In the News

In the LA Times, Charlotte Allen gives her take on the New Atheists.

"My problem with atheists is their tiresome - and way old - insistence that they are being oppressed and their fixation with the fine points of Christianity. What - did their Sunday school teachers flog their behinds with a Bible when they were kids?"

"Read Dawkins, or Hitchens, or the works of fellow atheists Sam Harris ("The End of Faith") and Daniel Dennett ("Breaking the Spell"), or visit an atheist website or blog (there are zillions of them, bearing such titles as "God Is for Suckers," "God Is Imaginary" and "God Is Pretend"), and your eyes will glaze over as you peruse - again and again - the obsessively tiny range of topics around which atheists circle like water in a drain."

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Thomas Vaughan has written a play that takes a critical look at both intelligent design and evolution.

The character Henry Darden's views are based on the ideas of well-qualified scientists. These professionals are not creationists, and they do not believe in Intelligent Design. Their credentials and their motives are impeccable. As a dramatist, I am not qualified to have a worth-while opinion on who exactly is right in this scientific debate, but it was the blistering, often personal attacks on these individuals by their colleagues that inspired this play.

The hostility these men and women received, however, is nothing compared to the vitriol directed towards Dr. William Dembski, a leading advocate of Intelligent Design (ID). I want to personally thank Dr. Dembski here. Knowing full well that I did not agree with his views, Dr. Dembski still took the time to read the play to help assure the accuracy of how the ideas behind ID were portrayed. He even suggested a fine story note that I used and I think the play is better for it. I am very grateful for his trust, his generosity, and most of all his open-mindedness.

This stands as a stark contrast to some of those that I communicated with in the same capacity who hold the more mainstream view of evolution. They were openly hostile to not just the play but the very notion that these minority views should be given a voice at all. The interviews with the notable scientists these ideas are based on were attacked without being read. One individual even suggested that the interviews were probably just made up and not worth reading in the first place.

While this hostility came from only a few, and only from the academics, it was enough to assure me that the basic thrust of the play was essentially correct. It is worth noting that many more people have helped tirelessly with this production who still disagree with the arguments presented by Henry Darden. I thank each and every one of them.

Learn more about the play by clicking HERE...

Kathy Hanson, for the Ames Tribune, reports that some representatives from Iowa's regent universities are calling for the state Legislature to kill "The Evolution Academic Freedom Act," introduced Feb. 3 by Rep. Rod Roberts, R-Carroll.

A statement released Tuesday includes a petition with more than 200 signatures by faculty opposing HF 183 from Iowa State University, the University of Iowa and the University of Northern Iowa, as well as from 17 other Iowa universities, colleges and community colleges, seven primary and secondary schools, and three research organizations.

According to the statement, HF 183 is one of many "academic freedom" bills that have been introduced in the last year that are sponsored and supported by the Discovery Institute, a "Seattle-based anti-evolution organization." Similar bills have been introduced in several states, including Alabama, Florida and Oklahoma. One such bill passed and was signed into law in Louisiana.

Robert Crowther Jr., Discovery Institute's communications director, said the Discovery Institute has not been directly involved in writing HF 183 but thinks it is likely Roberts crafted the bill's language along the lines of the institute's "model legislation."

"That's what we hoped would happen," Crowther said. "We want anyone interested in furthering academic freedom to use our resources."

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"Okay ID proponent, who designed the designer?" This is a question often asked. There comes a point where we look to the best candidate for ultimate explanation.

Jay Richards provides a brief podcast on the ultimate explanation. Is it a designer: a personal, immaterial, eternal mind, or nothing? The materialist is backed into a corner, having to assert that physical reality came from absolutely nothing: no space, no time, no matter, no energy...nothing. Bertrand Russell, and many other atheists and agnostics, are willing to take this radical leap of faith.

On the other hand, a personal, immaterial, eternal mind is the likely stopping point. Every existing thing has a explanation for its existence, either in an external cause, or in the necessity of its own nature. As the saying goes, from nothing, comes nothing. It's either everything from absolutely nothing, or the self-existent mind. Which takes more faith to believe in?

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This story has made the rounds worldwide.

The Austin American-Statesman reports that Chris Comer, who resigned under pressure, says state neutrality on creationism amounts to religious advocacy.

The article reports that more than 130 Texas university science professors in December signed a letter to Scott calling evolution "a central pillar in any modern science education" that is supported by a "massive body of scientific education." Intelligent design is a religious idea that deserves no place in the science classroom at all," according to the letter, sent in response to Comer's resignation.

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Now...this is odd. There are, or may be metaphysical implications in IDT, but that is true for an atheistic (naturalistic) worldview as well. A point is eventually reached when matter, energy, space, and time emerge either from absolutely nothing, or a necessary, eternal, immaterial, personal mind, who exists through the necessity of its own nature.

Either absolutely nothing, or this mind brought matter, energy, space, and time into existence. Therefore both atheists and theists are dealing in metaphysics, with the theists having the more plausible arguments. This fact is lost on most.

Atheists play the "religion card". Often not willing to admit it, they have their own metaphysical (religious) beliefs. They often exercise quite a bit of faith, one example being the multiverse assertion, based on pure speculation. It's multiverse vs God. The atheist has no idea if there is an ensemble of universes, or, for that matter, what mechanism (which had to be finely tuned) generated the varying universes in the multiverse. It takes more faith to believe in the bloated multiverse theory, than to believe in one, eternal, immaterial, personal being, who exists necessarily.

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Gil Dodgen comments in Uncommom Descent about the History Channel's How Life Began. He remarks that the title of the show was a dead giveaway about what I would see, hear, and experience. The title of the show should have been "How Did Life Begin?" and the answer should have been, "No one has the faintest idea."

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In ENV...This week Glenn Altschuler, professor of American Studies at Cornell, reviewed (among other books) Ken Miller's Only a Theory for the Baltimore Sun.

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There are literally scores of letters to the editor across the country each week on the Evolution - Intelligent Design. There are also hundreds of blogs.

A recent opinion piece in the Eugene (OR) Herald-Guard by Norm Fox, a Springfield, Oregon resident and retired Christian school administrator, is a great example of clear-thinking. He easily shows the embarrassingly shallow thought of Richard Dawkins.

He rightly points out that Richard Dawkins is indeed positing a self-creating cosmos, and is trumpeting intelligent design, just as long as the designers are evolved creatures in the cosmos. But, how did life spontaneously come forth in another part of the cosmos and evolve? On that question, silence from Dr. D.

Dawkins, in "Expelled", asks the naive question, "Who created God?"

Fox rightly points out that "Something is eternal". Either matter, energy, space, and time is eternal (either in this cosmos or in the unknowable, untouchable multiverse)...or a necessary, self-existent personal being is eternal. Since something exists rather than absolutely nothing, the necessary, eternal entity is either material stuff or an immaterial personal being. This ultimate reality is a metaphysical matter, beyond science. Can impersonal stuff create itself out of absolutely nothing, or did stuff come about from a personal, self-existent intelligent designer? It takes a lot more faith to be an atheist.

More...from Fox...

In ENV, Jonathan Wells writes that "surprisingly, in a lengthy interview with Ben Stein in Expelled, Dawkins says that living things on the Earth could be actually (and not just apparently) designed - and that the design might be detectable. Dawkins thereby concedes the central claim of ID, though he insists that the designers - if there were any - must have been highly evolved space aliens, not God."

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In ENV, Casey Luskin report on the fireside chat at Stanford this past weekend. For the most part, they agreed with one-another on nearly everything. It's clear that they fear intelligent design. They equated intelligent design proponents with "con-men" who are "slimy," "well-funded," and promote "ignorance." (Incidentally, each of these claims is incorrect.) They also appeared to greatly fear religion, as both Dawkins and Krauss held that teaching young children about religion in Sunday School is equivalent to "child abuse."

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