The ID Report

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

A recent article in the Washington Post by Alan Cooperman addresses bias against evangelical Christians on campus:

The other survey, by the San Francisco-based Institute for Jewish and Community Research, confirmed those findings but also found what the institute's director and chief pollster, Gary A. Tobin, called an "explosive" statistic: 53 percent of its sample of 1,200 college and university faculty members said they have "unfavorable" feelings toward evangelical Christians.

Of course, according to some, it is all the evangelicals' fault if people are biased against them:

Nelson, a professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said the unfavorable feelings toward evangelical Christians probably have two causes: "the particular kind of Republican Party activism that some evangelicals have engaged in over the years, as well as what faculty perceive as the opposition to scientific objectivity among some evangelicals."

I think that's code for the fact that many evangelicals doubt Darwin.

Here are some of my recent posts on related subjects at the Post-Darwinist, the Mindful Hack, and Uncommon Descent.

Frank Pastore identifies the challenges that materialist atheism cannot face, but you can be sure that materialist atheists will come up with an answer, whether their answer makes sense or not.

Denyse O' Leary's take on the Economist's recent relatively reasonable piece on the growing globalization of intelligent design advocacy: I know no reason to think that the elite Economistas are particularly happy with the grassroots uprising against radical materialism, but one really remarkable thing about both this article and Patricia Cohen's account of a recent debate between conservatives in The New York Times is the slow decline in language bias. Has it begun to dawn on some newsrooms that Darwinism really is a problem and that intelligent design is not going away?

Denyse O'Leary's take on the media significance of the fact that Michael Behe was asked to write the entry for Richard Dawkins in Time 100.

Pope Benedict vs. a chance origin of the universe - lines from an early lecture.

Why there is no compatibility between traditional communities of any kind and accounts of spiritual beliefs derived from Darwinism.

A most interesting survey of views in evolutionary psychology on religious belief makes quite clear that there is NO room in the evo psycho paradigm for the view that spirituality relates to any fact about the universe. Hence the folly of trying to get traditional communities to support Darwinian evolution. .

On language and
mystical experience: can language tell us what is real?

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).