In the News

In the Denver Post, Dr. Doug Groothuis, professor of philosophy at Denver Seminary, reviewed two books released within a few weeks of each other. They address Darwinism and its critics, but in radically different ways. Not only do the authors hold entirely different positions on Darwinism and the alternative theory of intelligent design, but there also is a vast chasm between the tone and approach of these books.

Jonathan Wells, who holds doctorates in both religion and embryology, is a leading advocate of intelligent design. You can purchase his new book, "The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design" by clicking HERE.

On the other hand, editor and author Michael Shermer, formerly a professor of psychology, is generally condescending toward intelligent design. His book is also available now by clicking the title Why Darwin Matters: The Case Against Intelligent Design

Mustafa Akyol, on Whitepath.com, reports on a recent TV debate on the Turkish educational system, where the country's Minister of Education, Mr. Huseyin Celik, argued in favor of intelligent design and for incorporating the theory into Turkish high school biology textbooks. The debate was aired on CNNTurk* on 17 October 2006.

The Nashua Telegraph reports that a physicist and former college physics professor, David Heddle, will give a presentation on intelligent design in Nashua on Thursday, November 2nd.

The talk is praised by reviewers for its ability to place religious faith and modern physics peacefully in the same room, and will take place from 7-8:30 p.m. in the Nashua High School South lecture hall.

Scott Stephens, of the Newhouse News Service, reports on the importance of this fall's race between State Board of Education member Deborah Owens Fink and her challenger, Tom Sawyer.

The Indiana College Biology Teachers Association is having a meeting about evolution / ID issues at IU Kokomo.

For details...click the link above.

A quite funny encounter with Richard Dawkins...click the link above.

This is the sixth article in a series on ID by Sekai Nippo in World Peace Herald.

Evolution News & Views reports on the misinformation "campaign" in the UK against anything that questions Darwinism.

Richard Dawkins, one of most well known antagonists of ID and religion, did a reading from his new book, The God Delusion, at a local bookstore in Washington, DC. After the reading he fielded questions. A person sympathetic to ID asked Dawkins if he thought he was being inconsistent by being a determinist while taking credit for writing his book. His answer was surprising. Here is the transcript:

Questioner: Dr. Dawkins thank you for your comments. The thing I have appreciated most about your comments is your consistency in the things I've seen you written. One of the areas that I wanted to ask you about and the places where I think there is an inconsistency and I hoped you would clarify it is that in what I've read you seem to take a position of a strong determinist who says that what we see around us is the product of physical laws playing themselves out but on the other hand it would seem that you would do things like taking credit for writing this book and things like that. But it would seem, and this isn't to be funny, that the consistent position would be that necessarily the authoring of this book from the initial condition of the big bang it was set that this would be the product of what we see today. I would take it that that would be the consistent position but I wanted to know what you thought about that.

Dawkins: The philosophical question of determinism is a very difficult question. It's not one I discuss in this book, indeed in any other book that I've ever talked about. Now an extreme determinist, as the questioner says, might say that everything we do, everything we think, everything that we write, has been determined from the beginning of time in which case the very idea of taking credit for anything doesn't seem to make any sense. Now I don't actually know what I actually think about that, I haven't taken up a position about that, it's not part of my remit to talk about the philosophical issue of determinism. What I do know is that what it feels like to me, and I think to all of us, we don't feel determined. We feel like blaming people for what they do or giving people the credit for what they do. We feel like admiring people for what they do. None of us ever actually as a matter of fact says, "Oh well he couldn't help doing it, he was determined by his molecules." Maybe we should… I sometimes… Um… You probably remember many of you would have seen Fawlty Towers. The episode where Basil where his car won't start and he gives it fair warning, counts up to three, and then gets out of the car and picks up a tree branch and thrashes it within an edge of his life. Maybe that's what we all ought to... Maybe the way we laugh at Basil Fawlty, we ought to laugh in the same way at people who blame humans. I mean when we punish people for doing the most horrible murders, maybe the attitude we should take is "Oh they were just determined by their molecules." It's stupid to punish them. What we should do is say "This unit has a faulty motherboard which needs to be replaced." I can't bring myself to do that. I actually do respond in an emotional way and I blame people, I give people credit, or I might be more charitable and say this individual who has committed murders or child abuse of whatever it is was really abused in his own childhood. And so again I might take a …

Questioner: But do you personally see that as an inconsistency in your views?

Dawkins: I sort of do. Yes. But it is an inconsistency that we sort of have to live with otherwise life would be intolerable. But it has nothing to do with my views on religion it is an entirely separate issue.

Questioner: Thank you.
_____________

Richard Dawkins is a staunch materialist who simply cannot follow his worldview to its logical conclusions. He follows his innate moral intuition, which cannot be explained by material processes, and concedes that he cannot truly live out his worldview.

Dawkins' naturalistic determinism requires that anything like consciousness, self-awareness, and freedom must be emergent properties of matter. Humans must deal with this "reality" as best they can. The concession is huge because it means Dawkins' scientism has no place for "humanness'.

Logan Paul Gage is a policy analyst at the Discovery Institute, and writes that astrphysicist George Coyne lectured before the largest scientific organization in the world, the American Association for the Advancement of Science. As he railed against biological arguments for intelligent design (ID), Gage wondered what Coyne thought of the now-mainstream design arguments in his own field. Click the link above for more.

ScienceDaily reports that a report published Oct. 19 in the journal Nature, suggests evidence that the ancestors of mushrooms, lichens and various other fungi may have lost their original wiggling taillike "flagellae" on several different occasions as they evolved from water to land environments while branching off from animals in the process.

Their losses of flagellae "coincided with the evolution of new mechanisms of spore dispersal, such as aerial dispersal," said the report.

More lucky coincidences as the creatures "found" ways of adapting. The words suggest intent and purpose in the process, which the Darwinists vehemently deny. This smuggling in of "design language" occurs all the time.

Once upon a time some social progressives took upon themselves the task of reclassifying a book just because they could. Read the "story" about how "Darwin's Nemesis" became a work of religion instead of science in a California library.

This is troubling, because our opponents actually believe that by attaching a different label to something, it magically becomes so. Put an orangutan in a tux, and call it Pierce Brosnan. Yeah...that's it.

ScienceDaily reports on the amazing complexity of intra-cellular movement and regulating of materials. I don't have enough faith to believe this small thing is a happy accident of natural selection. That it occurred in tiny steps over vast amounts of time is a just-so story.

David Quinn, a well known Catholic commentator and journalist in Ireland, debated Richard Dawkins on Irish radio on the reasonableness of religious belief. Dawkins is a formidable debater, but David Quinn embarrassed him. To hear the 18 minute audio, clear the link above. We could learn much from David Quinn.

Del Ratzsch, a clear-thinking scientist who is sympathetic to ID concepts is interviewed.

Leonard Susskind, the "Father" of String Theory, apparently debated himself at UC-Davis, attended by around 250 interested listeners.

Michael Miller, of the California Aggie, reported that Susskind said, "that with billions of galaxies and planets within our infinite universe, statistically speaking, there must be a planet like ours which has the perfect mixture of gases and temperature ranges that can sustain life." Apparently the "Father" of String Theory needs to brush up on recent evidence that shows the odds of a planet like Earth are literally astronomical, in fact, so big that the figure outnumbers the number of known planets in the cosmos.

Susskind then asked himself, "Why did I wake up this morning as an intelligent creature?" "Simple answer: If I wasn't intelligent, I wouldn't have thought about that this morning." Wow, my head is spinning from that elegant and nonsensical answer.

Stuart Burgess writes in True.Origin about the IC of the knee joint. Makes you wonder how natural selection pulled this one off.

Darla Slipke, of the University (of Kansas) Daily Kansan, reports on the lecture given by Richard Dawkins in Lawrence. The talk was decidely anit-ID, and praised the wonder of natural selection.

At the Zarinha Cultural Center, in Joao Pessoa, Brazil, Enezio E. de Almeida Filho will give an ID talk and have a debate. The event will take place on Oct. 21st at 7:30 p.m. The link above is in Portuguese.

In the World Peace Herald, Sekai Nippo reports on ID favorably in a five part series. All five parts can be accessed from the above link...and scrolling down the page.

PBS's Think Tank welcomed Dr. Stephen Meyer, director of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture and author of Darwinism, Design and Public Education and Dr. Michael Ruse, Director of the Program in the Philosophy of the History of Science at Florida State University for a discussion on biological history, etc.

Wednesday, October 11th was a historic day in the life of the European Parliament.

Polish member of the European Parliament, Maciej Giertych, retired head of the Genetics Department of the Polish Academy of Science, and father of Polish Deputy Prime Minister, Roman Giertych, introduced a public seminar on the General Theory of Evolution to fellow MEP's.

Professor Giertych questioned the value of teaching a continually falsified hypothesis - macroevolution - to students throughout Europe, as well as pointing out its lack of usefulness in regard to scientific endeavour.

Professor Giertych introduced the subject by relating how his children had returned home from school having been taught about the theory of evolution. They were told that the proof of macroevolution - the common ancestry of biological life - was to be found in the science of genetics. This was news to Professor Giertych who had spent his life working at the highest level of genetic research. He revealed to the meeting that such proof does not exist in genetics, only disproof.

This was reinforced by the speech of Professor Emeritus Joseph Mastropaolo who had travelled from the USA to participate in the Brussels hearing. He explained that the biological sciences offer no empirical proof of macroevolution, just insurmountable problems. The theory of evolution consists merely of interpretational evidences which by their very nature could be interpreted in many different ways. He told the audience that the theory, after more than 150 years, still lacked any empirical proof.

Dr. Hans Zillmer, a German Palaeontologist and member of the New York Academy of Sciences, told the meeting that the fossil record holds no proof for evolution theory either. Instead of showing gradual change from one species to another, as is often claimed in the classroom, it actually reveals the stasis and stability of life forms.

Amongst those helping to organise the historic seminar were Dr. Dominique Tassot, Director of Centre d'Etude et de Prospectives sur la Science (C.E.P). C.E.P. is an organisation consisting of 700 French speaking scientists, intellectuals and representatives of other professions, all of whom oppose evolutionary theory on scientific grounds.

Evolution News & Views reports on the meeting of Jonathan Wells and Michael Shermer at the CATO Institute.

DNA World reports that Poland's deputy education minister called for the influential evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin not to be taught in the country's schools, branding them as lies in comments published on Saturday.

"The theory of evolution is a lie, an error that we have legalised as a common truth," Miroslaw Orzechowski, the deputy minister in the country's right-wing coalition government, was quoted as saying.

Colson noted that A Meaningful World is "about so much more than the narrow concept that many people have of 'intelligent design.' Their book's subtitle helps explain their idea - How the Arts and Sciences Reveal the Genius of Nature. It's an original and utterly fascinating approach to the subject.

It available on ARN by clicking HERE.

Those who like Paley's watchmaker analogy as an argument for design will enjoy this animated poem for kids.

This week on Think Tank - Intelligent Design vs. Evolution, Part One.

Host Ben Wattenberg is joined by Dr. Stephen Meyer, director of the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture and Dr. Michael Ruse, Director of the Program in the Philosophy of the History of Science at Florida State University.

Tim Martin, of the Detroit Free Press, reports that the State Board of Education on Tuesday approved public school curriculum guidelines that support the teaching of evolution in science classes, but not intelligent design.

Intelligent design instruction could be left for other classes in Michigan schools. But it should not have a home in science class, based on the unanimously adopted guidelines.

The Garaventa Center for Catholic Intellectual Life and American Culture at the University of Portland will host a panel titled "Evolution, Intelligent Design and God: The Conversation Continues."

The panel discussion is set for 2 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 28 in Buckley Center Auditorium on the University of Portland Campus, 5000 N. Willamette Blvd. Panel members will be John Haught, Peter Dodson, and Michael Behe.

Click the title above to purchase the book from ARN.

Dr. Jonathan Wells will be in Washington, DC promoting his new book, "The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design" (Regnery, 2006) at the following public appearances:

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 11

5:30 - 7:00 PM: Book party, Discovery Institute DC Office, 1015 Fifteenth Street NW, Suite 900, 202-558-7058. For free registration call the preceding number or email lgage@discovery.org.

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 12

Noon - 1:30 PM: Debate with Michael Shermer, CATO Institute, 1000 Massachusetts Avenue NW, 202-842-0200. For free registration call
202-789-5229 or email events@cato.org.

7:00 PM: Book signing at Books-A-Million, 1451 Chain Bridge Road, McLean, VA, 703-893-7640.

Download this paper written by Johnny Rex Buckles of the University of Houston Law Center.

This letter appeared in the Muskegon Chronicle. A simple, yet effective way to "put a stone" in the shoe of each person who will consider ID.

It was in a high school science classroom that Lee Strobel became an atheist. A lecture on the Miller-Urey experiment convinced him that the origin of life, and all life for that matter, could be explained by purely naturalistic processes. Only the hard, empirical evidence of science could be trusted—and it appeared to point to a universe created by purely naturalist processes: time, chance, and Darwinian evolution.

Although science led Strobel away from a belief in a Creator, it was science that led him back. The atheistic worldview deeply influenced Strobel’s academic years and early career as an award-winning journalist for the Chicago Tribune. Then, in 1980, his wife’s conversion to Christianity led him on an intensive search for the truth about God and our beginnings. Not surprisingly, it began with science.

The Case for a Creator is the third in a series of top quality, block-buster documentaries on Intelligent Design by Illustra Media that started with Unlocking the Mystery of Life and The Privileged Planet. Based on Strobel’s popular book by the same title, the documentary leads you through one man’s journey to grapple with the scientific evidence regarding one of life’s greatest questions: How did we get here? Along the way he interviews many of the leading scientists and scholars for the intelligent design theory including Stephen C. Meyer, Michael Behe, Jay Richards, Jonathan Wells, Robin Collins, William Lane Craig, Guillermo Gonzalez, and Scott Minnich. The major topic areas of the documentary cover the fossil evidence, cosmology, astronomy, physics, biological machines and biological information. The bonus material includes additional interviews with the scientists, and special units on the origin of life and the machinery of life.

As with previous Illustra Media documentaries, this one is chock full of stunning graphics, amazing animations, and a theater-worthy soundtrack. The focus of this documentary is the scientific and philosophical evidence for design and a theistic worldview, and is suitable for use in public schools, especially when shown to balance the atheistic Darwinian worldview found in many educational scientific documentaries on the topic.

Both programs, part of the university’s President's Forum on Current Issues and Controversies, are free and open to the public on November 6th and 7th.

In the DetNews, Scott Bahr opines on the "faith" required by both Darwinists and IDers. In fact, both theories have a degree of uncertainty, and the scientific evidence points to one as being the most reasonable explanation. We claim the evidence is much in favor of ID.

Evolution News & Views reports of the USF conference. Of interest are complaints from a Darwinist, and the careful critique of the criticism.

The article in ScienceDaily starts out by saying that "DNA's simple and elegant structure — the 'twisted ladder,' with sugar-phosphate chains making up the 'rails' and oxygen - and nitrogen - containing chemical 'rungs' tenuously uniting the two halves — seems to be the work of an accomplished sculptor. Yet the graceful, sinuous profile of the DNA double helix is the result of random chemical reactions in a simmering, primordial stew."

Interesting, because there is no evidence in the geologic record that a primordial stew existed. And, note the blatant scientism assertion in the second sentence. No evidence required. It's a fact.

The Cato Institute will feature the author, Michael Shermer, Director, Skeptics Society, with comments by Jonathan Wells, Senior Fellow, Center for Science and Culture, Discovery Institute on Oct. 12th.

Any IDers in the area could ask some questions of Shermer.

Mark Pitsch, of the Louisville Courier-Journal, reports that outgoing Kentucky Education Commissioner Gene Wilhoit says it would be a mistake for the state Board of Education to hire a replacement who believes "intelligent design" should be taught in public schools.

That's because intelligent design promotes a specific religious viewpoint that can't be tested by science, he said. The idea that some complex biological structures and other aspects of nature show evidence of a creator.

"Intelligent design at this point has not been shown to be a scientific theory that can stand the test," Wilhoit said in an interview Friday. "

What Mr Wilhoit fails to point out is that there is such a thing as historical science. It's not repeatable, yet is science.

Melanie Ave, of the St. Petersburg Times, reports on the three-hour symposium sponsored by the Clearwater advocacy group, Physicians and Surgeons for Scientific Integrity. The group believes the origins of life are too complex to attribute to evolution's tenets of natural selection and random mutation.

The group was biochemist Michael Behe, one of the nation's most prominent supporters of intelligent design, and author of Darwin's Black Box; research scientist Ralph Seelke; and embryologist Jonathan Wells, author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design.

Panel emcee Tom Woodward, a Trinity College professor and author of Doubts About Darwin, said evolution is inadequate to explain the creation of life. "We have never yet discovered any occasion in the known history of this universe where unintelligent causes, natural causes ... have produced" complicated life forms, Woodward said. "If there were a known occurrence, the guy would get three Nobel Prizes. It would be a major discovery."