In the News

ENV reports that Michael Ruse, a philosopher by profession, claims that the anti-evolutionists are "not very good historians." However, he commits some serious historical gaffes himself, undermining his claim to be setting the record straight.

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This is extremely important because of the upcoming documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, where there is a link made between Darwinism and Nazism. Many Darwinists have claimed that the link is illegitimate.

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ENV reports that Discovery senior fellow David Klinghoffer has an interesting piece just out in the new Townhall Magazine, in which he looks at whether or not scientists really are free to research intelligent design. Of course, ID-critics claim that academic freedom reigns supreme...not so.

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Casey Luskin in ENV reports that the Florida State Board of Education voted 4-3 to adopt science standards that call evolution "the fundamental concept underlying all of biology." While it is good that students will learn about evolution, these standards will make for bad science education because they elevate Darwin's theory to a dogma that cannot be questioned. Even worse, some board members thought that they could rectify the dogmatic tone of the standards by calling evolution a "scientific theory." Some news articles are even calling this a "compromise." Those board members were tricked into a false compromise: inserting the word "scientific theory" before the word "evolution" is a meaningless and impotent change that will do absolutely nothing to actually inform students about the scientific problems with evolution.

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Casey is absolutely spot on throughout the piece...and that the board members thought that using the word "theory" was a compromise? That shows how out of touch they are with the idea of a scientific theory...an overarching, unifying concept.

From a press release from Biola University...

Ben Stein, known for his lead role in the film Ferris Bueller's Day and his Comedy Central show Win Ben Stein's Money, believes in liberty and truth. In recognition of this, Biola University's masters in science and religion program will present him with the 2008 Phillip E. Johnson Award for Liberty and Truth on March 27, a month before the release of his major controversial motion picture, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed.

In his new movie Expelled, Stein wonders whether humans were designed by an intelligent being or whether we were simply the result of an ancient natural accident. In his search for an answer, he discovers an elitist scientific establishment that punishes the scientific proponents of Intelligent Design because they reject some of the claims of Darwin's theory of evolution. "Big science in this area of biology has lost its way," says Stein. "Scientists are supposed to be allowed to follow the evidence wherever it may lead, no matter what the implications are. Freedom of inquiry has been greatly compromised, and this is not only anti-American, it's anti-science."

In light of Stein's contribution to the pursuit of liberty and truth, particularly as it relates to the field of Intelligent Design, he is being honored with the 2008 Johnson Award. The award ceremony will feature premiere clips from the forthcoming movie, the personal appearance of scientists who were expelled from their jobs because they are sympathetic to Intelligent Design, and will include a brief address by Stein.

Biola University, a Christian university in Southern California, established the Phillip E. Johnson Award for Liberty and Truth in 2004 to honor legal scholar and Berkeley law professor Phillip E. Johnson, who was the award's first recipient. The award recognizes Johnson's pivotal role in advancing our understanding of design in the universe by opening up informed dissent to Darwinian and materialistic theories of evolution. British philosopher Antony Flew, once considered the most prominent defender of atheism in the English - speaking world, became the second recipient of this award in 2006 for his Socratic approach of "following the evidence where it leads" and abandoning atheism on account of design arguments.

Ben Stein is a lawyer, economist, former presidential speechwriter, author and social commentator. He has acted and made guest appearances in numerous movies, TV series, and TV commercials. His part as the boring teacher in Ferris Bueller's Day Off was recently ranked as one of the fifty most famous scenes in American film.

Nanowerk reports that Brown University biologist Kenneth Miller has to hand one victory to the "intelligent design" crowd. They know how to frame an issue.

"The idea that there is 'design' in nature is very appealing," Miller said. "People want to believe that life isn't purposeless and random. That's why the intelligent design movement wins the emotional battle for adherents despite its utter lack of scientific support."

Miller asserted that there is "design" in nature, but it's evolutionary design.

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Here again is the problem...what is meant by evolution? If Miller means Darwinism, which explicitly claims that the process is random chance and natural selection, this hopelessly inefficient process would not have enough time to "design" complex life. The numbers have been calculated by evolution proponents and intelligent design theorists alike over the past 50 years. Evolutionists put too much faith in time.

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Mike Gene's new book The Design Matrix: A Consilience of Clues is now available at ARN. Here is an except from a review posted at Telic Thoughts...

And Now for Something New
by Steve Petermann

For some time now I have thought that the debate surrounding ID had grown stale. It seems that the ideas and arguments concerning intelligent design were just being recycled over and over again. That has changed. I just finished reading Mike Gene's new book The Design Matrix and it is chock-full of interesting information, ideas, and approaches to the design question. I think you'll find Mike's approach to the design issue very refreshing. You won't find any ideologically driven claims or conclusions. Instead Mike approaches the question of design as an investigation, looking for clues and developing ways to evaluate those clues in a reasonable and thought provoking manner. His Explanatory Continuum offers a fresh and, in my view, very realistic way of interpreting biological data. Then, while acknowledging the subjectivity of the Continuum, Mike provides a way to quantify and systematically assess those judgements. His exposition of new information on the structure of genetic code really caught my eye. And of course, Mike offers lots of intriguing ideas on frontloading. For the biologically astute there is plenty of detail that will be of interest, but even for a non-biologist like me it was easy to read and follow.

In ENV, Logan Gage, explains what I have been saying for years, and what seems so obvious to most in the Intelligent Design movement. There is no such animal as guided, or manipulated randomness. A person who believes that an intelligent being (okay, God) has been tinkering with an evolutionary process behind the scenes, cannot believe in Darwinism...period. Darwinism, by definition requires unguided, random (not guided, directed) processes and natural (not supernatural) selection.

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Angus Menuge will be doing three ID-related presentations in the near future. Here are some details for those of you in those areas...

1) February 21st, "Is Design an Illusion?" 7:00 p.m., Moore 100, UCLA.
For more details, contact Mark Jasa: markjasa@gmail.com

2) March 29th, "Does Neuroscience make room for God?" (a debate with PZ Myers), 8:00 p.m., University of Minnesota at Morris.*
For more details, contact Pastor Jarvis: rjarvis@hometownsolutions.net

3) April 1st, (with Paul Nelson) "Intelligent Design vs. Darwinism: Can Science Discover God?" 7:00 p.m., University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Student Union, The Wisconsin Room.
For more details, contact Vicar Askins: lmc_vicar@yahoo.com

In the Florida Baptist Witness, a statement given at a public hearing on the proposed science standards for Florida held in Jacksonville last month is reproduced.

Robin Brown, a recently retired teacher from Polk County, taught for 31 years with the last 15 years being middle school science

Many quotes cited, questioning Darwinism, are from evolutionists, such as, Stephen Jay Gould, Karl Popper, Paul Davies, Fred Hoyle, etc. Of course, the Darwinists will accuse "quote-mining", as they frequently do.

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Chuck Colson opines that PETA, perhaps like no other organization, follows a Darwinian worldview to its logical conclusions. A cow is no more important than a human, so eating meat would be cannibalism. Of course this drives some Darwinists crazy, particularly the ones who are creating out of whole cloth, proximal meaning and purpose for their lives.

When speaking about Darwinists, we must be careful to define that a Darwinist is one who believes that all life evolved by mindless, purposeless chance and natural selection. This would exclude theistic evolutionists who believe that a God had some say in evolution, either by front-loading the cosmos from the get-go, or playing a more active role through the ages.

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In the Stanford Review...

Summary of the debate

Interview with Jay Richards

Interview with Christopher Hitchens

Interview with Ben Stein

An Interview with Expelled Producer Mark Mathis

Reflection on the debate by the Editor-in-Chief of the Stanford Review

The details are yet to be discovered...

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Should scientists who believe the universe is the product of intelligent design be fired? Should science teachers who tell students about evidence that challenges Darwin's theory of evolution be reprimanded? Should students who want to explore both the strengths and weaknesses of Darwinian evolution be discouraged from doing so? If you answered no to these questions, sign a petition.

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The Board of Regents of the State of Iowa has denied the tenure appeal of Dr. Guillermo Gonzalez, Assistant Professor of Astronomy at Iowa State University (ISU). Dr. Gonzalez's appeal has been ongoing since the summer of 2007, when he was first denied tenure by ISU.

"We are extremely disappointed that the Board of Regents refused to give Dr. Gonzalez a fair hearing in his appeal," said Gonzalez's attorney Chuck Hurley. "They say in Iowa that academic freedom is supposed to be the 'foundation of the university.' That foundation is cracked."

ISU has consistently maintained that Dr. Gonzalez's tenure denial has nothing to do with intelligent design (ID). But secret e-mails exchanged by ISU faculty who voted against his tenure and statements in Dr. Gonzalez's tenure file showed that intelligent design was the overriding factor in his tenure denial. The Board of Regents refused to admit much of this evidence into the record in Dr. Gonzalez's appeal.

More of ENV...

The Expelled Top 10 Challenge
By Dennis Wagner
ARN Executive Director

Several of you have inquired if Expelled will be showing at your local theater when it is released in April. The answer is only YOU can know for sure. The producers don't have a lot of say about which theaters pick up their movie. Theaters chains and local theater managers schedule their movies based on perceived demand and interest in their community. So if you want to see this powerful documentary in your favorite theater, go to the Expelled website and print off one of these posters and write your name and phone number on it. Go to the theater and ask for the manager. Ask her when this movie will be scheduled in that theater. Tell her you are bringing a boat load of your friends and you are going to be passing posters out at your church, or your office, or your Rotary Club, etc. and you would like to list the theater that will be showing the movie on the poster. Better yet, apply for an Expelled Group Scholarship and buy an entire showing at your theater on opening weekend.

Now here is why you want to do this. You have the opportunity to help launch Expelled into the all time top 10 of theater released documentaries. Take a close look at that list. If we can get Expelled in just 250 theaters with a domestic box office of just $10M, it has a chance to make the top 10 list. 1,200 theaters and a $25M box office will place it in the top 3 above Sicko and An Inconvenient Truth. I've seen Sicko. I've seen An Inconvenient Truth. I've seen Expelled. Expelled is a more balanced and compelling documentary about what is wrong with America then either of these. Unlike these two documentary's Ben Stein does not spend two hours showing you selective data and then try to convince you that you should believe ID instead of Darwin. Instead Stein documents the many lives and careers that have been ruined because people dared to challenge the assumption of Darwinism in a land where we value our freedom to ask questions above all else. I have not talked to a person yet that has watched a prescreening of Expelled and been disappointed.

You may feel that you don't have a lot to say about who our next President may be with your single vote. But you do have a lot to say about what the important social issues of our time are. You start by talking to your local theater and then by helping to get as many bodies in the seats as you can opening weekend. Suddenly your one vote is leveraged into 1,000, just because you asked. So take the Expelled Top 10 Challenge with me. Let's see if we can't launch Expelled high up the Top 10 documentary list by talking to our local theaters and spreading the word to our family, friends and colleagues. If we are successful, we may open the door for other important documentaries in the future. The people in Hollywood make decisions based on box office numbers. Let your voice be counted.

In Florida, Darwinian activists have crowed long and loud about attempts to insert intelligent design into the state science standards and to teach the theory in science classes. Although no one has proposed teaching intelligent design, and no one has suggested inserting anything about intelligent design into the standards, the Darwinists continue to falsely claim this is what is going on. (Not unlike Texas - do we see a new strategy developing?)

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Indeed, why do some Darwinists just make things up. Maybe because they really believe that Darwinism and Neo-Darwinism have been proven beyond a reasonable doubt. Far from it.

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In the Southern Baptist Texan, Jerry Pierce writes on two professors featured in the upcoming big-screen documentary.

William A. Dembski and Robert Marks appear in the film as ID proponents.

The film aims to expose the scientific establishment's scorn toward academics who question Darwinian evolution.

"Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed" is scheduled for theaters in April and stars comedic actor and conservative activist Ben Stein as he travels the world interviewing intelligent design (ID) proponents whose careers have been threatened, as well as prominent neo-Darwinists who hold ID in contempt, including Richard Dawkins, author of the best-selling book "The God Delusion."

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The blogs are starting to heat up over the film. Many of the comments are just ad hominem attacks on Ben Stein, or those rascally professors who think there actually may be more to Reality than material processes. Others don't care for the tie-in with Hilter or the Berlin Wall. Stay tuned...

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