The ID Report

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

A communist view of the intelligent design controversy? It is unlikely that Darwin's heirs will wish to make these tributes to the master's teachings front and centre.

ID in Italy: Italian newspapers dare to doubt Darwin?

Muslim ID advocate argues that materialism, not Christianity, is what so many Muslims hate about America

The complexity of today's intelligent design controversy:

Basically, anyone who adopts a non-materialist stance of any type on anything will be persecuted by the materialists dominant in science and public policy today. That's just a fact. Non-materialists who squabble among themselves waste time that could be going into developing their own positions more fully. This is a matter of political common sense and actually has nothing to do with the legitimacy or usefulness of YEC ideas.

That said, people do not always think what you might expect.

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 heart has reasons that reason cannot know. - Blaise Pascal

Reasoned decisions can lead to a shock,
Like building on sand when told it was rock.
Expect devastation with every new storm
When teachers of science refuse to inform.

Organizations and institutions of science have spoken: students are not to be informed of any data, any studies, any scientists, or even any books, the knowledge of which might in the slightest weaken, question, or otherwise disparage evolution. Currently over seventy scientific societies, institutions and other professional groups have issued statements supporting evolution education and opposing any challenge to Darwin's ineffable sovereignty. Seventy. Seventy scientific organizations fretting that evolution is fact, cackling that there is no controversy, and begging us to please, oh please, just believe them. How many of these seventy have a statement supporting gravity? Or heliocentricism? Zero. The show of force on the topic of evolution is evidence itself of contrary facts, a genuine controversy, and reasons to doubt. One wonders what reason drives organizations to compel unquestioning belief in a theory so bullet-proof it's practically a law. Reason, it seems, is the problem, not the answer.

Totalitarian attitudes toward all thoughts that somehow evolved free of Darwin's dogma are striking. Totalitarians in Dover, Pennsylvania objected to verbal notification of a book in the library that would inform students of evidence unsupportive of Darwinism. Totalitarians in Atlanta, Georgia objected to students being informed by a sticker in a book that evolution is a theory and not a fact. Last year totalitarians in Ohio removed the state's critical-analysis lesson plan that informed high school students of scientific challenges to Darwin's theory. Just last week faculty totalitarians at Southern Methodist (Methodist?) University (University?) demanded the school shut down a student-initiated debate entitled "Darwin vs. Design" lest students be informed by a conference said to have "no place on an academic campus." And not to let mere wannabes steal the spotlight, the totalitarian faction of the state school board in Kansas, ground zero in this debate, last month lost all semblance of pedagogical good sense, and formally removed the state's responsibility to inform in science education.

Don't believe it? Compare the two mission statements below, and find the difference:

Old Mission Statement:

Kansas science education contributes to the preparation of all students as lifelong learners who can use science to make informed and reasoned decisions that contribute to their local, state, national and international communities.

New (Current) Mission Statement:

Kansas science education contributes to the preparation of all students as lifelong learners who can use science to make reasoned decisions that contribute to their local, state, national and international communities.

Make no mistake, the removal of "informing" as a goal of science education was purposeful, made in direct response to the previous standards that encouraged objective science education. Spooked by apparitions of intelligent design cleverly hidden in science standards requiring objective analysis of current evolutionary theory, the Kansans decided a knee jerk is preferable to a knee bow to anyone other than Darwin. Under the guise of combating intelligent design (which never was in the state standards) the marionette majority of the State Board of Education obeyed the noisy voices on high, and exchanged objective science education for non-objective, un-scientific indoctrination.

Ironically, by letting ideas they despise govern what they apprise, hard core Darwinists signal their demise. Equating the natural world with the physical world and believing science can explain the cause of the physical world solely in terms of "matter, energy, and forces" begs the question like never before: How do Darwinists know the physical world can be explained solely in terms of "matter, energy, and the forces"? Where does this knowledge come from? Of course they don't know, but they believe it, and like all good believers in a philosophical idea, they are convinced their belief is right, and you must believe as well. Never mind that the belief-induced idea that science can only consider "natural" causes is a relatively new concept, one that never occurred to most of the world's great scientists from Aristotle (yes, back when one was free to reason one's way to an uncaused cause for all of nature) to Newton and beyond. The relatively recent insistence by Darwinists that "science" can only consider natural causes is an anomaly, a non-scientific falsehood driven more by fear of truth than love of truth.

Demanding students believe on the faith of their pedagogical fathers that they are not created because science cannot consider such an idea is like forcing students to believe a circle is a square because "squareness" is all science can consider. But circles are self-evidently not squares, and no number of "Statements on Squareness" can make a circle square. True free thinkers see science education that seeks to explain why "apparent" circles seem to have four sides as something odd and curious at best, and false and deceptive at worst. And when the growing evidence suggesting circles are actually circles continues to be systematically shut down, censored and banned, it can only be a matter of time before the naked truth supplants the naked emperor of Darwinism.

Beyond odd and curious, however, demanding that a student be informed only that he or she is an occurrence rather than a purposefully designed creation suffers from a more significant and beautifully ironic flaw: it is unnatural. Darwinism woefully misstates and misunderstands the nature of human beings. Having matter alone to work with, Darwinism logically forces Darwinists to insist there is no non-material component of human beings, thereby denying the existence of a soul and, in fact, a mind. We are, say honest Darwinists, just a particular arrangement of matter, atoms arranged just so in our brains to make us think that we are thinking, imagine that we are imagining, and contemplate that we are ... well, that we are (their thoughts, imaginations and contemplations being better than ours, mind you). But at bottom in the Darwinian scheme we humans are no different in essence, in our nature, from any other collection of atoms, living or non-living. Fortunately few (and maybe fewer) of only the most indurate of Darwinian dogmatists really believe this nonsense. Ordinary people know intuitively, in their hearts, minds, and souls that they are in fact designed. No amount of one-sided informing from one brain to another can stop the mind-informing function of a reflective heart.

Believing in their we-are-gods arrogance that they are the source of all truth on this issue, Darwin-loving materialists unwittingly provide the stimulus for reflective hearts everywhere. Part of the human spirit (sorry Darwinists, but you have one too) loves truth and objects to any fettered freedom, any taboo topic, and any forbidden field. By making public displays of their intolerance and close-mindedness, Darwinists only invite the curious to question and the honest to wonder. Seeming to obsess on this issue, they appear as charlatans with something to hide. Those who appear to have something to hide usually do, and it is the non-material truth detectors of intuition, mind, and conscience that aid the reflective heart in exposing deceivers and deception alike.

Hearts, minds and souls--each defies a materialistic explanation, and each nurtures a powerful witness to purposeful design. No amount of "non informing" by the likes of today's arrogant provocateurs of science can change the image we each carry within us, an ancestral image infinitely more noble than that of every brute beast Darwin's disciples would have swinging, slinking, or swimming in our family line.

Truth will prevail, soon perhaps. In the words of a leading intelligent design scientist, "It is then immediately evident that Darwinism is indeed on its last legs, held up by a combination of intellectual inertia and social pressure. No judge or politician or reporter--or scientific society, for that matter--can change the lack of nature to conform to Darwinian expectations." But in the meantime don't expect any slack from the those of the full blooded materialist sect of Darwinism. Because when pain is measured against the social pressure of comfortable careers and the intellectual inertia of research funding, what you do know can hurt them.

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 2007 Roddy M. Bullock, all rights reserved. Quotes and links permitted with attribution.

References:

Statements on Evolution:
From NCSE: http://www.ncseweb.org/resources/articles/8408_statements_from_scientific_and_12_19_2002.asp
From The Society for the Study of Evolution: http://www.evolutionsociety.org/statements.htm
And more: http://arshermeneutica.org/besieged/Statements_on_Teaching_Evolution

SMU professors object to intelligent design meeting
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/tech/news/4659008.html

Kansas Science Standards, http://www.kansasscience2005.com/

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

The sudden appearance of most phyla of animals about 525 million years ago - generally called the Cambrian explosion - has attracted another new theory. In a forthcoming paper in Trends in Ecology and Evolution, researchers Filip J.R. Meysman, Jack J. Middelburg and Carlo H.R. Heip, of the Netherlands Institute of Ecology, revisit Darwin's last idea on the subject: The evolution of the reworking of sediments by burrowing animals was responsible for the explosion. Over the years, the Cambrian explosion has been a sore point for Darwinism, which requires gradual evolution in order to make any sense.Many, many theories have been proposed. (Note: Attempts to explain it away continue.
You will be clicking on a .pdf if you go to the Filip et a.. paper.)

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’s Sun engineer Jeff Bonwick's comment on the teaching of evolution in textbooks:

We have a tendency to overclaim. Evolution at the micro level is beyond dispute: we see it in nature and we can reproduce it in the lab. But the road to hell is paved with extrapolations. When we speak about the origins of life, we're really just making it up, and in that sense is really *is* more like a religion. We have no plausible explanation for the emergence of DNA polymerase, or the Cambrian explosion, or the giant gaps in the fossil record.
The problem is that we tend to paper over these holes in our textbooks, like a prosecutor trying to sell a timeline to a jury, when what we should be saying is: Look! Nobody knows how this happened! Despite all the progress we've made, there are still important questions that we can't answer! And if you study hard and persevere, perhaps you can be the one to figure it out!
This approach would be more honest, more motivating, and more true to the scientific method.

Yes, it would. The problem is that it would also require us to put past theories on the table for honest examination, including Darwinian evolution. But the Darwinist wants to start with the assumption that Darwinian evolution is true and treat the problems as something to be explained away, like the Cambrian explosion.

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

A friend draws my attention to Jeffrey Koperski's interesting reflections on the academics who made their careers out of critiquing intelligent design ideas. In "Intelligent Design and the End of Science" in American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, he comments on Barbara Forrest's essay Intelligent Design Creationism and Its Critics :

This book is not designed to engage the opposing side, but rather to put down an insidious movement.

Just how insidious is shown in Barbara Forrest’s historical overview. With a tone like that of an investigative reporter, Forrest quotes from an “internal CRSC [Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture] document, titled ‘The Wedge Strategy,’ that surfaced from an anonymous source in March, 1999” (3). According to this document, the ultimate goal of the
Wedge is to overthrow the naturalistic hegemony and replace it with something a bit more friendly to theists. And like all good revolutionary movements, Forrest sees this one as having a clear plan. Among other things, "CRSC creationists have taken the time and trouble to acquire legitimate degrees, providing them a degree of cover both while they are students and after they join university faculties" (38), which implies that people join the ID movement and only then decide to get their doctorates as a means for advancing their sinister Wedge Strategy. Just like modern terrorists, their M. O. is to "blend more smoothly into the academic population" (39). There is no biographical information to support these claims, but shadowy figures like these are just the kind of extremists who would do something like that. Forrest's goal is to reveal the "deep" motives behind ID, all in a what-they-don't-want-you-to-know tone.

Of course, Forrest's career depends on portraying the ID guys and their ideas this way, which is all very well for her. But those who ask no critical questions do themselves no favors. They may just as well believe that the ID guys are space aliens, for all the predictive value they'll get.

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, there have been some serious problems with widely consulted Wikipedia entries on major intelligent design figures that read like poison pen letters. The trouble is, anyone can edit a Wiki entry. This problem is hardly likely to be confined to the intelligent design controversy, as a recent scandal and ban on school use has spotlighted.

As Financial Times put it, Wikipedia's celebrated "openness" has

drawn charges of unreliability and left it vulnerable to disputes between people with opposing views, particularly on politically sensitive topics.

That's a polite way of putting it, for sure. One of ID math guy WIlliam Dembski's colleagues at Uncommon Descent went to a good deal of trouble to ascertain facts and post a long correct entry. But it could go corrupt again as long as anyone with a grudge can edit it. So if it doesn't smell right at certain points, that's probably why.

Recently, I wrote to a friend regarding some bad entries for Bill Dembski:

The current Wiki entry would euthanize about forty squirrels in my back alley, two dozen skunks, four foxes, and eighteen full size raccoons. Maybe a coyote as well. And three dozen tomcats and 200 rats.

As a textbook editor, one of my functions was "bias reviewer" - specifically, it was my job to flag tendentious material. But Wikipedia has no such oversight. Now, a founder of Wikipedia, Larry Sanger, is bringing out a competitor that will feature traditional control devices like editors. As he says,

The latest articles don't represent a consensus view – they tend to become what the most persistent 'posters' say.

Yes, exactly. And people with a grudge, for whatever reason, will be far more persistent than people who just want to set down some information and go live their life and be happy.

Apparently, Sanger left after a year, frustrated by the failure of Wkipedia to grasp the need for qualified editors.

Is ID an unusual case? Probably not. Teachers and professors should not, in my view, encourage students to use Wikipedia entries at this point. Many students are not nearly skilled enough to detect even the most obvious bias and the teacher cannot be everywhere and know everything.

Jimmy Wales at Wikipedia had a great idea - in theory. In practice, allowing malicious posters to publish distorted accounts, presumably on the theory that the friends of the maligned will rush to correct them, is simply irresponsible. Entirely lost to view is that the system should benefit the user, not the poster - and the user just wants a neutral account of ideas and events. We traditional editors always knew that.

Incidentally, I have reason to believe that the competitor encyclopedia will feature a supervised entry on the intelligent design controversy written by a knowledgeable insider. People who want to launch personal attacks on the ID guys are still free to do so, of course, but not to pretend that they are encyclopedia entries.

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

My lead author on the book The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul, Mario Beauregard, has an article coming out in Progress in Neurobiology , and as soon as I can link to it, I will. It describes a number of studies in non-materialist neuroscience.

(Non-materialist neuroscience = the mind exists and uses the brain but is not the same thing as the brain.)

Neuroimaging techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) can now show the ways in which people reorganize their brains by changing their minds. However, their ability to do this is in direct conflict with materialist theories of mind, according to which the mind either is simply the brain at work or is a side-effect of brain processes - or perhaps does not even exist. As Beauregard writes,

The results of the neuroimaging studies reviewed here call in question the psychophysical identity theory and epiphenomenalism. For the psychophysical identity theory, mental processes (including intentional ones) are identical with neural processes (Feigl, 1958). For epiphenomenalism, mental processes are causally inert epiphenomena (side-effects or by-products) of neural processes. These findings also challenge eliminative materialism (or eliminativism). According to this view, mental processes and functions (e.g., consciousness, intentions, desires, beliefs, self) can be reduced entirely to brain processes. These mental processes and functions are pre-scientific concepts that belong to unsophisticated ideas of how the brain works (sometimes called "folk psychology"). Eliminative materialism further proposes that all common language or "folk psychology" descriptions of mental experience should be eliminated and replaced by descriptions using neuroscientific language (Churchland, 1981). For these materialist views (psychophysical identity theory, epiphenomenalism, eliminative materialism), physically describable brain mechanisms represent the core and final explanatory vehicle for every kind of psychologically described data. These views are extremely counter-intuitive since our most basic experience teaches us that our choice of perspective about how we apprehend our mental states makes a huge difference in how we respond to them (Schwartz et al., 2005).With regard to this issue, we agree with Glannon (2002) that the tendency of modern neuroscience and biological psychiatry toward neurobiological reductionism, i.e., the reduction of persons to their brains (a form of "neural anthropomorphism"), is ill-advised and socially hazardous. We must keep in mind that the whole human person, not merely a part of a brain, thinks, feels, or believes. Indeed, the human person cannot be reduced to neural processes and it is difficult to understand a whole person without understanding the sociocultural context in which the person lives.

Okay, if you are not a neuroscientist, you might prefer to read The Spiritual Brain. My job is to write like a journalist, and I did.

Also at my non-materialist neuroscience blog Mindful Hack:

Alcoholics: Spirituality corks the bottle of spirits

Artificial intelligence: Making the whole universe intelligent?

Theories of Everything: A theory of everything must address consciousness, says prof

Neuroscience watch: Another controversial new finding about nerves

Also, new at the Post-Darwinist:

Dilbert cartoonist: Fossils are bull----
em>Note: I also put up something at the Post-Darwinist on the impact of Kent "Dr. Dino" Hovind's jail term for tax evasion.

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

Sometimes, when the wind is changing, all you can do is note the straws flying past. Here is a handful.

- Here are the sort of silly Darwinists who are quite convinced that they have the
truth. And people wonder why there is an intelligent design controversy.

- Scientific literacy claims

According to poli sci prof Jon Miller's
research

Approximately 28 percent of American adults currently qualify as scientifically literate, an increase from around 10 percent in the late 1980s and early 1990s ...

But the number of people who believe Darwinism is not increasing.

- Coincidences (?) In evolution

There are amazing coincidences in evolution. But are they really coincidences?

- Usage note: "Darwinism"

Now and then, I get hassled by people claiming that Darwinists do not use the term "Darwinism" to describe themselves. As I have said elsewhere, I think that this view stems mainly from anxiety about the social changes that are resulting from the failure of materialist ideologies. People look for anything and everything that might reassure them that nothing is really happening, and seize on petty matters that the can inflate into a an "issue." Well, here is a conference to be held in September 2007 at the University of Leeds called Darwinism after Darwin: New historical perspectives. The thing that blows me away is, what's wrong with the term?

- Ray Kurzweil, the guru of conscious computers , now prophesies an intelligent universe. He thinks that intelligent beings like ourselves will take over the universe and indue it with intelligence.

Coming, as I do, from a publishing background, I find myself thinking, but ... what if some prior intelligence (Intelligence? God?) holds the copyright on our efforts? We cannot act as though we are not republishing the original material.

- Darwinism vs. traditional religions and philosophies

According to Wesley V. Hromatko, D.Min, preaching to the First Unitarian Church at Sioux City, Iowa, on March 6, 2005
, poet Robert Frost discovered Darwin in high school and "to his mother’s horror called himself a Freethinker." (Lawrence Thompson, Robert Frost: The Early Years 1874-1915 (NY, Chicago, & San Francisco: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966), 118f.) Remember that when someone assures you that Darwinism does not have that effect.

- An ID-friendly scientist friend (I seem to have a lot of those, so either they're more numerous than some believe or I live long or wrong) writes,

Things ARE changing. If someone has said to me, even late in my PhD work, that a seminar such as the following would occur within less than a decade of my defense [about a decade ago], I would have been incredulous -- especially in light of the co-sponsorship of the UW-Madison zoology and philosophy departments.

Trees do bear fruit, if one is patient.

My friend references an attempt to accommodate non-materialist science. It was always there. It was always fruitful. It just wasn't popular with or funded by materialists.

- ID guy Michael Behe's review of anti-ID guy Richard Dawkins' book , Ancestor's Tale is comparatively charitable. Hard to imagine Dawkins returning the favor. That said, Behe does note,

It seems apparent that Dawkins’ creative intellect is spent. He is no longer either willing or able to wrestle with big ideas. Now, as Oxford University’s unfortunate “Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science”, he is doomed to the life of a pedestrian science popularizer (he spends pages in The Ancestor’s Tale explaining radioactive dating to those who don’t know protons from neutrons), although an admittedly entertaining one given to frequent, superficial rants on religion and politics.

and I have thought the same myself. Dawkins' recent "anti-God" crusade cemented the impression.

- ID guy as concert pianist: Free music download
Gil Dodgen, one of the ID guys, blogs with Bill Dembski at Uncommon Descent, and also makes available wonderful music from his days as a concert pianist, before he became a better paid software engineer. Sigh.

- Allow school choice, says Cato Institute

The free-market Cato Institute believes that the solution to a number of battles, including the entrenchment of Darwinist religion in biology classes, is simply to allow more parental choice. As Cato spokesman Neal McCluskey's study, quoted in Bob Unruh's story at WorldNet Daily says,

Public schooling forces everyone to pay for a single official system that does not – and indeed cannot – reflect the public's diverse and often conflicting views. The inevitable result of this system … is endless social discord over what is taught, ...

Well, yes, of course. Thirty years ago, I tended to be against school choice because my mental picture of the people who would want it was that they were attempting to impose nonsense. I have learned since. Now that Darwinism has become the linchpin of a materialist religion, promoted using tax dollars through the publicly supported school system.

- Nanotechnology: The wild card This and
this show you what nanotechnology can do.

- A new book questioning Darwinism has been published by SUNY-Syracuse biologist J. Scott Turner, arguing

This book is about why organisms work well, or to put it another way, why they seem to be “designed.”
Before I elaborate, I should mention two things the book is not. First, it is not about Intelligent Design (ID). Although I touch upon ID obliquely from time-to-time, I do so not because I endorse it, but because it is mostly unavoidable. ID theory is essentially warmed-over natural theology, but there is, at its core, a serious point that deserves serious attention. Before your hackles rise too much, let me hasten to say that the serious point is not the one that ID enthusiasts would like it to be. ID theory would like us to believe that some overarching intelligence lurks at the heart of the evolutionary process: to say the least, that is unlikely. Nevertheless, how design arises remains a very real problem in biology. This would be a good point to note the second thing the book is not: it is not a critique of Darwinism, which, as Dr Seuss might have put it, is about as true as any thought that has ever been thunk.[1]

Which brings us back to what this book is about …

My thesis is quite simple: organisms are designed not so much because natural selection of particular genes has made them that way, but because agents of homeostasis build them that way. These agents’ modus operandi is to construct environments upon which homeostasis can be imposed, and design is the result.

[1] The Glunk that got Thunk from Dr Seuss (1969). I Can Lick 30 Tigers Today!

Turner's comments are interesting chiefly because if he is arguing against natural selection, he is arguing against Darwinism. Natural selection is the engine that drives Darwinism. Presumably, he avoids attacks by Darwinists by resorting to this subterfuge.

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 comment to one of my posts of yesterday at Uncommon Descent, on the popular myths (and ridiculous hagiography) around Darwin, someone responded, "I am not seeing the ID relevance of this article."

Really not? Okay then, let me unpack it. When I started covering the ID controversy in depth (about 2002 onward, while writing By Design or by Chance?), I quickly became aware that the Darwin myths were the single most important reason why - irrespective of any evidence whatever - average educated people could not imagine that Darwin and his heirs might be mistaken in their interpretation of the history of life.

Indeed, Darwinian evolutionist Douglas Futuyma picked up that current when he wrote in the 1998 edition of his textbook,

Together with Marx's materialistic theory of history and society and Freud's attribution of human behavior to influences over which we have little control, Darwin's theory of evolution was a crucial plank in the platform of mechanism and materialism…

Yes, you see, Darwin is right up there with Einstein - where Freud and Marx also used to be - as one of the guys who explained it all for you.

Now, obviously, one consequence of materialist apotheosis (becoming a materialist divinity) is that you can't be wrong even when you obviously are. Miracles are ascribed to you or allegedly done in your name. The people who oppose you are evil, and are hatching wicked plots against the righteous elect who believe in you.

Now, religious sects in North America often behave in this fashion. But they do not often demand what the Darwinists have demanded and so far got - that all children be legally compelled to learn their dogmas (and only their dogmas) at taxpayer expense in publicly funded schools. Had the American elite not already been sold on the religion of materialism, materialism's creation story (Darwinism) would certainly not have attained this status in biology classes. And there is now no longer any question that the materialists do mean to found a church.

Slowly, materialists are succeeding in their effort to establish their church as the national religion. And, just as a sociologist of religion might predict, the vigorous Christian sects of North America, Catholicism and evangelicalism, are blowing the materialists off but the dying liberal ones are accommodating them.

Now, how does this affect ID? Well, in the present environment, any scientist who says, "My data better fit a hypothesis of the workings of nature that includes design than one that does not" is essentially either an infidel or a heretic. Thus, the question is not whether his data provide useful information but whether we should burn or drown the faithless wretch.

In my own view, most educated people will not evaluate the question of whether design is an intrinsic part of nature in a reasonable way until the dubious Darwiniania is shown up for what it is - dubious mythmaking and inappropriate hagiography. The Darwin bicentennial is a good place to begin.

I also posted the following stories at the Post-Darwinist:

Historian of science slams Darwin myth-making

Darwinism proponent now simply avoids ID arguments?

Showdown in the restaurant at the end of the universe? (What about all these
weird new theories about the universe?)

Intelligent design a big threat in Canada?

New Book: Letter from a Christian Citizen (in response to Sam Harris's Letter
to a Christian Nation)

Post-normal science: Is that where we are now?

Thinkquote of the day: Darwinian evolution and chance.

Also, at Mindful Hack,

The power of one: Compassion is strictly a one-to-one thing

Intercessory prayer works, according to researcher

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

John McCain: Can a man be US president if he listens to both sides?

Longtime foe of scientific reductionism, Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor wins Templeton Prize.

Also, a bunch of other stuff.

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

Go to Mindful Hack or to specific links below:

1. Brain cells release information more widely than thought

Well, anyone who has listened to someone thinking out loud about who to vote for or where to seat people at a critical dinner party will have likely heard an approximate simulacrum of the chaos. But, that aside, if the information in the brain is really released in waves (?) and not simply at the synapses, then many materialist theories may be due for a revision.

2. Why soldiers pray

"Like those who came before and after him, Col. Barnes saw the worst of human nature in a war zone. But in the selflessness of his brothers and sisters in arms, he also witnessed the best."

The diminishing plausibility of materialism is more easily understood when we consider that this sort of behaviour, by no means rare, is regarded as the "problem" of altruism.

3. Ignorance is diss? As a member of the Canadian Science Writers' Association AND the Word Guild (a Christian writers' organization), I get to see the conflict between materialism and non-materialism from several different views. What strikes me most forcibly, from reading the militant materialist atheists' work, is that they are commonly fundamentally ignorant of what they seek to debunk and - it gets better - they parade ignorance as some kind of virtue.

4. Discussing materialism and naturalism, Ralph Dumain takes aim at one-way-only skeptics (the sort of people who call themselves "skeptics", but it only ever goes in one direction).

5. The Spiritual Brain finally has a subtitle: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul.

"Well, after some consultation, a subtitle has been decided on: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul. I don't think the search 'bots have picked it up yet at Amazon, but when they do, that's what they are supposed to pick up. The thesis is controversial enough, I think ...."

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

A student appended a comment to one of my blog posts, charging that intelligent design is just a God of the Gaps argument (if we assume design we cannot learn very much about the world), and asking for a response. Here it is, and here is an excerpt:

"The concern you expressed above, that an inference of design means that "we wouldn't learn very much about the world", beautifully captures the default position of defenders of materialism - whether they claim to be churchgoers or not - and that may be where you first encountered it. (I am not saying that you are a materialist; I am saying that you have beautifully captured their default position.)

Their view makes sense, of course, once you assume up front that materialism is really true. [ ...]

And - note this carefully, for this follows too - when we identify evidence that looks like design, we must seek an "explanation" that rules out design, even if it doesn't really work well. That's okay because some day we will have an explanation that rules out design that works a lot better. Otherwise we wouldn't learn very much about the world.

That is actually a classic recipe for a point of view that can never be disconfirmed by evidence. So it is not surprising that materialists insist that the evidence for their point of view and for their creation story (Darwinism) is overwhelming. Following their rules, there is no circumstance under which it could ever be otherwise."

I find interesting the way students are unemphatically taught to see science as applied 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 (Harper 2007).