The ID Report

Post details: Part 2: Antireligious zealotry riffs off materialist science

02/25/07

by Denyse O'Leary 05:51:27 pm, Categories: Commentary - Announcements, Commentary - OpEd, Commentary -Events, 458 words

Part 2: Antireligious zealotry riffs off materialist science

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

What's all the fuss about? Why the big atheist putsch?

Ever since the Big Bang, materialist science has come in for a lot of trouble. As I set out in By Design or by Chance?, things that cannot happen by chance in the lifetime of the known universe cannot happen - unless some force or law has overruled chance.

In that case, the most reasonable assumption is that the universe and life forms did not come about by chance, but by design. That does not prove that any specific intelligent design thesis is true; it just makes design a reasonable proposition. Denunciation of the fact base or anyone who asks questions about it changes nothing.

To make matters worse, life sciences are not confirming that everything just sort of happens by a Darwinian pathway and neuroscience is not confirming that mind comes from mud. It's just not happening the way it was supposed to.

Another development in recent decades is that the collapse of worldwide communism removed huge numbers of people from the percentage who could technically be described as atheists. So they are in the mix now, clamoring for attention to their real perceptions.

And, worse still for materialists, increasing numbers of people are refusing to permit employers, bureaucrats, and other "minders" to divorce them from their spirituality.

As if that wasn't bad enough, a growing number of biologists acknowledge that the way in which evolution is taught often promotes materialist atheism rather than science as such.

Put simply: Materialist science is in trouble. And the trouble does not stem from traditional religions, though materialists are - as one might expect - quick to blame their troubles on traditional religions and to reassure themselves that - despite all the evidence - traditional religions are doomed. But, materialists are also smug and thus cannot imagine or respond to any source of trouble arising from their interpretation of the evidence.

They have apparently decided instead to target the Christian religion as the source of their problems. One outcome is that, as we shall see, many materialists want to start a new religion to compete with the traditional ones, including a Darwin Day (Christmas, Eid al-Fitr, and Chinese New Year all rolled into one?). The new religion lacks at least one ingredient that you hear about every Sunday in a Christian church ... any guesses?

Next: Part 3: The Beyond Belief conference

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).

Pingbacks:

No Pingbacks for this post yet...

The ID Report

Recently (cached)
Recently (no cache)

March 2010
Mon	Tue	Wed	Thu	Fri	Sat	Sun
<< <		> >>
1	2	3	4	5	6	7
8	9	10	11	12	13	14
15	16	17	18	19	20	21
22	23	24	25	26	27	28
29	30	31

Last comments

Search

Linkblog

Links - Groups and Organizations

Access Research Network
Discovery Institute
Evolution News Blog
Evolution has become a favorite topic of the news media recently, but for some reason, they never seem to get the story straight. The staff at Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture started this Blog to set the record straight and make sure you knew "the rest of the story".
Intelligent Design Network (IDNet)
Intelligent Design Undergraduate Research Center
Intelligent Reasoning
A blogger from New England offers his intelligent reasoning.
International Society for Complexity, Information, and Design (ISCID)
Telic Thoughts
We are a group of individuals, coming from diverse backgrounds and not speaking for any organization, who have found common ground around teleological concepts, including intelligent design. We think these concepts have real potential to generate insights about our reality that are being drowned out by political advocacy from both sides. We hope this blog will provide a small voice that helps rectify this situation.
The Design Inference - The Writings of William A. Dembski
The Intelligent Design and Evolution Awareness Center (IDEA)
www.themonkeytrial.com
Website dedicated to comparing scenes from the "Inherit the Wind" movie with factual information from actual Scopes Trial. View 37 clips from the movie and decide for yourself if this movie is more fact or fiction.

Links - Of General Interest

A Brief View of Time and Those That Live There
Don Cicchetti blogs on: Culture, Music, Faith, Intelligent Design, Guitar, Audio
A Quick Guide to Sequenced Genomes
ARN Related Web Links
Creation/Evolution Quotes
Australian biologist Stephen E. Jones maintains one of the best origins "quote" databases around. He is meticulous about accuracy and working from original sources.
CreationEvolutionDesign
Most guys going through midlife crisis buy a convertible. Austrialian Stephen E. Jones went back to college to get a biology degree and is now a proponent of ID and common ancestry.
Darwinian Fairytales by David Stove
Complete zipped downloadable pdf copy of David Stove's devastating, and yet hard-to-find, critique of neo-Darwinism entitled "Darwinian Fairytales"
ID The Future
Intelligent Design The Future is a multiple contributor weblog whose participants include the nation's leading design scientists and theorists: biochemist Michael Behe, mathematician William Dembski, astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez, philosophers of science Stephen Meyer, and Jay Richards, philosopher of biology Paul Nelson, molecular biologist Jonathan Wells, and science writer Jonathan Witt. Posts will focus primarily on the intellectual issues at stake in the debate over intelligent design, rather than its implications for education or public policy.
John Mark Reynolds Blog
A Philosopher's Journey: Political and cultural reflections of John Mark N. Reynolds. Dr. Reynolds is Director of the Torrey Honors Institute at
Biola University.
NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day