In the News

A story by Erin Hemme Froslie on the InForum Web site, tells of a decision made in North Dakota regarding ID and high school debating.

The North Dakota High School Activities Association won’t allow students to debate the role of intelligent design in public school classrooms.
Some parents and administrators feel the topic is too controversial.

A former debate coach, Kent Hjelmstad, said the process of debate is more important than the topic. He thinks "the message is that you want the experience of an academic challenge, but you don’t need to have objectionable discussions to get that challenge".

Now, we wouldn't want to infringe on anyone's "Constitutional right to be comfortable".

You will need to register with InForum to read this amazing article.

This article in First Things is a MUST read to understand the current culture war between scientism (neo-Darwinism) and design theory.

Many misunderstood Cardinal Schonborn's article in the New York Times, and this is his eloquent and clear-thinking response.

He rightly points out that there are not just two ways to discover the Truth of Reality, but three. He states that "Modern science alone may well be incapable of grasping the key truths about nature that are woven into the fabric of Catholic theology and morality. And theology proper does not supply these key truths either. Prior to both science and theology is philosophy, the “science of common experience.” Its role in these crucial matters is indispensable.

The following is a crucial point that all must grasp. Schonborn says "Let us return to the heart of the problem: positivism. Modern science first excludes a priori final and formal causes, then investigates nature under the reductive mode of mechanism (efficient and material causes), and then turns around to claim both final and formal causes are obviously unreal, and also that its mode of knowing the corporeal world takes priority over all other forms of human knowledge. Being mechanistic, modern science is also historicist: It argues that a complete description of the efficient and material causal history of an entity is a complete explanation of the entity itself—in other words, that an understanding of how something came to be is the same as understanding what it is. But Catholic thinking rejects the genetic fallacy applied to the natural world and contains instead a holistic understanding of reality based on all the faculties of reason and all the causes evident in nature—including the “vertical” causation of formality and finality.

This article should be read over and over, and slowly digested. In doing so, the reader will see it's overall importance, and Schonborn's critics will seem like the sound of "tinkling cymbals".

On the Science & Theology News Web site, Dr. William A. Dembski comments on the recent ruling of Kitzmiller v. Dover, and it's implications for ID and the culture war.

It is not the "Waterloo" of ID, just as the Scopes Trial was not the "Waterloo" for Darwinism.