Reader Hempenstein called my attention to a long piece in yesterday’s Pittsburgh Post-Gazette by David Templeton (no relation, I suspect): “Is evolution missing link in some Pennsylvania high schools?” It’s good in not only laying out why evolution should be taught in public school science classrooms and why ID and creationism should not, but also […]
This isn’t an ad for an upcoming book showing that Jesus caused the Cambrian explosion of animal life (the rapid origin of many phyla about 540 million years ago); rather, it’s an indictment of a once-reputable publisher, HarperCollins, who, under the imprint of HarperOne (its “religion” subsidiary), is going to publish this book in June: […]
If there’s one characteristic of faitheists and accommodationists when facing the issue of American creationism, it’s their refusal to see the palpable fact that religion is the source of that creationism. While this seems trivially obvious to those who have followed the creation/evolution controversy, people like Chris Mooney, Karl Giberson, Kenneth Miller and the like […]
This Gallup poll is about ten months old, but I don’t think I’ve posted it before, and I like to update the statistics since the same poll is given every year. The question, too, is always the same (see below) and deals specifically with human evolution. Here are the overall data: Gallup’s summary is this: […]
I’m reading an interesting book: a series of interviews by Steve Paulson of various bigwigs who talk about the relationship between science and religion. It’s called Atoms & Eden: Conversations on Religion & Science (Oxford University Press, 2010). The interviewees are diverse and interesting: they include Francis Collins, Karen Armstrong, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Simon […]
Peter Hitchens can’t leave well enough alone, and so has sent yet another reply to my critiques (here and here) of his views on evolution (he doesn’t accept it, and is sympathetic to intelligent-design creationism ["ID"]). This is the last time I’ll put his responses above the fold; from now on they’ll go in the […]
Susan Jacoby, who’s just written a new book on atheist writer Robert G. Ingersoll, has called my attention to a really fine essay he wrote in 1872: “The Gods” (full reference below). It’s free online, and twenty pages long when printed out in 12-point type, but lengthen your attention span and read it. You’ll be […]
Over at Sandwalk, Larry Moran examines David Klinghoffer’s claim that we evolutionists don’t really understand Intelligent Design. Klinghoffer says this at the ID site Evolution News and Views (ENV): Forget for a moment about who, Darwinists or Design advocates, is actually right. If you took a sample of ID folks and a sample of Darwin […]
UPDATE: Over at Sandwalk, Larry Moran, who has dispatched Jon Wells’s ID-based arguments against “junk DNA” several times (see links below), goes after this latest video. ______ Know thine enemies. Uncommon Descent has a collection of videos from an Intelligent Design (ID) conference at Biola University (originally named “The Bible Institute of Los Angeles”), including […]
They go after me a lot at the Uncommon Descent website, a vehicle for intelligent design [ID] creationism, and I usually ignore them. But their latest tirade is so ludicrously ignorant that I have to single it out. Here it is in full: What a thicket of ignorance we must chop through here! My response […]
