Wednesday, October 24, 2012

 

Does Mercedes Make a Clown Car?


Then Donald Trump must own a fleet of them!

Is there a more ridiculous public figure in America today?

His latest is his announcement that he would announce "Something very, very big concerning the president of the United States. It's going to be very big. I know one thing — you will cover it in a very big fashion."

Well, here it is:
A STATEMENT FROM DONALD J. TRUMP

New York, October 24, 2012 - President Obama is the least transparent President in the history of this country. Sadly, we know very little about a large portion of our President's life and, fact, he has spent millions of dollars in legal fees to make sure that it stays that way. I am very honored to have gotten President Obama to release his long form birth certificate, or whatever it was that he released. This was something that neither John McCain nor Hilary Clinton were able to get him to do during their very long and bitter political campaigns despite the fact that they were strong in demanding it's release (nobody knows why he would not do it). Many Americans have serious questions — questions that should not be part of the presidential dialogue. Over the course of the last year, millions of people have contacted me via my social media pages (Twitter.com/realDonaldTrump, Facebook.com/DonaldTrump) seeking my assistance to have this extremely important issue settled once and for all While they may have the thought and concern, they feel that they lack the ability to get this done. Essentially, a large portion of American people are; asking me to serve as their spokesperson.

It is for this reason that I have a deal for the President — a deal that I do not believe he can refuse. If Barack Obama agrees (or has the universities and colleges agree) to give all of his college records and applications and if he provides all of his passport records/and applications, I will give to a charity of his choice (inner city children in Chicago, American Cancer Society, AIDS research, etc.) a check for five million dollars. The check will be given immediately after he releases the records so stated, or causes said records to be released. If he chooses to do this, he will be doing a great service not only to the charity, but also a great service to the country and indeed, himself.

If he releases these records it will end the question, and indeed the anger, of many Americans. Their President will become transparent like other Presidents. So all he has to do to collect five million dollars for a charity of his choice, is get his universities and colleges to immediately give his complete applications and records and also to release his passport information. When he does that to my satisfaction, and if it's complete, the check will be delivered immediately. A lot of people will be very, very happy to see this happen.

Frankly, it's a check that I very much want to write, I absolutely would be the most happy of all if I did, in fact, make this contribution through the President to a charity of his choice. One caveat -- the records must be given by October 31st at 5pm in the afternoon. So, Mr., President, not only will I be happy, and totally satisfied, but the American people will be happy and the selected charity will very, very happy. Than you, Mr. President!
Because, of course, the President of the United States should dance to the tune of and meet the 'deadline' of a buffoon obsessed with lunatic "birther" nonsense, whose main claim to fame is inheriting a real estate fortune, losing it, sort of recovering it, divorcing trophy wives and being a "reality television" star. And of course the President should do this to the "satisfaction" of someone wearing roadkill on his head!

The sad thing is that there may actually be some media outlets that will treat this as a "story" rather than a joke.

 

Paging Mr. Scotsman


John Blake has a long article about President Obama's religious beliefs and the reactions to it by the Rabid Religious Right.

Some of it is just funny:
The Rev. Steven Andrew, author of "Making a Strong Nation," says Obama is trying to change the national motto from "In God we Trust" to "Out of Many, One" ...
Um ... E pluribus unum has been on the Great Seal of the United States since it was adopted by Congress in 1782 and was generally considered the motto of the US until 1956 when, during the height of the cold war hysteria, Congress adopted "In God We Trust." Who's changing what?
"I think he's an anti-Christ," Andrew says. [Rev. Gary] Cass, of the Christian Anti-Defamation Commission, says Obama's emphasis on helping the poor through social justice isn't Christianity.
A good response from Rex Huppke on Twitter:
My Favorite part of the Bible is where Jesus gives money to the rich, tells the poor to suck it up and asks for Caesar's birth certificate.
But here's my favorite part:
Obama's support of same-sex marriage and abortion rights also disqualifies him from being a Christian, Cass says.

"It's the most pro-abortion administration in the history of America. On every social issue – the sanctity of life and of marriage between men and women – Obama is on the wrong side of every moral issue," he says.

He says a progressive Christian is a contradiction.

"No Christian says I believe in Jesus Christ and I reject the Bible," Cass says. "These progressives who say they're Christians are liars. They're using Christianity as a guise to advance their own agenda."
... Says the very people who are urging ministers to electioneer from the pulpit. Of course, there are millions of Catholics, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, etc., etc. who agree that gay marriage has nothing to do with the "sanctity" of marriage and that, at least within rational limits, women's medical decisions are their own.

Cass is just waiting for the True Scotsman to show up.

Tuesday, October 23, 2012

 

What "Pro Life" Really Looks Like


From Eric C. Miller at Religion Dispatches:
According to Dr. Jeffery Peipert, the study's lead author, abortion rates can be expected to decline significantly—perhaps up to 75 percent—when contraceptives are made available to women free of charge. ...

Drawing on a sample of 9,000 St. Louis women—many of whom were uninsured—Peipert and his colleagues covered the costs of birth control, making a variety of options available free of charge. Once price was no longer a concern, many of the women opted for relatively expensive intrauterine devices (IUDs) which are among the most effective forms available:

The effect on teen pregnancy was striking: There were 6.3 births per 1,000 teenagers in the study. Compare that to a national rate of 34 births per 1,000 teens in 2010.

There also were substantially lower rates of abortion, when compared with women in the metro area and nationally: 4.4 to 7.5 abortions per 1,000 women in the study, compared with 13.4 to 17 abortions per 1,000 women overall in the St. Louis region, Peipert calculated. That's lower than the national rate, too, which is almost 20 abortions per 1,000 women. ...
Author Brian Alexander notes that, according to a 2011 study from the Guttmacher Institute, "unplanned pregnancies cost the United States a conservatively estimated $11 billion per year," money that may be saved simply by covering the cost of birth control.
Of course, the fact that universal access to contraception will greatly reduce abortions, save tons of money for society and reduce medical costs (why do you think there was no stink from the insurance industry when this provision was put in? ... they know it will save them money!) will not stop opposition to contraception coverage. It was never about "killing unborn children." Before Roe v. Wade, abortion was never treated as the equivalent of murder.

It is and has always been about controlling the sexuality of others, particularly women.

Sunday, October 21, 2012

 

A Wondrous Sign of ...


PZ has an amusing sign from the Texas Freethought Convention ... or, more correctly, a sign in opposition to freedom of thought.

Drunks ... been there, done that, even have the T-shirt.

Homosexuals ... I've known quite a few ... as have the sign holders, though they might not "know" (along with a myriad of other things) it ... Almost always found them to be no worse than other people and considerably better than the people who obsess over what others are doing in their bedroom.

Abortionist ... My late wife was raped and had one ... but not without much angst. Oh, wait a minute! ... I was supposed to stone her to death for not being a virgin when we married! Silly me!

Liars ... Heh! ... I'm a lawyer!

Fornicators ... Damn! I knew I was supposed to be doing something during my 31 year marriage! Maybe I should have spoken to Jim Bakker! ...

Thieves ... Now there they have me ... I have to agree that people should not steal from others ... be it land or their lives ... right, Canaanites?

Atheists ... What's to be said? A just and righteous God would take the blame for making people who just couldn't believe in him/her/it. Right?

Witches ... I have to admit that, if I decided to be "spiritual but not religious," Wiccan would appeal to me. The personification of nature in the sort of elusive and enigmatic "gods" you might encounter in a sweet smelling dark wood seem as good ... nay, far better ... than one smiting everything and everyone in sight.

Idolaters ... Mr. Mammon, the RNC is calling ...

Saturday, October 20, 2012

 

Amen! Amen to That!




Watch to the end!
________________________________

Via Open Parachute

 

The Loss of an Ally?


Glenn Morton has announced that he has taken down all his web pages about the creationism/evolution "debate."

He apparently feels "used" by "atheists and agnostics." To a certain extent, it sounds like he has just given up:
For a long time, I thought I could actually influence Christian thought. That simply isn't the case. Those Christians who accept evolution are all comfortable with making the account factually false and those who want it factually true make it false by tying it to YEC. Thus, there is no real benefit in trying to change what are extremely well entrenched positions.
His stated reason, however, is to promote his own "freedom":
That is what freedom at its heart is, the freedom to believe and do what I want even if everyone else thinks I am wrong, idiotic or dangerous, so long as it doesn't hurt anyone else.
He then begins a long screed about "anti-religious bigotry" because of "the disdain, sneering comments and arrogant dislike of religion and people who were religious." Well, it wouldn't take much effort to find disdain, sneering and arrogant dislike of atheists, agnostics and secularists from religious quarters. Is this a sign of the lack of freedom or an example of it?

Then there is a jumble of confused "evidence" that there is a "push for conformity by the intellectual 'elite'." There is much that could be said about his examples, but this is the worst:
The powers that be think that everyone MUST be forced to pay for contraception for the YES, slutty life style of Sandra Fluck who gave a speech at the Democratic convention bemoaning that we don't pay for her contraception. (Rush Limbaugh got in lots of trouble for saying she is a slut, yet it is Sandra who wants to live a life of sex where everyone else pays to keep her from getting pregnant). Why must I as a Christian, who thinks such behavior abysmal, sinful and self destructive pay for her to have sexcapades without consequences? Why must my taxes be used to support what I view as her responsibility? Why does she have a right to pick the money in my pocket when she didn't earn it? But, it seems, if you question this simple fact in today's world, everyone will cluck their tongues at you, making you out to be the evil one. Why is it that they think that everyone MUST be forced to believe that what Sandra does is OK AND PAY FOR HER TO HAVE PLEASURE WITHOUT WORRY FOR THE CONSEQUENCES????
Besides being a repulsive caricature of Sandra Fluke and her arguments, it is a hopeless muddle. Many people disapprove of smoking and drinking. Should anyone who wants medical insurance be able to opt out of paying for treatment for those people with lung cancer or cirrhosis of the liver because it was a "consequence" of their behavior? Worse, should anyone with insurance be able to opt out of paying for treatments to combat smoking or alcoholism because those are just sinful and self destructive and should simply be shunned?

Of course, no one is being made to specifically pay for contraception. Under "Obamacare," in return for greatly increasing their business, medical insurers will provide contraception coverage on all policies. Have you heard any complaints from the insurance companies about this? No, and the reason is that they know that it will save them money that would otherwise be paid out to treat unplanned and problematic pregnancies and the medical problems that result to not only the "slutty" mothers but their children. In short, Glenn and his fellow moral crusaders will wind up paying less for the sins of others.

But rationality has nothing to do with this. I suspect that Glenn has (once again) succumbed to the demon he so eloquently described before. Not that he is alone in that ... perhaps we all do it in one way or another.

I have a certain sympathy with Glenn's complaint about one scientist comparing climate change deniers to racists and labeling them mentally ill (if, in fact she did that), but the solution is to fight back with your own speech. In fairness, some of the commenters at Glenn's post indicate that he has cancer, which is a good a reason to quit active fighting in this arena. But it doesn't explain throwing away what you have honorably (as I'm sure is Glenn's case) argued in the past just because you don't like how the debate is going now.

As he himself said of the demon:
Those who try to help the poor victims escape the ravages of Morton's demon wear themselves out typing e-mails explaining data and facts which never get through the demon's gate. After years of weariness, the philanthropic individual dies of fatigue. This is oh so devilish a situation!
_______________________________________

Via Recursivity

 

ID Explained



Sunday, October 14, 2012

 

Planting Plantinga


There has been a flurry of renewed interest in Alvin Plantinga's "evolutionary argument against naturalism" (EAAN). Mohan Matthen, a professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto has posted a critique at New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science:
[L]et's think about special purpose cognition vs general purpose cognition. Fleeing from predators can make organisms evolve special purpose detectors. These probably should not be very accurate, since an excess of false positives helps survival: its safer than a more accurate detector with the occasional false negative. But what about general purpose detector? Remember Rob, who runs away from tigers because he feels that is the best way to make friends—this enables him to escape the consequences of his disastrously false belief that tigers make good playmates. But if this is a general purpose attitude, he also runs away from potential mates because he believes that this is the best way to hook up with them. Evolutionarily, not so good.

Here is something the survivalists overlook. The senses are general purpose learning systems; inference and rationality helps us use them to come to know about our surroundings. Of course, we have special purpose cognition too, but these usually feed into autonomous behavioural systems that are not run by and don't produce beliefs. Belief is irrelevant to a rabbit freezing at the (often false) indication of a predator. Belief means everything to a young man or woman who is taking leadership of a group on a trek to find a better life.
Nicholas McGinnis at Engaging Science, the blog of the Rotman Institute of Philosophy at the University of Western Ontario (go canucks!), points out:
The problem is that an imago dei epistemology does not seem to follow from God's nature but God's free exercise of will. We therefore have a parallel problem: of all the infinite things God could do, how certain are we that he would choose to create in his image? Contrast to evolution: of all the infinite things that could evolve, why reliable faculties? The difference is that I know what kind of constraints, observations, and experiments might lead me to think evolution did lead to reliable faculties, but, short of direct personal revelation, I have no idea how to confirm imago dei.
TomS made much the same point some time ago here.

McGinnis also points out that the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP), which I have always thought was reliable, gives Plantinga a pass on the EAAN and his promotion of Michael Behe's "irreducible complexity" nonsense:
As a side-note, while re-reading Plantinga's SEP entry on 'Religion and Science' I am reminded of how bizarre and parochial the article is: it is not a discussion of the complex relationship between science and religion in the history of philosophy, nor an overview of the current state of affairs in the literature. Rather, it functions as a showcase for Plantinga's own views.

There is no discussion of some seminal and influential concepts–such as Gould's 'non-overlapping magisteria'–nor any mention of, say, the relationship between Islam and science. Instead we have enthusiastic citations of intellectually dishonest creationist frauds like Michael Behe, complete with summaries of discredited arguments about the bacterial flagellum and blood clotting meant to offer proof positive of the spurious, unscientific notion of 'irreducible complexity'. Writes Plantinga, "not only do [these examples] challenge Darwinism; they are also, [Behe] says, obviously designed: 'their design is about as obvious as an elephant in a living room.'" I cringe to read these words in the discipline's most publicly-visible reference source.
[Cough] Amen!

Labels:


Saturday, October 13, 2012

 

Painful As Usual


Jerry Coyne again "does" philosophy:
[T]he view that all sciences are in principle reducible to the laws of physics, which is materialism, is not identical to an attempt to reduce all sciences to physics. The former must be true unless you're religious, while the latter is a tactical problem ... [Emphasis added]
Now, please explain how the view "that all sciences are in principle reducible to the laws of physics" is more empirically based than religion. Scientific papers preferred, but give it a go however you can.

There is (unbeknownst to Jerry) a rich and important philosophical literature struggling with that question.

I'm sorry, but as much as I agree that Nagel is wrong, the naïve materialism of Jerry and others is just as "faith" based as religion. And their scoffing at those who have spent time and intellectual currency on thinking about it is as misguided as any creationist denialist.

__________________________________

P.S.: The ironic thing I forgot to mention is that Jerry quotes (without understanding) the “Neurath’s Boat” analogy that refutes his own certainty in materialism.

Friday, October 12, 2012

 

The End of the World Is Nigh!




My apologies to my ... er ... select group of readers who do not follow baseball but the sign of the apocalypse is here ...

Mark Teixeira stole second!

And that lead to the Yanks first run in a 3 to 1 victory!

Maybe there is a God ... And he/she/it is a Yankees fan!

Tuesday, October 09, 2012

 

Objective Moral Laws


That's what the Righteous Right keeps telling us they have:
The maintenance of civil order in society rests on the foundation of family discipline. Therefore, a child who disrespects his parents must be permanently removed from society in a way that gives an example to all other children of the importance of respect for parents. The death penalty for rebellious children is not something to be taken lightly. The guidelines for administering the death penalty to rebellious children are given in Deut 21:18-21:

This passage does not give parents blanket authority to kill their children. They must follow the proper procedure in order to have the death penalty executed against their children. I cannot think of one instance in the Scripture where parents had their child put to death. Why is this so? Other than the love Christ has for us, there is no greater love then [sic] that of a parent for their child. The last people who would want to see a child put to death would be the parents of the child. Even so, the Scrpture [sic] provides a safe guard to protect children from parents who would wrongly exercise the death penalty against them. Parents are required to bring their children to the gate of the city. The gate of the city was the place where the elders of the city met and made judicial pronouncements. In other words, the parents were required to take their children to a court of law and lay out their case before the proper judicial authority, and let the judicial authority determine if the child should be put to death. I know of many cases of rebellious children, however, I cannot think of one case where I believe that a parent had given up on their child to the point that they would have taken their child to a court of law and asked the court to rule that the child be put to death. Even though this procedure would rarely be used, if it were the law of land, it would give parents authority. Children would know that their parents had authority and it would be a tremendous incentive for children to give proper respect to their parents.
Uh huh!

Oh, and by the way, the moron who wrote this, one Charlie Fuqua, is a candidate for the Arkansas House of Representatives.

Guess which party ...

 

Dueling Quotes


Before you can change someone's mind you have to get their attention.
And I don't care what the National Academy of Science, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the National Center for Science Education says—theistic evolutionists are not our allies. They are foes of pure, undiluted science, and enablers of superstition.

~ Jerry Coyne, at his not-blog, Why Evolution Is True
...

MOHLER: What is new - and I appreciate the fact that Barbara has focused on this - is the fact that we're now down to what I think is the key issue of our understanding. And that is, even given all the controversies that had been taking place amongst evangelicals over Genesis in times past, are we now at a place where it's going to be legitimate to say that there was no fall, that there was no Adam, there was no Eve?

That is where the implications of this thought have taken us, and this is where the dividing line is going to happen. There is a serious and deep, perhaps irresolvable, divide between the scholars who would stand with Professor Harlow and those who would stand with me.

~ Talk of the Nation, National Public Radio, "Christians Divided Over Science Of Human Origins"
...

"This stuff is unavoidable," says Dan Harlow at Calvin College. "Evangelicals have to either face up to it or they have to stick their head in the sand. And if they do that, they will lose whatever intellectual currency or respectability they have."

"If so, that's simply the price we'll have to pay," says Southern Baptist seminary's Albert Mohler. "The moment you say 'We have to abandon this theology in order to have the respect of the world,' you end up with neither biblical orthodoxy nor the respect of the world."

Mohler and others say if other Protestants want to accommodate science, fine. But they shouldn't be surprised if their faith unravels.

~ Barbara Bradley Hagerty, National Public Radio, "Evangelicals Question The Existence Of Adam And Eve"
Some people just can't recognize who their allies are.

Saturday, October 06, 2012

 

Disasters of Biblical Proportions




From the Bridge Project:
God's word is true. I've come to understand that. All that stuff I was taught about evolution and embryology and the Big Bang Theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of Hell. And it's lies to try to keep me and all the folks who were taught that from understanding that they need a savior. You see, there are a lot of scientific data that I've found out as a scientist that actually show that this is really a young Earth. I don't believe that the Earth's but about 9,000 years old. I believe it was created in six days as we know them. That's what the Bible says.
Okay ... some goober spouting off in front of a wall full of ghoulishly preserved dead ruminants. But embryology? ... As in the birds and the bees?

Oh, wait a minute ... he's a medical doctor!!

Oh, crap!!! He's a Congressman!!!!

Oh, sweet shade of Stevie Gould, he's a Congressman on the House Science Committee!!!!!
But [the Bible] teaches us how to run all of public policy and everything in society. And that's the reason as your congressman I hold the Holy Bible as being the major directions to me of how I vote in Washington, D.C., and I'll continue to do that.
We are soooooooooo fucked!!!!!!

 

Philosophy Phail


It wouldn't be fair to say that reading the first third of Thomas Nagel's new book, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False, sapped my will to live ... it just sapped my will to spend any more of my life reading Nagel's lucubrations.

Fortunately, Brian Leiter, the Karl N. Llewellyn Professor of Jurisprudence and director of the Center for Law, Philosophy and Human Values at the University of Chicago, and Michael Weisberg, associate professor of philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, are made of sterner stuff and have published a longish review of the book entitled "Do You Only Have a Brain?" at The Nation.

First they note that Nagel is arguing, in part, against a strawman:
Nagel opposes two main components of the "materialist" view inspired by Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection. The first is what we will call theoretical reductionism, the view that there is an order of priority among the sciences, with all theories ultimately derivable from physics and all phenomena ultimately explicable in physical terms. We believe, along with most philosophers, that Nagel is right to reject theoretical reductionism, because the sciences have not progressed in a way consistent with it. We have not witnessed the reduction of psychology to biology, biology to chemistry, and chemistry to physics, but rather the proliferation of fields like neuroscience and evolutionary biology that explain psychological and biological phenomena in terms unrecognizable by physics. As the philosopher of biology Philip Kitcher pointed out some thirty years ago, even classical genetics has not been fully reduced to molecular genetics, and that reduction would have been wholly within one field. We simply do not see any serious attempts to reduce all the "higher" sciences to the laws of physics.
Instead, Nagel cites to popular works by Nobel Prize–winning physicist Steven Weinberg, such as Dreams of a Final Theory (1992). Lord knows I've taken a a swipe or two at Jerry Coyne for naïve reductionism but how do the personal philosophies of some scientists make the Neo-Darwinian conception of nature almost certainly false?

As Leiter and Weisberg justly point out:
[V]ery little of the actual work in biology inspired by Darwin depends on reductive materialism of this sort; evolutionary explanations do not typically appeal to Newton's laws or general relativity. Given this general consensus (the rhetoric of some popular science writing by Weinberg and others aside), it is puzzling that Nagel thinks he needs to bother attacking theoretical reductionism.
Nagel's second target is "naturalism," the "view that features of our world—including 'consciousness, intentionality, meaning, purpose, thought, and value'—can ultimately be accounted for in terms of the natural processes described by the various sciences." Leiter and Weisberg point out that Nagel is not very specific about what he means by "naturalism," except that it is associated with Daniel Dennett and is the attempt to explain everything "at the most basic level by the physical sciences, extended to include biology." And how does Nagel go about showing, on that ground, that the Neo-Darwinian conception of nature almost certainly false? Well ...
Defending such a sweeping claim might seem to require a detailed engagement with the relevant science, yet in a striking admission early on, Nagel reveals that his book "is just the opinion of a layman who reads widely in the literature that explains contemporary science to the nonspecialist." And a recurring objection to what he learned from his layman's reading of popular science writing is that much science "flies in the face of common sense," that it is inconsistent with "evident facts about ourselves, that it "require[s] us to deny the obvious," and so on.
As in the "common-sensical, obvious or evident ... notion that the earth is flat and the sun revolves around the earth?"
In support of his skepticism, Nagel writes: "The world is an astonishing place, and the idea that we have in our possession the basic tools needed to understand it is no more credible now than it was in Aristotle's day." This seems to us perhaps the most startling sentence in all of Mind and Cosmos. Epistemic humility—the recognition that we could be wrong—is a virtue in science as it is in daily life, but surely we have some reason for thinking, some four centuries after the start of the scientific revolution, that Aristotle was on the wrong track and that we are not, or at least not yet.
Or, put even more accessibly, "The Relativity of Wrong."

There is more to Nagel's arguments, as dissected by Leiter and Weisberg -- an argument from alleged "objective moral truth" and the "law of non-contradiction" -- but there is already a down the rabbit hole aspect to this post. You should go to Leiter's and Weisberg's article for the rest. Be sure to look up "Neurath's Boat," an analogy I had not heard of before but which I have often argued (though not as well) myself.

A bit from the closing:
Nagel's arguments against reductionism are quixotic, and his arguments against naturalism are unconvincing. He aspires to develop "rival alternative conceptions" to what he calls the materialist neo-Darwinian worldview, yet he never clearly articulates this rival conception, nor does he give us any reason to think that "the present right-thinking consensus will come to seem laughable in a generation or two." ... [H]is subtitle—"Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False"—is highly misleading. Nagel, by his own admission, relies only on popular science writing and brings to bear idiosyncratic and often outdated views about a whole host of issues, from the objectivity of moral truth to the nature of explanation. No one could possibly think he has shown that a massively successful scientific research program like the one inspired by Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection "is almost certainly false." The subtitle seems intended to market the book to evolution deniers, intelligent-design acolytes, religious fanatics and others who are not really interested in the substantive scientific and philosophical issues.
In other words, philosophers need to sell books too.
_____________________________________

P.S.: Nagel's declaration of ignorance of science is not new. He pled the same "defense" back when he recommended Stephen C. Meyer's book Signature in the Cell for "Book of the Year" in the Times Literary Supplement:
Like any layman who reads books on science for the general reader, I have to take the presentation of the data largely on trust, and try to evaluate more speculative arguments as best I can. Meyer's book seems to me to be written in good faith. If he misrepresents contemporary research on the origin of life, I will be grateful to have it pointed out to me.
It wouldn't have taken much effort to find where it was pointed out ... again and again ... but, instead, he preferred to continue in ignorance.

But maybe now Nagel can claim another "honor" ... a place on Glenn Morton's list, "The Imminent Demise of Evolution: The Longest Running Falsehood in Creationism."

Thursday, October 04, 2012

 

Got That Part Right!


Ah! The Houston Baptist University has acquired papers from Phillip Johnson, "father of the Intelligent Design movement."
[University provost Dr. John Mark] Reynolds said he believes this is a great opportunity for the University to become better known across the country.

Reynolds added that he hopes this acquisition will encourage other theologians to donate materials to the University, which could help enhance the school's reputation.

"We are the best-kept secret in America," Reynolds said. "A lot of people know Phil, so this way, people get to know HBU."
Well, famous and infamous are not exactly the same thing.

But Reynolds at least knows how to properly categorize Johnson and his work.

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