In the News

The debate between Darwin and design is coming to Tampa, Florida with a major one-night event featuring some of the leading voices challenging Darwinian evolution...Michael Medved, Stephen C. Meyer, David Berlinski. The event will occur Thursday evening, January 28th.

Info HERE...

In ENV...Discovery Institute is gearing up for the celebration by supporting what Darwin supported: academic freedom.

Academic Freedom Day couldn't come at a better time, as academic freedom is threatened around the country. We have seen Darwinists launch cyber attacks on a pro-ID conference website in Colorado and engage in an illegal coverup in the censorship of a pro-ID film in California.

It's time like these when Darwin's own words should instruct everyone on how to have an open and honest debate over evolution and intelligent design.
In On the Origin of Species, Darwin wrote, "A fair result can be obtained only by fully stating and balancing the facts and arguments on both sides of each question." This quote is the cornerstone of the Institute's Academic Freedom Day efforts.

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Dr. William Dembski, internationally known as a paradigmatic figure in the world of science - particularly as he has advanced the theory of intelligent design regarding the creation of the world in contrast to Darwinian evolution is featured on a recent PODCAST. The subject is his recent book - The End of Christianity: Finding a Good God in an Evil World.

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Frank Turek, of (http://www.CrossExamined.org) and much more, will have an internet radio talk show on Tuesday, January 19th, beginning at 7 p.m. CENTRAL time. His guests will be some of the top apologists in the world.

The evening will start with the man who is one of the best debaters in the world, Dr. William Lane Craig www.ReasonableFaith.org.

Next will be one of the founding fathers of the Intelligent Design movement-- Dr. Bill Dembski www.designinference.com. He'll show us very simply how life points to an intelligent designer, and how most of the so-called "evidence" for macroevolution is based on materialistic and counter-factual philosophical assumptions.

Next will be Dr. Mike Adams, a Christian professor on a secular campus and one of the most popular conservative columnists on www.Townhall.com.

The show will be capped off with Josh McDowell www.Josh.org. Josh will give us very helpful insights on the importance of relationships to a young person's faith.

A listing of the 200 stations carrying the program can be found here (http://action.afa.net/Radio/). For the live web simulcast, go here: http://action.afa.net/Webcast/WebcastPlayer.aspx?id=2147491014
The American Family Association, who are producing this event, will create a DVD of the program that will be available afterwards. Check www.CrossExamined.org later for details.

ENV reports that Senate Minority Leader Dennis Hollingsworth has sent a letter to the California Science Center (CSC) requesting documents related to the Center's cancellation of a screening last October of the pro-intelligent design documentary "Darwin’s Dilemma." The screening was sponsored by the American Freedom Alliance (AFA), a private group that had rented the Center's IMAX theater.

Senator Hollingsworth's letter follows two lawsuits filed against the state government-operated Science Center charging that it violated both the First Amendment and California's open records law in its effort to stop the screening and then cover up the real story behind the cancellation.

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As reported in ENV, Dr. Atkins, is a noted critic of intelligent design and author who appeared in Expelled, stating: "Religion, it's just fantasy...and is evil as well." According to a 1992 article by Atkins in New Scientist, "Darwin effectively swept purpose aside in the living world," and "[a]ll reimpositions of purpose are artifices of the religious to feed their faith." He holds little back on religion, claiming that it only offers only "empty gulping and the verbal flatulence that passes for theistic exposition."

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Access Research Network has just released its annual "Top 10 Darwin and Design Science Stories" for 2009.

Gaining top honors on the list was a peer-reviewed article by intelligent design theorists William Dembski and Robert Marks II in the September 2009 journal IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics. The authors used computer simulations and information theory to challenge the ability of neo-Darwinian processes to create new functional genetic information. This research provides validation for the core ideas in Dembski's 2001 book No Free Lunch: Why Specified Complexity Cannot Be Purchased without Intelligence. "For years the scientific establishment has tried to brush off intelligent design claiming that there are no peer-reviewed scientific articles supporting the theory and no research being done from the intelligent design paradigm," stated ARN Executive Director, Dennis Wagner. "This article is yet another rebuttal to both charges, and the research results put the monkey squarely on the back of the scientific materialists' to prove Darwinian processes can actually create new functional genetic information" Wagner concluded.

While there was a lot of hype in the media this year about the Darwin Bicentennial Celebration, Kevin Wirth, ARN Director of Media Relations, found it ironic that a several of the stories on ARN's top ten list this year were articles in scientific journals proclaiming that Darwin's theory should be abandoned because it no longer fits the data, or is severely limited in what it can do or explain. According to
Wirth "a cross disciplinary approach to biology is leading scientists away from reductionistic theories like Darwinian evolution toward more collective, holistic, systems approach." In one of the top ten articles on this topic Mark Buchanan states in Nature Physics "A coming revolution may go so far as to unseat Darwinian evolution as the key explanatory process in biology."

An online version of the ARN Top 10 Darwin and Design stories for 2009 with hyperlinks to original news sources can be found at www.arn.org/top10.

As reported by ENV...there are two big stories arising from the California Science Center's censorship last October of the pro-intelligent design film Darwin's Dilemma. The first big story, which was the primary focus of a Los Angeles Times article last week, is the act of censorship itself. As an agency of state government in California, the Science Center is required to abide by the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech. The Science Center didn't have to rent its facilities to the public, but once it did so, as a government agency, it was legally obliged by the First Amendment to treat all citizens equally.

But there is another big story tied to the Science Center that hasn't received sufficient attention yet: The Center's illegal cover-up.

The California Science Center has flagrantly violated California's open records law in an apparent effort to hide the real story behind its censorship of Darwin's Dilemma. The Center's evasion of the law is the reason for the open records lawsuit recently brought by Discovery Institute against the Center.

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William Dembski and Lewis Wolpert had an audio debate a few weeks ago, which is now available online as a podcast. There is around three minutes of stage-setting by the interviewer Justin Brierly before the actual discussion begins. The debate is part of a program series called UNBELIEVABLE.

Go to podcast...

This is not a book about God, or about intelligent design. Rather, here is a remarkable book, one that dares to challenge natural selection - not in the name of religion but in the name of good science. Most scientists are so terrified of religious attacks on the theory of evolution that it is never examined critically.

But there are major scientific and philosophical problems with the theory of natural selection. Darwin claimed the factors that determine the course of evolution are very largely environmental. This is a thesis that empirical results in biology are increasingly calling into question. The authors show that Darwinism is committed to inferring, from the premise that a kind of creature with a certain trait was selected, the conclusion that that kind of creature was selected for having that trait. Though such inferences are fallacious, they are nevertheless unavoidable within the Darwinist framework. Ultimately, Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini level a devastating critique against Darwinist orthodoxy and suggest new ways of thinking about evolution.

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The book, God in Science: An Atheist Defends Intelligent Design by Bradley Monton has been out for five months and has not gone unnoticed by the ID community. In fact, Dr. Monton, a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Colorado-Boulder, is a contributor to ARN. Monton argues that ID is legitimate as a scientific endeavor, although he is unconvinced, at this time, that an intelligent designer exists. It is refreshing to meet up with a clear-thinking, intellectually honest atheist.

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Monton's thinking is blogged in Proslogian by Dr. Jay L. Wile, Nuclear Chemist at the University of Rochester.

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