understand something that had puzzled me much, while co-writing The Spiritual Brain: No matter how foolish a naturalistic proposition regarding the human mind was, it had to be preferred to a sensible non-naturalist one.

My favourite example - with apologies to those who are put off by its sheer vulgarity - is the Big Bazooms Theory of Human Evolution: According to that theory, men like women with big busts because they know whether they are still fertile (and what men like is governed by the desire of their selfish genes to spread themselves around).

Now, an obviously simpler and more reasonable explanation for a masculine preference for well-endowed women would be our general human desire for abundance rather than scarcity. But wait! The simpler explanation may feel unsatisfactory to the committed naturalist. After all, it implies the existence of a mind that prefers. And the mind is one of the very things that naturalism must consider an illusion. Our "minds" are the buzz of neurons in our brains. Some of that buzz is generated by the selfish genes that want to spread themselves. So whatever men prefer in women must somehow be linked to the women's fertility. That is a clumsy, complex, and unconvincing explanation but the committed naturalist knows that it should be preferred to any explanation that allows the man's mind to cause anything to happen by itself.

As Hunter notes

... those committed to naturalistic explanations, like those committed to supernaturalistic explanations, can always devise a theory to explain what we observe. Like supernaturalism, naturalism can never be judged a failure, for there is no test for failure. Failed hypotheses simply lead to more complex hypotheses.

Theological naturalism does not and cannot provide a balanced assessment of its own theories, and eventually moves to simply silence those who disagree. After all, God's honour is at stake. And there can be no uncertainty about that.

Next: Part Three: Why rationalists cannot live with uncertainty

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the forthcoming The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Hunter is somewhat sympathetic to theistic naturalism, and - unlike many of naturalism's opponents - does not argue that most theistic naturalists are closet atheists. Indeed, he writes,

The urge toward naturalism is understandable, and charges of atheism and materialism are unfounded and unhelpful. But the rationalists also need to be careful. With their metaphysical and methodological a priori axioms in place, rationalists make high truth claims. Their powerful epistemological foundation allows them to firmly pronounce what is true and what is false. How often do we hear that this or that evidence PROVES evolution to be true? A little bit of data goes a long way when one has the framework of theological naturalism already in place. The universally held position is that evolution is not a model or hypothesis but an undeniable fact. In all this there is an unspoken dependency on controversial premises. (p. 140)

Still, Hunter is obviously in the empiricists' camp because he devotes several chapters to evidence from nature that presents conundrums for the orthodox naturalist - evidence that is routinely avoided when addressing the public.

That is because the rationalist must deny every instance of design. The empiricist has no similar problem with law or chance:

For empiricists, the scientific information we have does not readily convert to comprehensive explanations that we can know to be true. When it comes to origins, we are still left with many questions. Of course, empiricists have their own opinions about these questions, but they differ among themselves, and typically they are less sure than are rationalists.

One reason that empiricists lack well-defined philosophical assumptions is the complexity of these issues. For instance, where rationalists are quick to employ the infinite regress to argue for naturalism, empiricists engage in lengthy, detailed debates about what it portends. ... Empiricists differ among themselves and feel free to proceed with the science without having all the difficult questions firmly resolved. (P. 141)

Hunter concludes,

For centuries it has been observed that nature appears to have been designed. But rationalism, with is metaphysical axioms, has constrained the sciences to naturalism. This has led to a blind spot, as only naturalistic explanations may be considered. If those naturalistic explanation are correct, then all is well. But today's rationalism has proclaimed them to be correct by fiat. That is metaphysical certainty, not scientific certainty. ( P. 146 )

He regards intelligent design theory as moderate empiricism:

Intelligent design cuts the strong tie between the historical and experimental sciences that rationalism requires. It is mainly interested in pursuing the experimental sciences without a priori assumptions about what is the right answer ... We should not assume that we know the kind of answers science must produce when there is much uncertainty. The world may have arisen by any of a variety of means and there is little to be gained by prematurely narrowing the choices. (P. 147)

Unless, of course, we are very sure what we must never believe. And if you are a theistic naturalist, remember, God's honour is at stake. And for some reason it is very, very fragile.

Return to Introduction

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the forthcoming The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

As long as people believe in absurdities, they will continue to commit atrocities. -- Voltaire

People gaze at mountains. People live in valleys. People thrive when the mountain is healthy, channeling water of life to valleys made green and lush. But when the run-off is poisoned with purposelessness and made monstrously meaningless, should it be surprising that a dull, reeking valley of death results? For all its current glory, with affected upward gazes and mandated stares of respect, Darwinism's much-touted and largely doubted mountain of evidence feeds a valley of death--the cold, purposeless, meaningless death of natural selection makes life in the valley heartily attractive to the strong, and hardly attractive to the weak. And though the mountain comes to few, we are all forced to go to it, walking in its shadow, living in its valley. How can we not fear evil?

From Darwin to Hitler, from Darwin to Marx, from Darwin to Stalin, from Darwin to Columbine, from Darwin to eugenics, from Darwin to euthanasia, from Darwin to infanticide . . . . The connections are undeniable except to those who resolutely oppose truth for fear of the obvious. To those who hate truth and love naturalistic Darwinism, denying the obvious implications of their chosen theory must be a learned adaptation, no doubt necessary to survive in the harsh environment of materialistic science, where on the topic of origins Darwinism and reality rarely coincide. Beyond feeding the mountain of theoretical puffery animating just-so meta-narratives, however, Darwin's theory fuels ideas that clash with reality in every area of life, from ethics to politics to religion, where at each turn the Darwin-inspired unnatural election of natural selection as a guiding light wreaks havoc and wrecks lives. Why can't we ask, "Is it true?"

Natural selection. Who could question such a thoroughly impeccant and wholesome idea? How viscerally attractive is the combination of organic earthiness and pro-choice chic. Like a prophet, Darwin's greatest triumph may be his anticipation of a thoroughly secular culture, his terminology reflecting a perfectly humanistic blend of free cosmos and free choice. Unguided choice, unintelligent direction, language trumps logic in a shadowy world of selfish killing to live, the favored races being preserved over the unfavored in a cycle of amoral gene propagation. Would death by any other name smell as sweet?

Make no mistake, natural selection is nothing more than the killing of a weaker, slower, or dumber living being by the elements, or more likely, by a stronger, faster, or smarter living being. No real selection in any real sense of making a choiceful decision among competing alternatives happens, of course. But granting Darwinists their necessary guidance substitute, what is the selected one being selected for? And which one does the selecting? One living being selected for death by another living being (naturally, of course) for no necessary reason beyond bare survival, and even survival is not a reason but a result. That's natural selection. In a Darwinian system, that is the course and coarse of nature, and we are simply one purposeless byproduct. How convenient that our ancestors were better killers than whatever other purposeless existence might otherwise be here now. Are we to lament the flood of blood that washed us up on this present shore? Or are we to celebrate such good fortune? What use is lamenting or celebrating in the absence of reason and purpose? We are not even lucky; we just are.

The great failure of Darwinists is not only their failing to produce any evidence to support their theory in its strong form (all life from non-life in ever increasing information-bearing specified complexity), but in their obstinate refusal to admit and own up to the fact that their force-fed ideas (that few people believe) have predictable consequences (that no one likes). Students taught that they are a result of unguided, purposeless processes that never had them in mind can hardly be expected to see life through any other lens. Such world views produce world leaders whose truthless philosophy ends in ruthless atrocities. Whether kid or king, if people believe they are here only because their ancestors successfully killed off all competition, on what logical basis should they not reciprocate in kind for their offspring?

Ideas have consequences. If Darwinism is correct, and we truly are the result of unguided, chance mutations that made us more successful at killing off weaker beings, then we must live with the difficult task of trying to formulate any reason why we all should not simply continue nature's task. Unguided purposeless processes produced our mind, but what is to produce our morals? If science has defined our facts, can't science define our values? So far Darwinists have not been able to come up with any coherent ethic consistent with both the inherent human ethos and their heartless killing machine. Look it up, no one can do it. And no one ever will.

Many teach Darwinism sincerely out of ignorance, offending the truth in science born of nescience. Others preach Darwinism sincerely in spite of knowledge, suppressing the truth in science without conscience. But whether by omission or commission, sin is no less when lodged in sincere. We must ask, therefore, is Darwinism true? If not, can it be that perhaps not only are we designed as a scientific matter, but we are designed for a higher purpose? Can science help inform society on the human condition beyond the hopeless, clueless foundering of evolutionary thinking? Can we even ask the question?

Roddy Bullock, JD, BSME, is the Executive Director of the Intelligent Design Network of Ohio (www.idnetohio.com) and is the author of The Cave Painting: A Parable of Science, published by Access Research Network. Send comments to: roddybullock@idnetohio.com.

Copyright (C) 2007 Roddy M. Bullock, all rights reserved. Quotes and links permitted with attribution.

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Okay, here at last is Jerry Bergman's review of Stuart Pivar's Lifecode. Yes, Stu Pivar was the friend of Steve Gould who was suing and then unsuing PZ Myers. Also, note the new book announcement about Jerry Bergman.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the forthcoming The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Bird brains, far from us on the "tree of life" spur rethinking of intelligence

A fellow journalist's thoughts on neuroscientists and God

Scientist apologist John Lennox todebate atheist crusader Richard Dawkins

How powerful is the placebo effect? If you do not take your sugar pill, you are more likely to die.

New entries to the Evolution in the light of intelligent design encyclopedia

Also - menopause explained, or maybe not

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the forthcoming The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Here are the new entries to the Encyclopedia: Evolution in the light of intelligent design:

Acritarchs - oldest known protists (Tyler)

The picture emerging of the Late Archaean is one that includes prokaryotes and eukaryotes, photosynthesis, an oxygenated atmosphere and lots of biological activity. This is a big contrast from the picture even 10 years ago. The significance for our thinking about origins is that the eons of time demanded by Darwinian processes are not available.

Archaea - horizontal gene transfer - review of The Archaea's Tale (Tyler)

He presents evidence that Darwinian evolution does not go back to the beginning of life. When we compare genomes of ancient lineages of living creatures, we find evidence of numerous transfers of genetic information from one lineage to another. In early times, horizontal gene transfer, the sharing of genes between unrelated species, was prevalent. It becomes more prevalent the further back you go in time. - Freeman Dyson

Butterfly sex ratios in Samoa - and natural selection (Tyler)

Sex ratios are distorted by the presence of a maternally inherited bacterium which has the effect of selectively killing male embryos. The authors report ratios of >99% female to nearly 1:1. These were different on different islands and at different times. The genetics of this shift of sex ratios is summarised in one paragraph with some supporting online data. There is not enough information here for anyone to either confirm or challenge their conclusions.

Cell - molecular recognition - advantages of cellular key-lock not being an exact fit. (Tyler)

So, something that could have been interpreted as evidence for tinkering evolution is discovered to have advantages after all. Furthermore, it has potential for the design of human systems operating in noisy environments. By invoking "evolutionary selection", the authors suggest an evolutionary context for their work. However, there is no evidence that evolutionary selection was involved, and the link with evolutionary theory is gratuitous.

Central dogma (Tyler)

Casual observers might say they find chaos in the emerging picture of the genome, but systems biology is tracking down extraordinary sophistication at the molecular biology level, indicating that theories (like Darwinism) that are undirected and stochastic have little to offer 21st Century biology.

Exoplanets - atmospheres (Tyler)

Gecko - feet a standard for adhesion (Tyler)

... the gecko does not demonstrate just a single trait with enhanced performance. There are issues of adhesion and delamination, self-cleaning, and achieving a sustained adhesive performance. What we have in the gecko is exquisite design and, for that, biomimetics needs a methodology that can relate well to intelligent engineering design concepts.

Molecular recognition in the cell (Tyler)

Protists - oldest known protists (Tyler)

Sensory perception - advanced perception in Permian amniotes (Tyler)

The discovery of a highly-evolved auditory apparatus in Middle Permian parareptiles even further emphasizes that the entire groundplan for the impressive evolutionary history of amniotes was already largely in place by the end of the Paleozoic; what followed was in fact only a subsequent tinkering of earlier inventions." Darwinism needs time, but the fossil record no longer provides it.

Stasis - tribolites (Tyler)

Trilobites - variation and stasis as a pattern

The research documented both rapid morphological variation and subsequent stasis. ... One hypothesis is that radiations occur because organisms are designed to vary, but the process results in genetic impoverishment that leads to stasis.

Variation - tribolites (Tyler)

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the forthcoming The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Recently, an article appeared in New Scientist, a magazine for all things Darwin, wherein we are assured that ""Caring grandmas explain the evolutionary role of menopause."

The article argues, based on research in Gambia prior to the introduction of modern medicine, that children were more likely to survive their mother's death if their maternal grandmother was alive (and presumably looked after the child):

... Daryl Shanley and colleagues at Newcastle University, UK, analysed the births and deaths of 5500 people in Gambia between 1950 and 1975 – before a modern medical clinic arrived. They believe this provides an approximation to the situation experienced by females during the evolution of humans.

Interesting idea - that life in Africa has not changed at all since the Old Stone Age.

It's an interesting article, all the more because menopause may not even require an "evolutionary" explanation.

The article explains,

Human female reproductive functions stop around age 50, and start tapering off even earlier. In other mammals, female reproduction simply stops because of ageing, at a variety of ages. But in humans the shutdown is deliberate and early. And it is genetically controlled, meaning the genes responsible were selected by evolution.

Wait a minute ... do we have any good reason to believe that in earliest human history most women even lived to be fifty years of age? How many people over 35 years of age, never mind 50, were the subjects of natural selection (which is what New Scientist means by "evolution")? Also, I wonder how many animals living in nature really outlive their fertility or die of old age.

Doesn't a woman develop all her eggs while a fetus herself, start to release them at menarche and go through them at a rate of about one a month? When the monthly release of eggs stops, that’s menopause.So, why bother with an evolutionary purpose for menopause? Isn’t menopause just the state of outliving one’s fertility?

Of course, in some cultures, mom's mom would raise the child of a dead mother, and in other cultures she might only raise a boy (not a girl). In others, maybe a child whose mother died is bad luck. Indeed, in some cultures I suspect that dad's mom would shove mom's mom out of the way and grab a BOY immediately.

In the cafeteria at Biola University in October 2005, I recall an eager young Darwinist proclaiming to me (rightly, I believe), "Evolution doesn't care about you when you are old." I may have been the only "old" person within 500 metres, but I was hardly alarmed to learn that "evolution" didn't care about me.

(I only wish that the Toronto snow shovelling compliance inspector had the same view ... Unhappily, he knows that I exist, and that I am a few years short of free shovelling, no matter how big the mountain of snow is.)

Hat tip to the first reader to spot an article in New Scientist explaining the evolutionary adaptation of living to be over eighty years of age and being no darn use to anyone who does not want to listen to extended yarns of ye good old days...

Also:

Research: What can you believe about what you read?

Does it matter if materialism is false?

Anarchic Harmony blog on materialists and truth

Expelled! film crew visits Baylor, and most interssting correspondence revealed.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the forthcoming The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

I don't know what I would do without my regular fix of Toronto journalist David Warren, who - having made clear that he thinks Darwinism a crock - is constantly hearing from anxious Darwin fans, who don't know what they'll do if it isn't true.

If life cannot be produced accidentally by jiggling chemicals in a test tube, ... apparently life makes no sense to them - or something like that anyway.

Warren continues to offer boilerplate responses (one must live, after all). Indeed, he appears to know some of the same Darwoids as I hear from, to judge from their inimitable prose style:

"Atrociously bad, pig-ignorant garbage." ... "Mixture of gall & negligence." ... "Sheer brazen quality of this ignorance is a wonder to behold."

This is what's said ABOUT the likes of me, third-personally, by the more articulate correspondents advising my editors to sack me. The letters to me personally are, however, much ruder. As usual, among the charges, I am a "faggot," or at least a "closet fag."

[ ... ]

Many, many, of my apoplectic correspondents refer me to websites on "The God Delusion," & other standard sources for atheist proselytizing. Several correspondents refer to a website where Michael Behe's "claims" are "refuted" in a similar manner to the above (i.e. with a lot of more-or-less clinical abusive language).

And apparently, many of these ill-tempered illiterates have taken to styling themselves "the New Enlightenment."

To hear Warren's literate thoughts on "the survival instinct", go here.

Also:

Favorable review of Behe's Edge of Evolution

From the whodathunkit? files: Dan Rather suing CBS over pajamagate

Terminology wars: Materialist philosopher calls agnostic biochemist a creationist

CS Lewis on science writing - why it matters

Milt Rosenberg interviews Mario Beauregard (The Spiritual Brain) and Francis Collins (The Language of God) Thursday night 9:05 Chicago tmei

How memory works: Not like we thought.

Why spiritual histories of countries are necessary

Altruism files: Entrepreneur doctor honours promise despite dotcom disaster

Is the mind just an illusion?

HarperCollins Canada offers free stuff from The Spiritual Brain.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the forthcoming The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Apparently, in the most recent edition of First Things, Fr. Richard Neuhaus defends Mike Behe, author of Edge of Evolution. It's not on line yet, but Fr. Neuhaus says, among other things,

You usually know that somebody is losing the argument when he loses his cool and resorts to bluster, abuse, caricature, and the invocation of authorities who agree with him.

He is referring, of course, to Richard Dawkins's attempt to trash Behe's book in The New York Times. He notes the curious fact that the Times should never have given the book to Dawkins to review anyway, without giving Behe the right of reply (which it would never dare to do):

It is hard to know what purpose is served by the Book Review in having Dawkins review Behe, except, possibly, to ostracize anyone who presumes to raise questions about prevailing Darwinist orthodoxies and, perhaps, to pander to the smug prejudices of the presumed readership of the Times. That does not instill confidence in the Darwinist materialism that they are so desperately defending.

This is all particularly interesting because Neuhaus is not especially one of the ID think tank Discovery Institute fans.

Rather, it sounds (especially when you read the whole thing) as though he is beginning to get the same picture as so many of the rest of us: Darwinism is the Enron of biology. The fact that he scolds the New York Times over Dawkins's review is interesting in view of the question raised by some about whether Dawkins had actually read Behe's book.

Also: Cameron Wybrow, who got an honest review of Mike Behe's Edge of Evolution published in the Philadelphia Enquirer, found himself taking to task a completely silly review in the Winnipeg Free Press. Put it this way: It is impossible for U of Winnipeg molecular biologist Janice Dodd to consider the possibility that Darwinism might not be true. So she doesn't. Read her review, then Wybrow's comment.

I was travelling on a Toronto streetcar today with a fellow journalist who was musing about the sheer gullibility of Darwinists. Learned in history, he pointed out that Darwinists had originally attacked Mendel because Mendel cited statistics for genetics - instead of the vagueness the Darwinists so loved. He and I believe in a traditional religion, but the Darwinists believe in magic.

Also: ID materials outselling anti-ID materials? Gotta getta law against that!

Catholic Church continues to reject Darwinism

Is intelligent design biblical?

Jason Rennie's SciPhiShow interview with Denyse O'Leary on The Spiritual Brain.

People who have inspired/intrigued the readers of The Spiritual Brain.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the forthcoming The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Creation science museum opens in Alberta, Canada

New entries to the Evolution in the Light of Intelligent Design Encyclopedia.

Intelligent design and popular culture: Where did terms like "intelligent design", "Darwinism" come from?

ID Controversy: Why things shape up differently in Canada

Portuguese language ID blog draws 70 000 visitors over two years

O'Leary's two children's science books just published!

From Mindful Hack: Mother Teresa's dark night of the soul

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the forthcoming The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

Because so many people have asked me what The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul addresses, I thought I would post the Introduction. It doesn't deal with everything the book addresses, but it gives you some idea.

In this book, we intend to show you that your mind does exist, that it is not merely your brain. Your thoughts and feelings cannot be dismissed or explained away by firing synapses and physical phenomena alone. In a solely material world, "will power" or "mind over matter" are illusions, there is no such thing as purpose or meaning, there is no room for God. Yet many people have experience of these things. We intend to argue that these experiences are real. In contrast, many materialists now argue that notions like meaning or purpose do not correspond to reality; they are merely adaptations for human survival. In other words, they have no existence beyond the evolution of circuits in our brains.

Can we prove God exists from neuroscience? No, but if your mind is real, a cosmic Mind would best account for it. If spirituality is good for you (and it is), that's because spirituality responds to the way things really are in our universe. Come along with us and see for yourself.

Part One: Neuroscience as if your mind is real
Part Two: Who has enough faith to be a materialist?
Part Three: The uses of non-materialist neuroscience
Part Four: Materialism is running on empty

Next: Part One: Neuroscience as if your mind is real

Also:
Denyse writes for Pearcey Report on science reporters and meat puppets ...

Mario Beauregard speaking at mind-brain conference in Finland

Methodological naturalism at the end of its tether

Now it's the birds who explain selfless behavior. Whither the chimps?

Materialist cognitive scientist Steve Pinker's Stuff of Thought

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

What does Bob Marks want? He wants the right to run computer simulations at Baylor that might (possibly) reduce confidence in Darwinian evolution.

That is, the simulations might show that Darwinian evolution is not nearly as probable as professional Darwinists claim.

Actually, the Wistar meetings showed that way back in the 1960s, but Darwinism is just too good a creation story for materialism to pass up. So otherwise respectable scientists have been lying for Darwin ever since, and snuffing out the careers of anyone who breaks rank.

Contrary to popular belief, you need NOT be a creationist or an ID guy. All you have to do is stop believing in magic - Darwinian magic - and ask for evidence.

That's a Big Sin because the evidence does not support Darwinism.

Well, that explains the role of the Darwinist, who can hardly help suppressing evidence, but what about Baylor, the alleged Christian university? Elsewhere, I have pointed out that institutions like Baylor essentially protect Christians from a world that favours materialism. The justification for their existence would be revolutionized if word got out that materialism is largely disconfirmed over a broad area. As I said there,

In a trice, the harsh reality from which the institution protects its dumb sheeplike students is - a harsh UNreality. The students are not meat puppets who foolishly imagine that they have immortal souls and must therefore be humoured by their silly little campus groups. They are people who actually do have immortal souls who are being trained by the institution to accept a culture that lies to them that they are meat puppets. And the institution essentially brokers the lies in the interests of the materialist culture - and to its own prestige.
Now do you see the threat posed by an intellectually rigorous inquiry into intelligent design?

Last night, my mom and I were watching a video of one of my favourite movies - The Great Escape. Suddenly, some of the dialogue seemed startlingly relevant to the struggle of scientists like Marks.

Listen, as the German Colonel Von Luger explains to the Allied prisoners of war:

We have in effect put all our rotten eggs in one basket, and we intend to watch this basket carefully. Very wise. You will not be denied the usual facilities. Sports, a library, a recreation hall, and for gardening we will give you tools. We trust you to use them for gardening. Devote your energies to these things. Give up your hopeless attempts to escape. And, with intelligent cooperation, we may all sit out the war as comfortably as possible.

What institutions like Baylor want is precisely that - faculty who will just "sit out" the war between rampant materialist atheism and all non-materialist traditions, in the comfort of a Christian environment.

But Group Captain Ramsey responds,

Colonel Von Luger, it is the sworn duty of all officers to try to escape. If they cannot escape, then it is their sworn duty to cause the enemy to use an inordinate number of troops to guard them, and their sworn duty to harass the enemy to the best of their ability.

Ramsey's reply is the proper duty of the Christian (or other non-materialist) academic in these times.

It is also the only safe one. There is no surprise, really, in the fact that today's academic environment is quickly losing touch with the goal of intellectual inquiry. As Mario Beauregard and I show clearly in The Spiritual Brain, materialists do not believe in the reality of the mind. In that case, it is more humane as well as easier to just program the young meat puppets to be whatever is needed, and sideline any mis-programmed puppets who interfere.

Only a non-materialist tradition - in which intellect functions as a cause of events - can responsibly support intellectual freedom.

A Christian you say? Well then, do not be a good prisoner of your Christian campus. Be a Bob Marks. BE a problem!

Also:

Spying on a Darwin fan's nightstand

More on why dog breeding cannot explain evolution.

The Mindful Hack on The Complete Idiot's Guide to Life After Death

Wikipedia competitor Citizendium takes dead aim at propaganda, featured as news. And don't miss RationalWiki - more rational than a rabid raccoon.

Also, science journalist notices that people are smarter than apes - wow!

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the forthcoming The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

The vertebrate eye is NOT wired wrong or backwards, as commonly claimed. If you want your eyes to see as well as to look pretty, and you also want to be a mammal (why?), you need to to be wired that way. Go here and here.

Here's a transcript of a podcast of Beyond the Book on science writing.

Here's a primer on interpreting legacy mainstream media's materialist propaganda.

Here's Physics Nobelist Charles Townes on intelligent design, why he thinks three is something in it.

Can any reader help contribute to The Encyclopedia of Life? Whether you can or not, have fun with Jurustic Park.

How things change in science

Why you will more likely succeed if you are easy to indoctrinate

Media fallout from Baylor's attempt to dismantle Bob Marks's ID-friendly evolutionary informatics lab

Should tenure disappear?, The Scientist asks

ID friendly TV pastor dead at 76.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the forthcoming The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

Here's a podcast interview where I reveal key secrets of the evil conspiracies I am part of, whiled discussing The Spiritual Brain . I also Wedge "the Edge", and explain why I don't drink coffee while reading materialist interpretations of spirituality - because choking with laughter while drinking coffee is, like, a bitter experience. I take mine without sugar.

Never shrinking from controversy, and sometimes deliberately provoking it, this book serves as a lively introduction to a field where neuroscience, philosophy, and secular/spiritual cultural wars are unavoidably intermingled. - Publishers Weekly

The belief that the mind does not exist apart from the brain dominated the twentieth century. But can we really dismiss our thoughts and feelings, or furthermore, our religious and spiritual experiences, as simply outcomes of the firing synapses of our brain? In THE SPIRITUAL BRAIN, authors Dr. Mario Beauregard and Denyse O'Leary present the groundbreaking evidence that the mind cannot be simply reduced to physiological reactions in the brain.

Most neuroscientists are committed to the view that mystical experiences are simply the result of random neurons firing, or "delusions created by the brain." THE SPIRITUAL BRAIN takes another approach, powerfully arguing for what many in science are unwilling to consider - that people actually contact a reality outside themselves during intense spiritual experiences. Beauregard uses the most sophisticated technology to peer inside the brains of Carmelite nuns during a profound spiritual state. His results and a variety of other lines of evidence lead him to the surprising conclusion that spiritual experiences are not a figment of the mind or a delusion produced by a dysfunctional brain.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS - Mario Beauregard's work at the University of Montreal on the effects of consciousness and volition on the emotional brain, and the neurobiology of the mystical experience has received international media coverage. Dr. Beauregard was selected by the World Media Net to be one of the "One Hundred Pioneers of the Twenty-First Century." Denyse O'Leary is a Toronto-based journalist who specializes in faith and science issues and who has written for the Toronto Star and the Globe & Mail.

The Spiritual Brain
A Neuroscientist's Case for the Existence of the Soul
By Mario Beauregard & Denyse O'Leary
Published by HarperOne
Hardcover / ISBN 978-0-06-085883-4 / $25.95 / 400 pages / September 2007

Here are some of the comments on The Spiritual Brain

"If you have a mind, you will find The Spiritual Brain a refreshing antidote to the strange arguments offered by some scientists who insist that their minds, and yours, are meaningless illusions." - Dean Radin, PhD, Senior Scientist, Institute of Noetic Sciences and author of The Conscious Universe and Entangled Minds

The Spiritual Brain is a wonderful and important book that provides new insights into our experience of religion and God. It offers a unique perspective to the ongoing dialogue between science and religion. This book is a necessary read for both the scientist and the religious person.
-Andrew Newberg, M.D. Associate Professor of Radiology and Director of the Center for Spirituality and the Mind at the University of Pennsylvania. Co-author of Why We Believe What We Believe.

"The Spiritual Brain is a very important book. It clearly explains non-materialist neuroscience in simple terms appropriate for the lay reader, while building on and extending work that Sharon Begley and I began in The Mind and The Brain, and work that Mario and I collaborated on in academic publications." - neuropsychiatrist Jeffrey Schwartz, author of The Mind and the Brain

"I truly was bowled over by the book, ... In The Spiritual Brain neuroscientist Mario Beauregard and science writer Denyse O’Leary push back hard. First they debunk the most widely touted urban legends of impoverished materialism"
- Michael Behe, author of Edge of Evolution

I've just finished reading The Spiritual Brain (I was sent an advance copy). It's superb, and is a milestone in what I think is going to be a 'long twilight struggle' against materialist neuroscience.
- neurosurgeon Mike Egnor

Today at the Mindful Hack, the blog that supports The Spiritual Brain:

Mind is not merely brain, Spiked reviewer insists.

Lawyer explains why materialist atheism is incoherent

Mathematician David Berlinski says mathematics is more than just climbing "the greasy pole of life."

Hype and the pop science media

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

In his review of ID biochemist Mike Behe's Edge of Evolution, which caused many to wonder whether he had actually read the book he was reviewing, Richard Dawkins indulged in a long and seemingly irrelevant riff on dog breeding. He hoped to convince his readers that complex and fantastical intracellular machines come about by chance (and mind comes from mud) on account of the vast variety that humans can produce by selective breeding of dogs.

Correspondents have pointed out that Dawkins is counting on his readers' ignorance of a fundamental fact about dog breeding- that is depends on existing traits and does not introduce new ones. One writes, for example,

The problem is that the variety of dogs obtained through breeding programs is an example of the variation possible within the dog genome, but (and this is a very big 'but') there are natural limits to variation.

Darwinism predicts that there are no taxonomic limits to variation. However, every breeding experiment of the last 100 years that attempts to see how far variation can go (E. coli, drosophila, etc.) always encounters limits beyond which further change is not possible. Thus, the fundamental prediction of Darwinian theory has been consistently falsified in a century's worth of experimental testing. Dog breeding, itself, encounters these limits.
The bottom line is that dog breeding, and the observed limits to variation within dogs, falsifies the most important prediction of Darwinian theory.

What is he talking about?
Another correspondent, David A. DeWitt, author of Unraveling the Origins Controversy , enlightened me further,

Many of the traits for different dog breeds are examples of neoteny.

Neoteny refers to the maintaining of juvenile characteristics into adulthood. Mutations can prevent proper development and maturation. Even though particular traits might seem like they are novel, in such cases it is really a loss of information since the animal has stunted development in one trait.

This is why some breeds of dogs are so cute and look like puppies even though they are full grown (Jack Russel, Shitzu etc).

Well, that makes sense. The disgusting little freaky-poos that infest my neighbourhood are really just immature? Makes sense, all right.*

I wrote back to ask,

David, is there not also some distortion involved, maintained by selective breeding? I am thinking in particular of the Basset hound, the bulldog , and the dachsund. Do these distortions not shorten life in many cases?

Also, the single most important trait in domestic dogs is that the animal not be aggressive around humans. (That would be the fastest way for a dog to get himself a one-way trip to the vet's office.) But that means selecting for a trait that would NOT aid survival in nature.

The breeds that are commonly trained to BE aggressive toward humans (intentionally) are wolfhounds like German Shepherds. But they have the most characteristics in common with wild animals like wolves.

In other words, domestic breeding not only does not employ natural selection, but it selects for traits that would not be chosen in any process that favoured survivability. Is that correct?

He replied, with a long, careful answer:

Pure breed dogs often do have shorter lives than "mutts". Presumably, this is because of severe inbreeding. The result is that mutations for particular diseases/defects become concentrated.

So when people have selected for those traits that comprise the poodle breed, they have also inadvertently selected several serious genetic defects. Certain breeds are prone to the same diseases and early causes of death.

Regarding the lack of aggression in dogs...this is also considered an example of a neotenous trait (juvenile traits that persist into adulthood).

When wolves are very very young, they are not so aggressive. Many of the behaviors of our dog breeds are also neotenous. There is plenty of information about this on the internet. The less a dog is physically like a wolf, the less aggressive the dog.

The most important thing to understand about dog breeding is that there is not new genetic information (from mutation) that is being supplied. Through breeding, humans are either shuffling genes that pre-exist in the population (like different poker hands from the same deck) or preserving mutations that amount to developmental defects.

While developmental defects can look like new traits (short stubby legs or a short snout for example or a Chihuahua that looks like an embryonic dog) they are not new at all since it is simply preservation of a previous stage.

Another example of a neotenous trait would be a mutation that leads to webbing between fingers in a human. During development, the cells between the fingers are supposed to go through a process of programmed cell death (apoptosis). If the cells do not die (because of a mutation), then the remaining tissue would be webbed fingers.

Since all human babies go through such a stage, it would not be a new trait even though it looks like it. It is preservation of a previous developmental stage because of a mutation in the normal developmental pathway. This highlights another aspect to the limits of Darwinian evolution.

Often, dogs are considered an exception because they are so "plastic". In reality, it is just that we have been able to preserve a wider array of developmental defects. Dawkins pulled a real bait and switch trick when he criticized Behe's Edge of Evolution using dog breeding. Dog breeds highlight the limits of evolutionary change, but Dawkins used the diversity of dogs (from developmental defects) to rebut this fact.

However, since most people do not understand the preservation of juvenile characteristics, they can be fooled into thinking that evolution really can produce new traits.

Hmmm. We hear plenty about Darwin's natural selection, but almost nothing about neoteny. And, to the extent that Dawkins was counting on our ignorance of neoteny, why SHOULD he bother to read Edge of Evolution before discouraging others from reading it?

(*Thanks, Dr. DeWitt! I've been looking for years for a way to insult the local infestation of little canine swine without being cruel. Like, neighbours, please, if you're going to have a dog, have a dog. Otherwise, be a cat person like me.)

Also, at the Post-Darwinist:

Former atheist Antony Flew to author book on God as designer

British sociologist Steve Fuller is prepared to give Darwin a decent burial.

O'Leary's thoughts on "teaching the controversy", riffing off Freeman Dyson

Anti-ID physicist on humans as pollution.

Another undead materialist myth: Copernicus "demoted" man from center of universe

Steve Weinberg flogs the "Christians believe in a flat earth" myth

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the forthcoming The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

Yesterday, the Baylor University administration shut down Prof. Robert Marks's Evolutionary Informatics Lab because the lab's research was perceived as linked to intelligent design (ID).

Robert J. Marks II, Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Baylor, had hoped that a late-August compromise would save his lab, but the University withdrew from the previous offer yesterday morning. While President Lilley was not at the meeting, an insider senses his hand in the affair, noting that Lilley was the only person with the authority to overturn what the Provost, who was at the meeting, agreed to. [developing story ... go here for more soon]

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Rationalwiki is an online encyclopedia struggling to be born. Judging from the copy I saw August 29, 2007 (which will probably change), it appears to be written by a group of people who see themselves as the guardians of reason, progress, and enlightenment, against "the anti-science movement" and "crank ideas".

Nowadays, theirs is a pretty crowded field, in which hordes of half-educated and indifferently talented placeholders aim their resentment at anyone capable of questioning materialist dogmas.

Read more here

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the forthcoming The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

I just heard from a source I think reliable that Stuart Pivar has dropped his lawsuit against PZ Myers. 'Bout time, too. I stand by my comment of earlier today:

Incidentally, I do not expect PZ to lose his pajamas to the Pivar writ.

Defamation suits generally require a demonstration of harm. PZ verbally assaults people more or less on a daily basis, and who can really claim to have been harmed thereby other than himself?

Had he thought of choosing his targets more carefully and aiming more accurately, he might run risks that are not foreseen in the present case.

Let the Internet police itself.

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Tenzin Gyatso, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama , was chosen the spiritual and political leader of the Tibetan Buddhists as a small child in 1940. (He was believed to be the reincarnation of the Thirteenth Lama.) After a failed 1959 revolt against the 1949 Chinese takeover of Tibet, his government has been exiled at Dharamsala, India, along with tens of thousands of Tibetans.

The Lama would be a theocrat if he were not in exile. However, he is not at all most people's idea of a theocrat. He is an intensely curious man who has made friends with great philosophers of science and scientists, such as Karl Popper, Carl von Weizsäcker, and David Bohm. He also championed interreligious understanding, all the while campaigning for the rights of the Tibetan people. In 1989, he received the Nobel Peace Prize.

In particular, he is well known for his Mind and Life conferences, which bring together physicists and neuroscientists to hear reports on neuroscience investigations into the workings of the human mind, along with input from a Buddhist persepective. As Mario Beauregard and I note in The Spiritual Brain, Buddhists have attempted to understand consciousness for several millennia, but only recently have neuroscience tools been an option. Hence their interest.

The Lama's 2005 book, The Universe in a Single Atom: The Convergence of Science and Spirituality (New York: Morgan Road Books, 2005), was released amid considerable controversy. Hundreds of neuroscientists protested his addressing a 2005 conference because they saw it as mixing science and religion. More on that later. His book, Single Atom, is still a top seller in the Religion and Spirituality category.

What makes Single Atom interesting for the intelligent design controversy is the way in which an atheistic Buddhist approach to origins differs dramatically from a Western theistic approach - but comes round to rejecting Darwinism all the same. Let’s have a look at some of those differences.

Next: Part Two: If you are a Buddhist, what would test your faith and what wouldn't?

Series:

Part One: Intelligent design east? The Dalai Lama kisses Darwin goodbye

Part Two: If you are a Buddhist, what would test your faith and what wouldn't?

Part Three: Why does the Dalai Lama reject Darwinism?

Part Four: Materialist neuroscientists vs. the Dalai Lama

Part Five: Other reviews of Single Atom: Materialists and non-materialists continue to lock horns

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the forthcoming The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Here are two key differences between Christian and Buddhists' understanding of the issues around science, materialism, Darwinism and such:

1. Big Bang cosmology is NOT an aid to a Buddhist's faith

Big bang cosmology, which only really gained widespread science acceptance in the last fifty years, has often been used to support theistic religious belief in the West - as I explored in some detail in my book on the intelligent design controversy, By Design or by Chance?. The Lama, however, dislikes it much, and would prefer an eternal or automatically self-renewing universe. He explains,

From the Buddhist perspective, the idea that there is a single definite beginning is highly problematic. If there were such an absolute beginning, logically speaking, this leaves only two options. One is theism, which proposes that the universe is created by an intelligence that is totally transcendent, and therefore outside the laws of cause and effect. The second option is that the universe came into being from no cause at all. Buddhism rejects both these options. (P. 82)

Naturally, the Lama hopes that someone will disprove the Big Bang. I am glad he is so honest, compared to some atheist cosmologists, who attempt to undermine the Big Bang for what I suspect are precisely the same reasons - but without admitting the nature of their dissatisfaction.

2. Origin of consciousness vs. origin of life: Which is more important?

Western thinkers tend to place a great deal of emphasis on the difference between life and non-life, thus the problem of the origin of life receives considerable attention. But Buddhists are not especially interested in that problem, according to the Lama.

Much more important to Buddhists is the origin of the capacity for conscious experience. That is because Buddhists do not emphasize the difference between life and non-life, but rather the difference between experience and non-experience. For example, a Christian might think that a coral colony is closer to a dog than to a rock because the colony is, after all, alive.

But a Buddhist might think otherwise. He might consider the coral colony closer to a rock than to a dog because the colony is not a subject of conscious experience. The dog, by contrast, is a subject of conscious experience to some extent, in the sense that his canine mind, while limited, perceives what happens to him.

In other words, the Buddhist is primarily interested in the problem of mind rather than the problem of life. How does the mind arise? How does one become a subject of conscious experience, rather than an object colliding with other objects? And what is the significance of being a subject rather than an object? (The fundamental Buddhist doctrine of karma, whatever its merits, depends on the significance of being a subject and making morally accountable choices.)

Next: Part Three: Why does the Dalai Lama reject Darwinism?

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the forthcoming The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

The Lama has no problem with evolution in principle. But he clearly (though tactfully) rejects Darwinism (non-purposeful evolution) as an explanation for the history of life on earth. However, he rejects it for somewhat different reasons than many Christians do. He is not troubled by the prospect that humans and apes may be genetic cousins but he has three primary reasons for doubt.

First, he does not agree that the development of the universe is random. Indeed, Buddhism places law or karma in precisely the place where most Christians would put God. But the law of karma requires causation rather than randomness. The Lama writes,

From the philosophical point of view, the idea that these mutations, which have such far-reaching implications, take place naturally is unproblematic, but that they are purely random strikes me as unsatisfying. It leaves open the question of whether this randomness is best understood as an objective feature of reality or better understood as indicating some kind of hidden causality. (P. 104)

Second, he rejects the idea that the mind is not real and that therefore consciousness is an illusion. Many people do not realize that a central axiom of materialist science is that the mind is merely a buzz created by the neurons, with no real power to affect anything. That is, the materialist is not just saying that there is no God, he is also saying that there is no you. But the Lama does realize that. Indeed, he was forced to, in a dialogue with a materialist scientist that he recounts in Single Atom,

I said to one of the scientists: "It seems very evident that due to changes in the chemical processes of the brain, many of our subjective experiences like perception and sensation occur. Can one envision to reversal of this causal process? Can one postulate that pure thought itself could effect a change in the chemical processes of the brain?" I was asking whether, conceptually at least, we could allow the possibility of both upward and downward causation.

The scientist's response was quite surprising. He said that since all mental states arise from physical states, it is not possible for downward causation to occur. Although out of politeness, I did not respond at the time, I thought then and still think that here is as yet no scientific basis for such a categorical claim. The view that all mental processes are necessarily physical processes is a metaphysical assumption, not a scientific fact. I feel that, in the spirit of scientific inquiry, it is critical that we allow the question to remain open, and not conflate our assumptions with empirical fact. (p. 128)

As a Buddhist, he places a great deal of emphasis on the idea that the universe is top down, not bottom up. To him, the mind is real and creative. It is independent of matter. On that, he is not prepared to budge, as his reacton to the scientist shows. He writes further,

In order for the study of consciousness to be complete, we need a methodology that would account not only for what is occurring at the neurological and biochemical levels but also for the subjective experience of consciousness itself. Even when combined, neuroscience and behavioral psychology do not shed enough light on the subjective experience, as both approaches still place primary importance on the objective, third-person perspective. Contemplative traditions on the while have historically emphasized subjective, first-person investigation of the nature and functions of consciousness, by training the mind to focus in a disciplined way on its own internal states. (P. 141)

In other words, no view of mind is accurate if it dismisses the you in you.

Third, he rejects the idea that no one genuinely feels compassion (altruism). Strict Darwinism accounts for altruism as simply the way that your selfish genes compel you to spread them. Your feelings are useful illusions that help spread your genes. He acknowledges,

Some more dogmatic Darwinians have suggested that natural selection and survival of the fittest are best understood at the level of individual genes. Here we see the reduction of the strong metaphysical belief in the principle of self-interest to imply that somehow individual genes behave in a selfish way. I do not know how many of today's scientists hold such radical views, As it stands the current biological model does not allow for the possibility of real altruism. (P. 113)

Revisiting the topic and choosing his words carefully, the Lama writes,

I am told there is in fact an entire discipline called ‘evolutionary psychology.’ To an extent I can see how evolutionary accounts can be given for the emergence of basic emotions such as attachment, anger, and fear. However ... I cannot envision how the evolutionary approach can do justice to the richness of the emotional world and the subjective quality of experience. (P. 181)

His views come as no surprise because the development of compassion is central to the Buddhist understanding of spiritual growth. But they proved unacceptable to many neuroscientists.

Next: Part Four: Materialist neuroscientists vs. the Lama

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

In its spring 2005 newsletter, the Society for Neuroscience announced that the Dalai Lama had agreed to be the first-ever speaker in an annual lecture series, "Dialogues Between Neuroscience
and Society," in Washington, DC. As we have seen, the Lama comes from an ancient tradition of contemplation of mind, and he is intensely interested in (and financially supportive of) new tools that might assist understanding. So why did hundreds of neuroscientists sign a petition protesting his lecture?

Well, as non-materialist neuroscientist Mario Beauregard and I recount in The Spiritual Brain, a protester explained,

Neuroscience more than other disciplines is the science at the interface between modern philosophy and science. No opportunity should be given to anybody to use neuroscience for supporting transcendent views of the world.

Well there you have it. Neuroscience is one of the handmaidens of materialism, and must not be co-opted by anyone who doubts materialism.

But the story is really more complex than that. While the protesters claimed that they did not want science entangled with religion, they were actually pretty entangled themselves. One key grievance was the Lama's acceptance of the doctrine of reincarnation.

But that raises the question, why should neuroscientists - as neuroscientists - care whether the Lama believes that he is the reincarnation of the Thirteenth Dalai Lama? Neuroscience as a discipline will likely find the subject unresearchable. Only current brains can be researched by neuroscience. If a mind were formerly instantiated in the brain of another body, how would the neuroscientist know? The whole question is precisely the sort that neuroscientists should politely refuse to get involved in because it does not suggest useful research directions. But the protestors did want to get involved because, for them, materialism amounts to a religion. Hence the uproar.

As it happened, the Lama gave an excellent speech on science and ethics, of the sort quite typical for a religious leader, and the whole affair died down quietly. But it was a troubling reminder of the allegiance that many in science still feel toward materialism.

Next: Part Five: Other reviews of Single Atom: Materialists and non-materialists continue to lock horns

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the forthcoming The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Science writer George Johnson in The New York Times homed right in on the anti-Darwinist implications of the Lama’s approach to science in Single Atom:

But when it comes to questions about life and its origins, this would-be man of science begins to waver. Though he professes to accept evolutionary theory, he recoils at one of its most basic tenets: that the mutations that provide the raw material for natural selection occur at random. Look deeply enough, he suggests, and the randomness will turn out to be complexity in disguise - "hidden causality," the Buddha's smile. There you have it, Eastern religion's version of intelligent design. He also opposes physical explanations for consciousness, invoking instead the existence of some kind of irreducible mind stuff, an idea rejected long ago by mainstream science."

In other words, for Johnson, science is the handmaid of materialism, and a person is scientifically minded to the extent that he is a materialist.

Buddhist scholar B. Alan Wallace responds:

... mainstream science has largely chosen to ignore such evidence [for the mind as real] on the grounds that there must be a physical explanation for consciousness. Over the past century, cognitive science has focused on third-person measurements of the physical correlates of mental phenomena, while marginalizing introspection, the only means by which mental processes can be observed directly. As a result of this materialistic bias, scientists have yet to come to a consensus regarding the definition of consciousness, they have no means of detecting it or even its neural correlates, and they have yet to identify the necessary and sufficient causes of consciousness, and they have not discovered how neural events influence mental events or how mental processes influence each other. Scientists have made great progress in revealing the physical correlates of specific mental phenomena, but they have left us in the dark regarding most of the fundamental questions about the nature and origins of consciousness.

Materialism, in today's circumstances, is very much an act of faith, as Mario Beauregard and I show in The Spiritual Brain - an act of faith that most people, East and West, are still unprepared to make, and probably always will be. A fascinating study for some of us will be the different ways in which the issues play out, east and west.

Return to beginning: Part One: Intelligent design east? The Dalai Lama kisses Darwin goodbye

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the forthcoming The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

I just heard from a contact who knows his way around that studio who saw my recent post about the anonymous warning that Darwinists might sue the makers of the Ben Stein Expelled film. The film does not flatter them, and perhaps they'd want to at least stop it from opening on Darwin's birthday next February. Said studio rat writes,

Not only would any lawsuit be a waste of time, but there was nothing unethical about how they obtained interviews from what I've heard. In some cases, namely Richard Dawkins but a number of others as well, the interviewee saw the questions prior to the interview and it was very clear what the subject matter was about. Interviewees were told that the working title was Crossroads, which it was for a while (remember some interviews happened more than a year ago). It's not uncommon for a movie to have one or even a few working titles while it is being produced.

At the end of each interview the interviewees were asked to sign a release form. If they didn't like how the interview had gone it seems that would have been the time to say 'no, I won't sign that' which would have protected them from being included in the film.

He wonders how likely it is that Richard Dawkins or PZ Myers said anything that they haven't said or written publicly before.

Not likely.

Is anyone other than the Pharyngulite complaining? Funny, I would have thought that the Prophet of the Pharyngula would be too busy with other legal matters.

Anyway, Ratsy says he was kind of expecting the Darwoids to make these noises because they don't have many other options. The picture ain't pretty, apparently, but it isn't illegal either. I'm waiting to see if Premise Media wants to issue a statement. Might clear the air a bit.

Update: Here's a podcast with the executive producer of Expelled, Walt Ruloff.

Ruloff gives a brief overview of Expelled, explains how he came to spend over two years making the film, talks about intelligent design as a disruptive technology compared to dogmatic Darwinian evolution, and tells how the film will show that Darwinian evolution is a science stopper. Rather than get mired in the politics of the debate, Ruloff explains that Expelled gets to "where the rubber meets the road, where the science is being done."

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Canadian science fiction writer Rob Sawyer, author of The Calculating God, which explores the idea of intelligent design, has won China's top science fiction prize.

CHENGDU, CHINA, 26 AUGUST 2007: Robert J. Sawyer of Mississauga, Ontario, Canada, today won China's top science-fiction award, the Galaxy Award, in the category "Most Popular Foreign Author of the Year." The award, voted on by Chinese readers, was presented at the Chengdu International Science Fiction and Fantasy Festival, the largest science-fiction conference ever held in China. (The last international SF&F conference in China was held ten years ago, in 1997.)

Chinese translations of Sawyer's novels are published by Science Fiction World, headquartered in Chengdu, and his short stories have appeared in SCIENCE FICTION WORLD magazine, the world's largest-circulation SF publication; Sawyer is also a past columnist for that magazine.

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The Galaxy Award honors Sawyer's entire oeuvre, rather than a specific book. The award was presented at a gala ceremony at the Chengdu Museum of Science and Technology.

He deserves it. His sci-fi explores serious issues, not just the crises of geekhood. My review of Calculating God is here.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the forthcoming The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).