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Wednesday, February 02, 2011

Readings for Evolution Sunday I

Via this:

Here's what atheist evolution gurus think of Christian Darwinists:
I, at least, think the NCSE shouldn’t take the theological position that faith is consistent with science. And the NCSE should limit its discussion about faith to saying that there are a variety of views about the consilience of science and faith and somebody in conflict should consult his/her minister. People like Larry Moran, P.Z., and I have been saying this for years, but it doesn’t seem to have penetrated Josh’s consciousness.
"Josh" is a professional Darwin lobbyist who carries out boss Eugenie Scott's dictum that a dog collar is worth two white coats, when working the crowd.

The inimitable Jerry Coyne, attack by under-Darwin lobbyist Josh, roars back:
Having read my post from last Sunday, in which I discussed—civilly!—science and religion with a reading group at Chicago’s First United Methodist Church, Rosenau has somehow concluded that I’m an accommodationist!
But why are they all so upset? Does anyone imagine that the people who sit through Evolution Sunday and twiddle their cause-of-the-month buttons, placid and questionless, would be troubled by the idea that they are despised? Accommodationists expect to be despised when they join what they think is the winning side.

I don't despise them; I am concerned for their future.

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posted by Denyse @ 2:42 p.m.  

Monday, January 10, 2011

Typical Christian Darwinist evolves into 2011

And perhaps deserves, like his patron, to be called a theist.

This series of 2011 Christian Darwinist events, hosted by Rev. Michael Dowd, landed in my mailbox. The press release for the 2011 events informs,
The six-part series on EvolutionaryChristianity.com will explore what it means to be Christian in a myth-busting age of scientific discovery. Guests will include prominent, and often controversial, Christians, such as:

Professor Ken Miller, co-author of the most widely-used biology textbook in America, and lead witness in the Dover ‘intelligent design’ trial.

Karl Giberson, vice president of the BioLogos Foundation, an organization that helps conservative Christians integrate their faith with contemporary science.

Brian McLaren, a pastor named by Time magazine as one of America’s 25 most influential evangelicals.

Ian Lawton, a radical pastor whose church recently made national headlines for removing its cross.

Gail Worcelo, a Catholic nun and co-founder with the late Thomas Berry of Green Mountain Monastery, a new monastic community dedicated to the healing and protection of Earth and its life systems.

Owen Gingerich, professor emeritus of Astronomy and the History of Science at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and member of the American Scientific Affiliation, a society of evangelical scientists.  
The Ian Lawton story above seems kind of odd when you consider how many Christians have been killed or maimed in recent years for attending places of worship that do have a cross. But I digress.

Overall, these and other Dowd-friendly bios I have seen so far leave little doubt that "Evolutionary Christianity" is, in general, a project for and product of what a friend calls "Churches Nobody Goes to Any More."  A dead giveaway is that they're always "evolving" or "transforming themselves" or engaging in "creative destruction," or something or other.
Nothing is sure, not even unsureness - except about Darwin. He's a lodestone now.

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posted by Denyse @ 12:00 p.m.  

Saturday, December 11, 2010

But I really DO think that Christian Darwinism is an oxymoron

or

Something I wrote recently seems to have sparked quite the little discussion. (Dang! Everybody talks to Barry, nobody talks to me ... :) )

Briefly, I noted that a friend's post had been removed from a Christian Darwinist site because the moderator felt that he had intimated that Theodosius Dobzhansky was not a Christian. (He was not a Christian by any reasonable standard.)

How can one tell if a person is a Christian, many wanted to know. Isn't that just making a judgement (judge not, lest ye be ...)?

Barry Arrington made the excellent point that asking the person to affirm the Creed may be setting the bar a little high.

Fair enough: When I have used the Creed that way, I aimed to sort out situations where the person darn well knows what the Creed says and how it may differ from his private convictions. And I had good reasons for asking; otherwise, I wouldn't bother. I have neither time nor inclination for hunting down heresies. (And none of this is written with prejudice to any other religion. It's just that salesdarwinists currently target confused Christians more than other confused folk. So, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and others, please pardon us Christians as we set the record straight.)

We must say something when someone like Dobzhansky is fronted as a "Christian" to advance the Darwinist cause. I don't object in principle to other rational criteria for assessing whether someone is a Christian, ones such as Barry offered. The main thing to see here is that a person cannot in good faith believe two doctrines that oppose each other at the most basic level.

Darwinism opposes Christianity in a much more serious way than is generally recognized: The Darwinist must - and usually does - believe that Christianity accidentally evolved amid the noise of neurons and it spread via natural selection.

Thus it was that man created God.

Now, if the Darwinist also believes that Christianity was the result of God's admittedly spectacular self-revelations (cf the Creed**), then he believes that God created man. Which is it?

More to the point, if the Darwinist also believes that God can do all that the Creed commands* good Christians to believe, he cannot rationally go on to insist that

:) man is a part of nature, and Darwin proved it

:) God never intervenes in nature, but does it all by Darwinism

So man created God, but no, God created man. Or God created man with the capacity of accidentally evolve an idea of God as an illusion. Why? Because he couldn't reveal himself?

So yes, I do think Christian Darwinism is an oxymoron, if the Christian Darwinist is unconfused enough to know what he is saying.

It is hardly irrelevant to this discussion that 78% of evolutionary biologists are "pure naturalists" (no God and no free will).


* You cannot become an adult Catholic, so far as I know, without assenting intellectually to the Creed.

**For those for whom the Creed may be a bit challenging, due to age, haste, extreme suffering, or emergency, there is also a more basic prayer, the Act of Faith :
O MY GOD, I firmly believe that Thou art one God in three divine persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit; I believe that Thy divine Son became man and died for our sins, and that He shall come to judge the living and the dead. I believe these and all the truths which the holy Catholic Church teaches, because Thou hast revealed them, Who canst neither deceive nor be deceived. Amen.
. Now that is either a branch of Christianity or Darwin's neural noise.

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posted by Denyse @ 12:02 p.m.  

Friday, December 10, 2010

If you are a Darwinist, can you be a Christian if people just say so ... ?

A friend mentioned that a certain Christian Darwinist Web log removed a post in which he intimated that Theodosius Dobzhansky (1900-1975) was only doubtfully a Christian. We are advised by the mod that Dobzhansky, who was certainly a loyal foot soldier for Darwin, was also a “firmly committed Christian.”

Indeed? Those who might be expected to know report,
Dobzhansky was a religious man, although he apparently rejected fundamental beliefs of traditional religion, such as the existence of a personal God and of life beyond physical death. His religiosity was grounded on the conviction that there is meaning in the universe. He saw that meaning in the fact that evolution has produced the stupendous diversity of the living world and has progressed from primitive forms of life to mankind. Dobzhansky held that, in man, biological evolution has transcended itself into the realm of self-awareness and culture. He believed that somehow mankind would eventually evolve into higher levels of harmony and creativity. He was a metaphysical optimist." (Ayala, F.J. & Fitch, W.M., Genetics and the origin of species: An introduction," _Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA_, Vol. 94, July 1997, pp.7691-7697, p.7693.
Okay, so he was probably kind to kids, kittens, and katydids (as his fond survivors doubtless recall), but was not in any meaningful sense a Christian.

Yes, much is made of his “Orthodox”-ness”, presumably because those icons so greatly embellish to the story. It says a lot about Christian Darwinism that he is regarded as an excellent example.

As I explained to my friend,
if you ask me whether someone is a Christian, I say, "Let him recite the
Apostle's Creed and affirm that he believes it and renounces contrary doctrines."
In the Creed, you will hardly hear about “somehow mankind would eventually evolve into higher levels of harmony and creativity,” nor can any such doctrine be twisted out of either Christianity or history in general.

So either the Darwinists who think they know what Dobzhansky believed are wrong or the Christian Darwinists are trying to put us on again. Ladies and gentlemen, place your bets.

The trouble is, it’s all on the Internet now ...

It bothers me that some people reassure school kids that there is no conflict between Christianity and Darwinism (oh, and by the way, evolution explains why you kids and your parents believe the God illusion).

My friend is better off posting some place where facts matter. And Christian Darwinists would be better off without the Information Age.

(Note: There are slightly different versions of the Creed, but none offer the “somehow evolve” option.)

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posted by Denyse @ 6:00 a.m.  

Saturday, October 30, 2010

Christian Darwinism: Now you see the "Creator" and now you don't, but believe anyway

Well, believe something anyway, subject to rapid change.

Once, years ago, I got a rather long phone call from a Christian evolutionist who wanted me to know that Darwin had added to the second edition of his Origin of Species the words "by the Creator" to imply thaty evolution was God-directed. That was supposed to show that Darwin was really, at heart, a theist.

That Christian evolutionist must have thought I an one of those dim, wimpy Christian writers who nod appreciatively, make vacuous statements about "faith and science,"and worse, make cute little jokes, and then just run off to cover a praisefest somewhere.

Sorry, chump. You dialled the wrong number.

For more, go here.

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posted by Denyse @ 12:49 p.m.  

Monday, October 11, 2010

British physicist David Tyler on growing doubts about Darwinism in fruit flies


This empirical work is worth noting on two counts. First, we are here considering a mechanism that is central to Darwinian evolution. Positive natural selection of hereditable variation is the key (we are informed) to understanding how descent with modification occurs. However, the first set of empirical data relating to a sexually reproducing species does not confirm that modification works this way. This is why Long's comment is worth repeating: "This research really upends the dominant paradigm about how species evolve". Many scientists have long suspected that the Darwinian mechanisms are inadequate to account for large-scale transformation - these research findings provide empirical support for such doubts.

The other reason for taking an interest in this research is that the Darwinian paradigm has been widely used in the development of drugs for medical use. Whereas the classical view is that genes have specific functions, the new research supports the growing body of evidence that the norm is for genes to have pleiotropic effects. A novel SNP can then be expected to have not one, but many, effects. This has been underplayed by researchers of a darwinian persuasion.

"Based on that flawed paradigm, Rose noted, drugs have been developed to treat diabetes, heart disease and other maladies, some with serious side effects. He said those side effects probably occur because researchers were targeting single genes, rather than the hundreds of possible gene groups like those Burke found in the flies. Most people don't think of flies as close relatives, but the UCI team said previous research had established that humans and other mammals share 70 percent of the same genes as the tiny, banana-eating insect known as Drosophila melanogaster."

Read more here.

Find out why there is an intelligent design controversy:

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posted by Denyse @ 10:57 p.m.  

Sunday, August 15, 2010

Lighter moment: Want to attract a school of sharks?

Randal Rauser, a self-described "Tentative Apologist" explains,

I ventured into turbid waters a couple days ago by mentioning that in the future I would discuss Steve Meyer's Signature in the Cell in the blog. What followed was a barrage of discussion which led AnAtheist.Net to observe:

"It looks like you have discovered a quick way to attract a fiery horde of new readers."

Indeed. Actually I learned last year about the effect that mention of "intelligent design" has in a blog. I like to think of it as being like a bucket of fish heads and blood. Slop it in the ocean and within fifteen minutes you'll have a number of sharks swimming around the boat snapping things like: "That's just creationism in a cheap tuxedo. Goddidit! Magic! You suck! Ha ha ha!"

So the question. Do you want to deal with the sharks? (Jul 08, 2010)
In my own view, the key question is, do you want to believe that little separates you from a baboon or would you rather be an authentic human being? If the former, behave like a Darwinist troll. You can probably even get money for being a baboon's cousin, if you do a good enough impression. If the latter, try Uncommon Descent, where you will learn things you will not hear from the Darwinists' media sheep heard.

Find out why there is an intelligent design controversy:

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posted by Denyse @ 9:05 a.m.  

Friday, August 06, 2010

New book announcement: William A. Dembski and Denyse O'Leary slam "Christian Darwinism" in forthcoming book

In Christian Darwinism: Why Theistic Evolution Fails As Science and Theology (Broadman and Holman, November 2011), mathematician Dembski and journalist O’Leary address a powerful new trend to accommodate Christianity with atheist materialism, via acceptance of Darwinian ("survival of the fittest") evolution.

This trend includes "Evolution Sundays" at churches and endorsements by high administration officials like Francis Collins.

Dembski and O'Leary say it all just doesn't work. How can we accommodate self-sacrifice as the imitation of Christ with "altruism is just another way you spread your selfish genes!" How can we accommodate monogamy as the image of Christ and his church - for which he gave himself up - with "The human animal was never meant to be monogamous!"?

In the authors' view, no accommodation is possible. More to the point, accommodation is not even necessary. There are good reasons for doubting Darwin and good reasons for adopting other models for evolution - or for deciding that there is not enough evidence to make a decision.

Dembski and O'Leary insist that this conflict has nothing to do with the age of the Earth. Darwinism is, as they will show, the increasingly implausible creation story of atheism, which diverges at just about every point from the Christian worldview on which modern science was founded.

Yet Darwinism is publicly funded, and taught, in many jurisdictions, without any criticism permitted.

Reactions - not only praise but criticism - are expected and much appreciated! Regular updates will be provided at www.uncommondescent.com, so persons who wish to comment on the project can post there.

Contact: Denyse O'Leary oleary@sympatico.ca

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posted by Denyse @ 6:58 a.m.  

Thursday, August 05, 2010

Are formerly tone-deaf people finally getting the picture about Darwinian eugenics?

In the first half of the 20th century, the U.S. 60,000 sterilized Americans, to which California contributed a very robust 20,000. One of the more haunting features of an excellent new cable documentary coming out this summer, What Hath Darwin Wrought?, is the setting where many of its interviews with scholars were conducted: the grounds of the old Stockton State Hospital in Stockton, California.

[Yes, that same California in which, today, stars boast proudly of out of wedlock pregnancies. ... Not that I make it my business; I do not pay taxes there, and they do make lots of money, so I assume that deadbeat dads can be brought to justice.]

A leading center for coerced sterilization in that dark era, the hospital today looks quite picturesque as the backdrop to conversations with my Discovery Institute colleagues, political scientist John West and historian Richard Weikart (who teaches at the Cal State University campus of which the state hospital building is now a part). Along with philosopher and mathematician David Berlinski, another Discovery fellow, they do a remarkably lucid and informative job of sketching a side of 20th-century history -- the malign cultural and moral influence of Darwinian evolutionary thinking -- that tends to get overlooked.


A huge scandal. All worth reading.

The sad part is, all most people actually want is an acknowledgement of what happened. If many people never had children due to a failed ideology, well, those people have now died and they are dead. Best let the dead rest in peace.

But the living want an acknowledgement of the Darwinist eugenics scandal. It really happened, and we want an admission. Darwin's followers were wrong. They thought they knew who should live and who should die.

Oh, so, you are God now? When did He vacate his throne and a bunch of tax-funded Darwinist profs take it over?

[- 30 -]

Maybe the mosquitoes drove the eugenicists off?

Find out why there is an intelligent design controversy:

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posted by Denyse @ 2:55 p.m.  

Tuesday, June 22, 2010

1. Mayday mayday mayday SoS Darwin! Is it really that bad? Guess so, if you go by BioLogos.

Professor Karl W. Giberson vice-president of BioLogos asks, in Saving Darwin Can you still be a Christian and support the idea of evolution? He argues that we can save Darwin and still be Christians or theists.

Darwinism is kept in place by people I can only describe as atheist tax and donor burdens. They do not hesitate to lavish sickening obsequies on the old Brit toff. Christian tax and donor burdens who support these atheist tax burdens support them and pay no attention, so far as I can see, to the fact that the vast majority of their compatriots are pure naturalists (= no God and no free will). Indeed, their constant refrain is, if we don’t accept these people's views, ours will not be believed or accepted.

As if that would ever happen in an environment where such people rule. It would be a laff riot if it did not involve serious public policy issues.

Next segment: 2. Christian Darwinism is not in trouble? No? Want to put it to a real test?

Find out why there is an intelligent design controversy:

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posted by Denyse @ 3:19 a.m.  

2. Christian Darwinism is not in trouble? No? Want to put it to a real test?

Well, let’s start with the fact that Christians and theists in general are decreasingly respected as sources of information in a society whose science is so largely governed by atheist tax and donor burdens.

Look what happened to poor Michael Reiss, Church of England clergyman who was - heart and soul! - in favour of force feeding Darwinism to schoolkids, persuading them that they are merely hapless lumps of "evolution".

It would never have occurred to Reiss to question the system; he only wanted to '"help" - the usual social worker's wretched excuse for bad judgement and wrong action.

Reiss was driven out mainly because he was a clergyman. I bet he wouldn’t have been driven out if he were an atheist popularizer. In the shallow Brit culture today, he would have been lauded, except that his problem was that he really believed what others use only for gain - in power, prestige, or cash. And they are wiser than he was. That's what it is good for,not because it is true.

Atheists and theistic evolution fellow travellers think they can kid us all, because it is so easy to get politicians to holler and thump stupidly for Jesus at prayer breakfasts - as long as it never means anything. But clearly, for whatever reason, that is not working now in North America, where lots of people still have kids or grandkids, and we need to think about a real future, not a pretend one. But Christian Darwinism still attracts funds, as the BioLogos Institute attests.

You think I am being too harsh? Thomas Cudworth said much the same thing here. Okay, forget him, for now. Look at Giberson’s piece at the BioLogos site, a former home of Francis Collins, better known for being a capable genomics administrator than a clear thinker, who is now part of the United States' administration and avid supporter of human embryonic stem cell research.

Biologos is now a home, so far as I can see, for everyone who wants to persuade theists that the universe and/or life forms show no evidence of design (so, of course, human embryos can just be trashed, right? Just more stuff for the blender ...).

Real test: What credible real evidence is there that a deer-like creature turns into a whale by purely Darwinian means?* Fine with me if it is true, but how do we know it is, apart from the need to advance the claims of Darwinism by plumping up stuff that is largely speculation?

* And don't try to con us by claiming that Darwinism is the same thing as evolution. Increasing numbers of people just know better now.

Next segment: Why are we not all contented Darwinian cows?

Find out why there is an intelligent design controversy:

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posted by Denyse @ 2:47 a.m.  

3. Karl Giberson's basic point: Why are we not all contented Darwinian cows?

Giberson's basic point in "Would you like fries with that theory?" is that lay people should be contented cows when listening to scientists.

Well, first, what about the Altenberg 16, scientists seeking to rescue evolution from tax burden Darwinists?

And just shutting up and listening would get us where, exactly? My favourite Giberson lines:
My field is physics. I cannot imagine what it would mean for a layperson to deal with the data of physics and draw their own conclusions.
Well, physics can easily be divided into what can be demonstrated and what can’t. The prospects of getting an explorer probe out to Pluto or a Canadarm on the space shuttle could, at least in principle, be demonstrated or refuted. Multiple universes or competing Darwinian universes (Lee Smolin-style) cannot. Well, Giberson goes on, as profs tend to do:
Furthermore we rarely—if ever—apply this “Professor Everyman” style of reasoning to, say, medical diagnoses. If our child is sick we want our doctor to share the collective wisdom of the medical profession with us and tell us what to do, not hand us some charts and say “Here are the facts. Let me know what medications you want me to prescribe. Or if you think surgery is required.”
Well, excuse me. I sure want a say myself. And have always had one in the past. And my kids and grandkids are fine.

I don’t know what happens in Prof. Giberson’s community, but here we think that consensus is important, because it affects patient care - except in unusual, emergency situations, where no one need accept responsibility for an adverse outcome. I once saw a doctor on her knees on the floor of a hotel lobby, administering heart massage to an unconscious heart attack victim, while awaiting emerg backup.

However, in a normal surgical situation, the doctor offers the patient a chance to choose, or a parent a chance to choose on behalf of a minor child. That is quite different. The reality is that, today, matters are often complex. Many people simply refuse further conventional treatment, and they are by no means less aware than the physician of what that means. They need to live with whatever outcome either way, and if one outcome means more suffering than another, they need to determine at what point conventional treatment has run its course. Onward, research!! But why the parent is a worse judge than the physician in such difficult cases, is out of my reach.

In a typical modern community, where we have clean water, vaccinations, absence of constant violent crime, etc., obvious solutions work, and we just provide them. We call that "applied science" - known locally as "engineering." But we cannot extrapolate applied science to all difficult cases.

Next segment: 4. Maybe the coffin is still empty because no one actually bought it?

Find out why there is an intelligent design controversy:

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posted by Denyse @ 1:51 a.m.  

Monday, May 24, 2010

Christian Darwinist admits that design explanation is better

Here is an amazing excerpt from the thoughts of Christian evolutionist Steve Matheson:
Matheson: I don’t find the argument convincing, I really don’t, but I think I know why. And the reason why is, I just figured out tonight, you said that we reason backwards from what we know works, which is that intelligence makes codes. I’ll agree with that. Can I see the hands of people that don’t agree? Of course not. Okay, well we reason back and say, therefore, this is the one explanation we know that can do this. I buy that, I get it, it’s, it’s obvious. But I see the world differently than you do. And so here’s the thing. I haven’t yet [pause] well, you said intelligence always creates information. And my view is a little different. Everywhere I look, and every time I look, if I wait long enough, there is a natural and even materialistic explanation to things. Now, don’t I have the right to say, you know, I’m going to go ahead and extrapolate that back, like Steve’s book, not because I’m an obnoxious Calvinist—maybe that’s true—but because, well that’s just kinda my preference? And so what I want all of us to agree on is that it’s fruitless, it’s pointless to say, Steve, don’t be stupid, design doesn’t explain what you want it to. Well, of course it does—how could it not? But wouldn’t it be reasonable for some of the Christians in this room to say, You know—

Meyer: You’re comfortable waiting for another explanation.

Matheson: I am.

Meyer: Which, in a strict sense, concedes that the one I offer is currently best—[The audience erupts into applause. Unintelligible between Meyer and Matheson]—and we have a different philosophy of science, which is where the locus of our disagreement probably lies, and where we should continue to converse.

Matheson: I’ll offer the acknowledgment: [pause] Design will always be an excellent and irrefutable explanation. How can it [pause] I just don’t see how it couldn’t be. I’m just saying it doesn’t look designed to me. He’s right, and there’s some stuff that goes on in the cell, I don’t know how you get design into there.
Basically, I wonder whether Matheson doesn't want to acknowledge design because his living may depend on denying it.

Should I offer him a membership in the "Stooges for Darwin "Eat me last!!" Club?

More to the point, there is a fundamental thinking error here: If non-atheist materialist explanations cannot beconsidered, any materialist atheist explanation, no matter how foolish, is acceptable.

Big bazooms theory of human evolution? Big brow ridge theory of human evolution? Dancing dad theory of human evolution? That sort of thing dumbs down our culture. That is what is not being confronted here. And it is what Bill Dembski and I fully intend to confront in our upcoming book, Christian Darwinism: Why theistic evolution fails as science and as theology. Listening to this guy, you hardly need to read the book, but you probably should anyway, if only to hear more of the crackpottery fronted in the name of Darwin in Christian circles.

PS: Don't bother writing in to tell me that there are other explanations of evolution besides Darwin's. Of course there are, and many very respectable ones, too. Darwin's explanation is, as he explicitly intended, the only one to power materialist atheism. So where does that leave the Christian Darwinist?

Find out why there is an intelligent design controversy:

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posted by Denyse @ 9:00 a.m.  

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