The ID Report

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 entlightened, 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).