The ID Report

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

The world's best-known Darwinist happens to be a Brit, Richard Dawkins (though he owes his position as Oxford's Professor of the Public Understanding of Science, to American Microsoft billionaire Charles Simonyi).

Dawkins also happens, as we have seen, to be a vociferous atheist. So, when a group of British science types wanted to investigate intelligent design theory, they found themselves in an environment where atheism and science were rather hard to separate.

A November 19, 2006 article in the London Times, "Godless Dawkins Challenges Schools", screamed

RICHARD DAWKINS, the Oxford University professor and campaigning atheist, is planning to take his fight against God into the classroom by flooding schools with anti-religious literature.

Just what the beleaguered schools need. Caught between Islamic extremists, drug dealers, sclerotic administrators, antisocial unions, and irresponsible parents, they, um, need a whack of "anti-God" literature to mix into the swirl ...

The Guardian was quick to spread rumours that Brit ID folk were all young earth creationists (=the planet is only 6000 years old and was crated in 144 hours), making clear that either you believe in Darwinism (mud creates mind) or you believe that the planet is only 6000 years old.

That, of course, lets Darwinism off pretty easy ...

Meanwhile, the budding Brit ID group, Truth in Science, has come under serious fire simply for wanting to get the materialist crud out of science education, to enable a discussion of the questions around law, chance, and design. But that won't be easy.

So many elite atheists are so bound up with Darwinism as a creation story that it appears to be almost immune from rational criticism. The atheists' desperation is easier to understand if you look at the actual worldwide trend against their view.

Next: Part 11: So what are the actual trends in religion?

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 (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

As far as understanding the anti-God crusade is concerned, the most useful thing to know is that the longstanding mid-twentieth century prediction that religious belief would wither away has been largely falsified. Rather, it is atheism that is stagnant or withering away. As Uwe Siemon-Netto writes, for UPI (March 3, 2005),

"Atheism as a theoretical position is in decline worldwide," Munich theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg told United Press International Tuesday.

His Oxford colleague Alister McGrath agrees. Atheism's "future seems increasingly to lie in the private beliefs of individuals rather than in the great public domain it once regarded as its habitat," he wrote in the U.S. magazine, Christianity Today.

Two developments are plaguing atheism these days. One is that it appears to be losing its scientific underpinnings. The other is the historical experience of hundreds of millions of people worldwide that atheists are in no position to claim the moral high ground.

It's no wonder that militant atheists are anxiously writing books promoting their view. Their view is sufficiently odd that they are sure to find an audience. But even those who don't believe in God do not necessarily describe themselves as atheists. The major change has not been an increase in atheism, but the rise of a much broader and more eclectic spectrum of beliefs, and in general, a return to belief in meaning, purpose, or God. One may question the merit of a great deal of it, but the trend is clear.

I suppose that atheists are like dinosaurs. If doomed dinosaurs could write books, they too would find a large audience - but a large audience might not change their fate.

More ominously, the atheist books have not advanced new ideas. The only thing that's really new is the extremism, but that wears pretty thin after a while.

Meanwhile, as Richard A Schweder notes in The New York Times , referencing the atheistic horrors of the twentieth century,

At the turn of the millennium it was pretty hard not to notice that the 20th century was probably the worst one yet, and that the big causes of all the death and destruction had rather little to do with religion.

[ ... ]

Even some children within the enclave are retreating from the Enlightenment in their quest for a spiritual revival; one discovers perfectly rational and devout Jews or Hindus in one's own family, or living down the block. If religion is a delusion, it is a delusion with a future, which it may be hazardous for us to deny. A shared conception of the soul, the sacred and transcendental values may be a prerequisite for any viable society.

The flurry of court cases and civil rights hearings around specific issues such as intelligent design in the school system , at universities , or in science facilities are a symptom of the change. The materialists, atheists, and Darwinists must rely on courts to compel where their ideas cannot persuade.

Next: Part 12 Unmasking the authoritarian intent of the militant atheist campaign

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 (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

While some clergy are content to reassure their congregations that going along with materialism (especially Darwinism) is okay, many thoughtful Christians and Muslims are getting the picture pretty fast. The threat is not an intellectual one, but a political one.

Generally, Christian philosophers are not taking the anti-God campaign very seriously. Philosopher Alvin Plantinga writes that Dawkins' The God Delusion is difficult to take seriously as philosophy:

Now despite the fact that ths book is mainly philosophy, Dawkins is not a philosopher (he's a biologist). Even taking this into account, however, much of the philosophy he purveys is at best jejune. You might say that some of his forays into philosophy are at best sophomoric, but that would be unfair to sophomores; the fact is (grade inflation aside) many of his arguments would receive a failing grade in a sophomore philosophy class. This, combined with the arrogant, smarter-than-thou ('thou' being believers in God) tone of the book can be annoying. I shall put irritation aside, however and do my best to take Dawkins’ main argument seriously.

The boredom and lack of defensiveness on the part of Christian philosophers is not too surprising, considering that - as has been widely noted - the anti-God campaign has not come up with a single new idea of any substance.

(Note: The whole of Plantinga's comments will be available at Books and Culture in due course.)

But one thing the anti-God campaign has come up with is the desire for new rules to restrict religious believers. As Sam Schulman notes in "Without God, Gall Is Permitted" (Wall Street Journal ),

What is new about the new atheists? It's not their arguments. Spend as much time as you like with a pile of the recent anti-religion books, but you won't encounter a single point you didn't hear in your freshman dormitory. It's their tone that is novel. Belief, in their eyes, is not just misguided but contemptible, the product of provincial minds, the mark of people who need to be told how to think and how to vote--both of which, the new atheists assure us, they do in lockstep with the pope and Jerry Falwell.

For them, belief in God is beyond childish, it is unsuitable for children. Today's atheists are particularly disgusted by the religious training of young people--which Dr. Dawkins calls "a form of child abuse." He even floats the idea that the state should intervene to protect children from their parents' religious beliefs.

Schulman is unsparing in his description of the truncated sort of literature that this new generation of atheists produces.

Tobias Jones writes in The Guardian that the campaign is not merely authoritarian but totalitarian:

There's an aspiring totalitarianism in Britain which is brilliantly disguised. It's disguised because the would-be dictators - and there are many of them - all pretend to be more tolerant than thou. They hide alongside the anti-racists, the anti-homophobes and anti-sexists. But what they are really against is something very different. They - call them secular fundamentalists - are anti-God, and what they really want is the eradication of religion, and all believers, from the face of the earth.

Well, yes. Given that materialist atheists do not believe in free will, they have nothing to lose by attempting to simply force people to do what they want. Or use eugenics for the purpose. The thing to see here is that people who do not believe in free will do usually enjoy power and its uses.

For that matter, Dinesh D'Souza comments that, generally speaking, materialist atheism has been a much better recipe for mass murder in recent history than has any form of religious violence or persecution:

It is strange to witness the passion with which some secular figures rail against the misdeeds of the Crusaders and Inquisitors more than 500 years ago. The number sentenced to death by the Spanish Inquisition appears to be about 10,000. Some historians contend that an additional 100,000 died in jail due to malnutrition or illness.

These figures are tragic, and of course population levels were much lower at the time. But even so, they are minuscule compared with the death tolls produced by the atheist despotisms of the 20th century. In the name of creating their version of a religion-free utopia, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Mao Zedong produced the kind of mass slaughter that no Inquisitor could possibly match. Collectively these atheist tyrants murdered more than 100 million people.

But for people who believe that humans are "a mere grab bag of atomic particles", accusations of violence against religious groups are probably only talking points anyway.

Slowly, those who believe in a non-materialist universe are beginning to see that they have more in common with each other, despite differences in the specifics of their beliefs, than they do with the materialists. Muslim intellectual and ID enthusiast Mustafa Akyol observes:

Said Nursi, in the 1950s, foresaw an alliance between Islam and Christianity against materialism. He prophetically wrote, "A tyrannical current born of naturalist and materialist philosophy will gradually gain strength and spread at the end of time, reaching such a degree that it denies God. ... Although defeated before the atheistic current while separate, Christianity and Islam will have the capability to defeat and rout it as a result of their alliance" (Nursi, Letters, s. 77-78). Half a century after Nursi, the stage for that alliance is set.

Intellectual Muslims, fed up with the pathological anti-Western hatred of the radicals who defame Islam by their violent acts, are seeking the right way to express and stand for their faith and identity in the modern world.

Intellectual Christians have already found that way. They encountered materialism before we did, because it grew right in the heart of Christendom. They have been standing against it for several decades.

Akyol is perceptive in seeing that materialists use Western Christian secularism - which originated in a desire not to violate the conscience of others - to make war on all spiritual traditions.

People from the great religious traditions of the East are also beginning to see what is at stake.

One problem that we face in the West today, however, is that many Christians, unlike those of whom Akyol speaks, have simply accommodated to materialism, and to Darwinism as its creation story.

Next: Part 13: Theistic evolutionism and the new militant atheism

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 (Harper 2007).

The boredom and lack of defensiveness on the part of Christian philosophers is not too surprising, considering that - as has been widely noted - the anti-God campaign has not come up with a single new idea of any substance.

(Note: The whole of Plantinga's comments will be available at Books and Culture in due course.)

But one thing the anti-God campaign has come up with is the desire for new rules to restrict religious believers. As Sam Schulman notes in "Without God, Gall Is Permitted" (Wall Street Journal ),

What is new about the new atheists? It's not their arguments. Spend as much time as you like with a pile of the recent anti-religion books, but you won't encounter a single point you didn't hear in your freshman dormitory. It's their tone that is novel. Belief, in their eyes, is not just misguided but contemptible, the product of provincial minds, the mark of people who need to be told how to think and how to vote--both of which, the new atheists assure us, they do in lockstep with the pope and Jerry Falwell.

For them, belief in God is beyond childish, it is unsuitable for children. Today's atheists are particularly disgusted by the religious training of young people--which Dr. Dawkins calls "a form of child abuse." He even floats the idea that the state should intervene to protect children from their parents' religious beliefs.

Schulman is unsparing in his description of the truncated sort of literature that this new generation of atheists produces.

Tobias Jones writes in The Guardian that the campaign is not merely authoritarian but totalitarian:

There's an aspiring totalitarianism in Britain which is brilliantly disguised. It's disguised because the would-be dictators - and there are many of them - all pretend to be more tolerant than thou. They hide alongside the anti-racists, the anti-homophobes and anti-sexists. But what they are really against is something very different. They - call them secular fundamentalists - are anti-God, and what they really want is the eradication of religion, and all believers, from the face of the earth.

Well, yes. Given that materialist atheists do not believe in free will, they have nothing to lose by attempting to simply force people to do what they want. Or use eugenics for the purpose. The thing to see here is that people who do not believe in free will do usually enjoy power and its uses.

For that matter, Dinesh D'Souza comments that, generally speaking, materialist atheism has been a much better recipe for mass murder in recent history than has any form of religious violence or persecution:

It is strange to witness the passion with which some secular figures rail against the misdeeds of the Crusaders and Inquisitors more than 500 years ago. The number sentenced to death by the Spanish Inquisition appears to be about 10,000. Some historians contend that an additional 100,000 died in jail due to malnutrition or illness.

These figures are tragic, and of course population levels were much lower at the time. But even so, they are minuscule compared with the death tolls produced by the atheist despotisms of the 20th century. In the name of creating their version of a religion-free utopia, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Mao Zedong produced the kind of mass slaughter that no Inquisitor could possibly match. Collectively these atheist tyrants murdered more than 100 million people.
But for people who believe that humans are "a mere grab bag of atomic particles", accusations of violence against religious groups are probably only talking points anyway.

Slowly, those who believe in a non-materialist universe are beginning to see that they have more in common with each other, despite differences in the specifics of their beliefs, than they do with the materialists. Muslim intellectual and ID enthusiast Mustafa Akyol observes:

Said Nursi, in the 1950s, foresaw an alliance between Islam and Christianity against materialism. He prophetically wrote, "A tyrannical current born of naturalist and materialist philosophy will gradually gain strength and spread at the end of time, reaching such a degree that it denies God. ... Although defeated before the atheistic current while separate, Christianity and Islam will have the capability to defeat and rout it as a result of their alliance" (Nursi, Letters, s. 77-78). Half a century after Nursi, the stage for that alliance is set.

Intellectual Muslims, fed up with the pathological anti-Western hatred of the radicals who defame Islam by their violent acts, are seeking the right way to express and stand for their faith and identity in the modern world.

Intellectual Christians have already found that way. They encountered materialism before we did, because it grew right in the heart of Christendom. They have been standing against it for several decades.

Akyol is perceptive in seeing that materialists use Western Christian secularism - which originated in a desire not to violate the conscience of others - to make war on all spiritual traditions.

People from the great religious traditions of the East are also beginning to see what is at stake.

One problem that we face in the West today, however, is that many Christians, unlike those of whom Akyol speaks, have simply accommodated to materialism, and to Darwinism as its creation story.

Next: Part 13: Theistic evolutionism and the new militant atheism

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 (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

The biggest loser from the new militant atheism which claims to speak for science is the "accommodationist" type of theistic evolutionist.

Traditionally, theistic evolution simply meant that theists accept that the world has not always appeared as it does today. Once there were trilobites; now there are horses. Life forms rise and fall, as do empires and hemlines.

However, much of what is called theistic evolution today is simply an attempt to sell Darwinism, the creation story of materialism, to people who are not materialists. I call that "accommodationist" theistic evolution - it attempts to accommodate spiritually directed institutions to rule by materialists.

One result is projects like Evolution Sunday or the Clergy Project (getting clergy to promote materialism in the guise of Darwinism).

Usually, Christians (or other theists or people who accept that there is meaning and purpose in the universe) are urged to "accept" - in broad terms - "evolution." Darwinism, which nakedly refutes everything the theist believes, is the form of evolution that the sponsors are actually interested in promoting, to judge from their other activities. But they do not spell out its implications with the candor that the anti-God Darwinists do.

Surprising numbers of clergy go along with it, too. For example, in this article, a Lutheran "poster cleric" Nelson Rivera reassures us,

For people of faith, "thinking from below," that is from the realms of nature and history, is helpful. When we think from below, we can recognize the involvement of God with God’s people and creation, as is true with thinking from above. Thinking from below, however, leaves room and freedom for recognizing that God makes it possible for us to gain a perspective from our experience in the world. ... Eventually, however, we get to some metaphysical construction about our relationship to the whole and to God.

Thinking from above, by contrast, allows very little space, if any, for considering the evolutionary process, which requires freedom and some place to acknowledge chance and accident. Chance and accident are consistent with God's involvement in human life and creation. In thinking from above one can’t easily move from there to allow for knowledge gleaned from a study of evolutionary biology. The study of evolutionary biology teaches us much about the richness, complexity and wonder of God and God's creation. We need to remember, though, that it's sinful for us to think we have the capacity to finally figure out creation and who God is.

"Thinking from below" (the virtuous thing to do) necessarily means accepting materialism. The universe is clearly either either bottom up or top down, and Rivera's pitch is just as clearly a sell job for bottom up - substituting materialism for spirituality. And of course, it is "sinful" for us to think we can finally know God, even though that is one of the promises of Scripture - on earth as it is in heaven.

Sometimes, political messages are obvious as well, even in churches that promote separaton of church and state.

In other cases, accommodationists promote a self-limiting (kenotic) God, in order to rescue Darwinism. As Peter James Causton perceptively writes in "Darwin's Ghost: Can Evolution & Christianity Be Reconciled?" (Catholic thinkmag Commonweal),

in its confident assertions about how God does and does not create, kenotic theology cannot avoid a certain air of presumption. Might it not also be presumptive in its wholesale embrace of Darwinism?

Causton writes cautiously, but there may be less need for caution than in the past, at least in Catholic circles. The Catholic Church, long misrepresented as accepting Darwinism, is beginning to make its position ever more clear. Christoph, Cardinal Schoenborn has firmly insisted that teaching only Darwinism in schools means teaching only a "materialistic, atheistic" view of the universe. Of course that's true - but it didn't used to be polite for a senior cleric to say so.

The underlying problem of accommodationist theistic evolution, of course, is the felt need to embrace Darwinism - and the materialism from which it springs. As I have suggested above, the most likely explanation, based on my encounters with theistic evolution accommodationists, is that they assume that materialism is basically true and that spiritual traditions must somehow accommodate themselves to its rule.

Put another way: Once you do think that materialism is not true, Darwinism is not true either. That raises the question of why any clergy should feel the need to sell "evolution" to their congregations, as part of their ministry.

That's why the accommodationists are the big losers. People will think of questions they never used to ask before, like "why exactly are you telling us all this stuff about how God allows everything to happen by chance .... ?"

Meanwhile, the militant atheists push on, saying - essentially - the same things militant atheists said in the eighteenth century, to as much or little purpose, and most of the world goes on ignoring them. Plus ca change ...

Return to the beginning: http://www.arn.org/blogs/index.php/2/2007/02/26/lstrongglemgpart_1_l_emg_what_s_with_the

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 (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

(Post-Darwinist is just what you think, life without Darwin. Mindful Hack is Denyse's blog on the neuroscience issues relevant to the intelligent design controversy.)

Evolutionary biology: Better without Darwin?

Basically, the controversy was never about Darwin's theory as such, of course, but about the use of Darwin's theory to preach a materialist origin of life and the mind. It is one thing to say that natural selection explains which squirrels will survive the winter - another to say that it completely explains life, the universe, and all that. Materialists, faced with growing dissent worldwide, now want to spin materialism through some sort of "God-talk"

Why did anyone ever believe Darwinism?
One reason is that when third-raters proffer unfalsifiable explanations - without themselves having the least sense that they might not be proferring wisdom - they can sound very, very convincing.

New Age discovers AI and ID?

The scenario, as prophesied by Ray Kurzweil's Foreword, seems materialist, but it's a bit hard to tell. Kurzweil, interestingly, is not a fan of Carl Sagan's billions of civilizations out there in space.

Marsupial frogs: Another reason to check out of Darwinism
"Marsupial frogs put the lie to two Darwinian myths: (1) that homologous features arise through similar developmental pathways, and (2) that development replays evolutionary history. " - Jonathan Wells

Intelligent design like the Big Bang theory?

Now, I don't know if intelligent design will turn out to be as significant - or more or less - than the Big Bang theory, but I do know the size of the debt that ID owes to the Big Bang.

Recent stories at the Mindful Hack

1. Health: Hospitals now factor lifestyle beliefs and practices into wellness

Some hospitals have come a long way toward realizing how important it is to adapt to the life beliefs of patients, especially the older ones, according to a recent article in Jewish World Review:
"The hospital perks of yesteryear — designer gowns, valet parking, Internet access — stressed luxury and convenience. Today, hospitals have found G-d.

Hospitals are now touting "Shabbat elevators" for observant Jews, "bloodless surgery" for Jehovah's Witnesses and Muslim prayer rooms.

The new services show that hospitals have begun adapting to the religious mosaic of patients — and are increasingly marketing to patients not by disease or age, but by belief."

2. Evolutionary psychology watch: Natural selection, not consciousness, accounts for sexual jealousy?

What, you may ask, is the connection between the idea that consciousness is an illusion and the idea that sexual jealousy is simply the outworking of natural selection? Well, if you believe that consciousness is not an illusion and that it can initiate action, you can readily account for the hostility that a person (or dog or cat, for that matter) perceives toward a new favorite. An intelligent life form perceives benefits lost and reacts accordingly. No further explanation in the form of a mechanism is needed because the perception itself drives the process.

(But the evolutionary psychologist is compelled to seek for a mechanism that drives the process, hence the obsession with the search for an illusory driver in the form of natural selection.)

3. On Sam Harris's Letters to a Christian Nation

"The thing is, you can be anti-God in the US, and your books will sell. Try being anti-God in the Middle East and your head may be rolling and bouncing along the cobblestones. The real tragedy of modern-day materialist atheism is that it's quite easy in places where no one takes you seriously and quite impossible in places where everyone does."

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 (Harper 2007).