My latest MercatorNet column
A choice argument
Did you choose to cheat on your taxes? Or snub a friend? Free will makes an unexpected comeback.
Possibly no issue between traditionalists and new atheists rankles more than this one: Are we simply the products of our genes and neurons, or can we make authentic choices?
Traditional religions encourage repentance for sin, which just means, "I knew what I was doing and it was wrong." No one repents of slipping on the ice, and ending up in traction. But a new doctrine has been highly seductive. You never choose.
In a blog entry, "No soul? I can live with that. No free will? AHHHH!!!," on the Psychology Today website, Tamler Sommers, professor of philosophy at the University of Houston, explains why he thinks no free will is no big deal. He acknowledges that most materialists have not wanted to confront the issue directly.
To bring his idea home: Why should a man suffer any penalty if he kills your spouse, rapes your daughter, and maims your son? By definition, he is not responsible for his behaviour. That's not because he passes normal tests of insanity, but because no one is ever responsible for their behaviour. Ever. At all.
Sommers cites one study where we learn that ... more
Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain.
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Evolution has become a favorite topic of the news media recently, but for some reason, they never seem to get the story straight. The staff at Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture started this Blog to set the record straight and make sure you knew "the rest of the story".
A blogger from New England offers his intelligent reasoning.
We are a group of individuals, coming from diverse backgrounds and not speaking for any organization, who have found common ground around teleological concepts, including intelligent design. We think these concepts have real potential to generate insights about our reality that are being drowned out by political advocacy from both sides. We hope this blog will provide a small voice that helps rectify this situation.
Website dedicated to comparing scenes from the "Inherit the Wind" movie with factual information from actual Scopes Trial. View 37 clips from the movie and decide for yourself if this movie is more fact or fiction.
Don Cicchetti blogs on: Culture, Music, Faith, Intelligent Design, Guitar, Audio
Australian biologist Stephen E. Jones maintains one of the best origins "quote" databases around. He is meticulous about accuracy and working from original sources.
Most guys going through midlife crisis buy a convertible. Austrialian Stephen E. Jones went back to college to get a biology degree and is now a proponent of ID and common ancestry.
Complete zipped downloadable pdf copy of David Stove's devastating, and yet hard-to-find, critique of neo-Darwinism entitled "Darwinian Fairytales"
Intelligent Design The Future is a multiple contributor weblog whose participants include the nation's leading design scientists and theorists: biochemist Michael Behe, mathematician William Dembski, astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez, philosophers of science Stephen Meyer, and Jay Richards, philosopher of biology Paul Nelson, molecular biologist Jonathan Wells, and science writer Jonathan Witt. Posts will focus primarily on the intellectual issues at stake in the debate over intelligent design, rather than its implications for education or public policy.
A Philosopher's Journey: Political and cultural reflections of John Mark N. Reynolds. Dr. Reynolds is Director of the Torrey Honors Institute at
Biola University.