In the News

A followup article by Cornelia Dean and Laurie Goodstein in the New York Times regarding the op-ed piece by the Archbishop of Vienna tries to confuse the Catholic church's official postion on Darwinism. The headline reveals the bias of the article.

The writers assert, right from the talking points of Darwinists, that "Darwinian evolution is the foundation of modern biology. While researchers may debate details of how the mechanism of evolution plays out, there is no credible scientific challenge to the underlying theory."

A question; why must a researcher believe in Darwinism to do practical scientific reasearch? Unless, of course, he is a professor who is specifically trying to advance the Darwinian paradigm.

The article goes on to give examples of Christians who hold to theistic evolution, such as, Dr. Kenneth Miller. Miller said he was already hearing from people worried about the cardinal's essay. "People are saying, does the church really believe this?"

Well, a recent Harris poll shows that around 10 percent of people believe in Darwinism in the U.S., so the vast majority of Americans are really not shaking their heads, wondering why the church doesn't hold to Darwinism.

For the full article, click HERE.

An article about a sponge on the MSNBC website offered by Daniel B. Kane had me eagerly soaking up the information.

Turns out, this lowly deep-sea sponge, the Venus' Flower Basket, is quite an engineer, moreso than me or other folks interested in ID. Joanna Aizenberg from Bell Labs/Lucent Technologies explains that "the number and placement of the diagonal (glass) beams fits an equation engineers use to calculate the minimum number of reinforcements needed to achieve the maximum stability. The sponge uses exactly what’s needed but nothing more.”

The sponge glass cage is then wrapped in spiraling surface ridges that protect it from being squeezed like an empty can of soda. And lastly, the sponges are anchored to the soft sediments of the sea floor in such a way that they do not break off due to the stress and strains of ocean currents.

“It puzzles me. In my wildest dreams I can’t imagine how these fibers are assembled to make the nearly perfect, highly regular square cells, diagonal supports and surface ridges of the cage,” said Aizenberg.

Yes, how all these intricate structures came together through random mutation and natural selection would, indeed, be puzzling to a materialist. A question for the materialists; How could random mutation and natural selection provide such specified complexity? Please give a detailed account of the evolutionary pathway(s). Their answer; it just did, and it had to, because it's the only player on the field.

Oh really...

For the article, click HERE.

Craig Holdrege of the Nature Institute discusses the varying Lamarckian and Darwinian explanations for the length of the giraffe's neck. After surveying and critiquing a number of ideas, he concludes that there may be a more mysterious explanation, which takes into account the entire body plan of the giraffe. Holdrege is looking for an explanation that comports with naturalism. An intelligent designer need not apply, thank you.

The Nature Institute's Mission Statement contains that odd language that grants Nature with a capital N powers that should be given only to intelligent agents. For instance, "we do not yet fathom her depths, and our actions to do not embody her wisdom...we work to create a new paradigm that embraces nature's wisdom..."

For the entire article, click HERE.