Yes, remember that Ball State U prof in Indiana who was under attack from the exotic “Freedom from Religion Foundation” because he taught an elective course that included readings on the ID controversy? Yeah, whassname, Eric Hedin, pictured above right.

Interesting that he is with the physics and astronomy department. Atheist mathematician Peter Woit has warned atheist celeb Michael Shermer against crackpot (anti-ID, as it happens) cosmologies, many of which depend on assumptions derived from Darwinism and Darwin’s god.

Apparently, this has got beyond a “Godless Sunday at Home” joke. The anti-God crackpots have muscle (if not brains), and can easily frighten administrators (but who can’t frighten them?).

Here is an academic freedom petition to sign.

Apparently, even a well-respected academic like Thomas Nagel isn’t immune from the Night of the Long Weasels, so why should this guy expect to escape, unless … ?

Unless enough people make it clear that education is about listening to both sides and that they will not continue to provide a tax-funded bullhorn for one side only.

I (news writer Denyse O’Leary) was surprised by the pattern when I added up all the instances where nothing much happens for millions or tens or hundreds of millions of years. But  here’s a new one on me, because it was only recently published:

Researchers had previously believed that ichthyosaurs declined throughout the Jurassic Period, which lasted from 199 million to 145 million years ago, with the only survivors rapidly evolving to keep ahead of repeated extinction events. The new fossil, however, dates from the Cretaceous Period, which lasted from 145 million to 66 million years ago. It looks remarkably like its Jurassic brethren, revealing a surprising evolutionary status.

The fossil “represents an animal that seems ‘out of time’ for its age,” study researcher Valentin Fischer of the University of Liège in Belgium said in a statement.

Note: The last word in the first paragraph above should almost certainly read “stasis,” not “status.”

That usage error just shows you how unfamiliar Darwin-drenched reporters are with the realities of the history of life on Earth. Chances are, they do not know the term “stasis.” Or if they do, it is only from the flak aimed at them by Darwin’s hacks, advising them to ignore it as a key fact about life on Earth: Stasis = Evolution rarely happens.

Stanford biologist Joan Roughgarden, it should be noted, could be sneered at by tenured career Darwinists for having dissented in the past, for example at AAAS’s 169th meeting, February 17, 2003. Roughgarden is the author of Evolution’s Rainbow: Diversity, Gender and Sexuality in Nature and People (University of California Press, 2003). Of Darwin’s sexual selection, she has said, “The exceptions are so numerous they cry out for explanation.” The meeting she spoke at is headlined, “Darwin may have been wrong about sex. Or at least too narrow minded.”

Oooh, bad, bad, bad, when it might mean doubting Darwin, the greatest mind that ever accidentally evolved. Who had the best idea anyone ever had, the most powerful idea ever. Who, now long dead, pays a bunch of people’s salaries to spout stuff at students that just ain’t so, unhindered and largely unopposed.

Say what you want about Darwinists: They have the most genteel thugs.

Many engineers near where I live are hired to construct satellites and space probes, and in order to familiarize the engineers with the nature and challenges facing these satellites and space probes, it is sometimes helpful for the engineers to get additional training in areas of physics beyond the cursory introduction they get as undergraduates. For example, it may be helpful for engineers to learn more physics in order to appreciate the effects of general and special relativity on some of the ultra accurate clocks in space probes and satellites. And engineers might find plasma physics helpful in understanding environmental challenges facing space probes and satellites as well as Earth-based systems since there are many plasma phenomenon in the solar system and beyond.

To meet this need for retraining engineers in physics, the Whiting School of Engineering (WSE) offered classes specifically geared to retrain engineers in physics. The Whiting School has a modest ranking of #26 overall in the US, but #1 in Biomedical Engineering. Being a former engineer, I decided I’d enroll in the WSE’s Master of Science Applied Physics program which was usually taught at the Applied Physics Laboratory (APL). APL is not to be confused with its more prestigious little brother, The Henry Rowland Department of Physics and Astronomy that boasted a Nobel Laureate in 2011 by the name of Adam Riess for his work on dark energy. The Applied Physics Laboratory boasts a budget of around 1 bilion dollars. The Henry Rowland Department of Physics and Astronomy is rich in prestige, whereas the The Applied Physics Laboratory is just rich.

One of the former faculty members of the Whiting School of Engineering, Daniel Schectman, won the Nobel in Chemistry the same year Adam Riess won the Nobel in Physics. Ironically, Schectman left the Whiting School in disgrace because his claim of discovering quasi crystals was viewed as an embarrassment. Linus Pauling quipped, “there are no such things as quasi crystals, only quasi scientists”.

In 2007, I decided to enroll in the Whiting School’s program of Applied Physics. Only a few months before, Robert Marks invited me get a Master’s degree and work as his assistant at the Evolution Informatics Lab in Baylor. I had degrees in Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, and Math, so I was supposedly qualified. The Baylor Darwinists shut Marks lab down, while that same week I got an acceptance letter from the Whiting School. Happily the evolution informatics lab was reopened, and instead Winston Ewert succeeded where I did not. Marks’ plight was featured in the movie Explelled, the Baylor president who shut down the lab was fired, and Baylor issued an apology. Score one for ID!….

My fellow students at the Whiting School were incredibly bright coming from schools like MIT, Stanford, UC Berkeley, Cal Tech…you get the picture. I came from that little old creationist factory known as George Mason (yes, at least 4 PhD biologists associated with George Mason are creationists or pro-ID). Regrettably I dropped out for a few years to mend my financial business, and it looked like I would never return to school, but I returned. Thus it is with incredible embarrassment that I admit, after a shaky start, several times dropping out, I maintained an A- GPA and completed my MS degree August 2012 and was invited as part of the 2013 commencement. Yay!

So what did I learn in engineering grad school? My classes were:

Modern Physics
Mathematical Methods
Quantum Mechanics
Classical Mechanics
Astrophysics
General Relativity
Solid State Physics
Plasma Physics
Cosmology
Statistical Mechanics and Thermodynamics

One may wonder how I can be sympathetic to Young Earth Creation given what I learned in these classes. It would be fair to say what I learned in these classes casts enormous doubt on the viability of the Young Earth Creation model, and at some point one must be willing to accept irresolution or even error in what one believes. For YECs to find resolution to the problems that physics poses for their religious beliefs, they’ll have to face the challenges offered by the subjects listed above, and then some. The resolution is above my pay grade, and I’m willing to accept alternatives…Some of my YEC friends get upset that I might even question their YEC ideas, and I tell them, “redo Maxwell’s equations to account for distant starlight, redo nuclear physics to account for radiometric dating, etc…then we might have basis for a reasonable discussion”…

Now what did I learn in relation to ID? I learned how utterly irrelevant evolutionism is to most of modern science, medicine, and engineering. To be fair there are disciplines like population genetics (such as developed by Joe Felsenstein) which are important to creationists. Felsenstein’s software is being used to find genes related to the high priest Zadok in the time of King David, and I would presume YECs are using Felsenstein’s work to go back even farther than David!

Can someone understand science without understanding evolution? It would be fair to say someone can understand almost all fields of science without evolution. Darwinists often argue that creationists are anti-science because they reject evolution. Well what if we required evolutionists to become proficient in general relativity before they practice evolutionary biology? The field would absolutely shut down! So what if a creationist can’t do evolutionary biology, there are many other science fields like physics, chemistry, medicine, engineering, and even within biology that don’t require a profession of faith in evolution.

Many evolutionary biologist don’t have to be proficient in physics to do science, so it’s very wrong then to disqualify someone from the scientific enterprise merely because they are not proficient in another discipline of science such as evolutionary biology. So how needed is evolutionism? Jerry Coyne put it well:

“In sciences pecking order evolutionary biology lurks somewhere near the bottom, far closer to phrenology than to physics.”

It is mostly to promote evolutionism that evolutionists argue creationists are anti-science. Creationist can succeed in other disciplines of science outside of evolution. Why?
Can one understand genetics without evolutionism? Yes. Anatomy, physiology, and medicine? Yes. Molecular biology? Yes. Cellular biology? Yes. Micro biology? Yes. Certain aspects of population biology? Yes. The only biology one where they might hard pressed is evolutionary biology, and yet the most central evidence for the entire field are phylogenetic trees that are conflicted!

Whatever Darwin belched out in Origin of Species paled in comparison to real science like Einstein’s Field Equations. Even if I were wrong to accept ID and creation, I could still get acquainted with far more important scientific concepts in science than evolution.

One problem is that evolutionists have is an over-inflated view of the utility of their ideas in the world of science. Another problem is that though evolutionism has low scientific utility (even possibly harmful to science), it has extreme utility philosophically and politically and even financially, such as: 40 million taxpayer’s dollars wasted on venerating Darwin.

Fundamentally the ID/creation/evolution isn’t about what is taught in public schools, it is fundamentally about the possibility of purpose in the universe. What happens in school board politics pales in comparison to this fundamental question of reality. And that is the heart of my quest…

So is there Intelligent Design in the universe? One physicist at my university said “NO” but proceeded to give reasons that an ID proponent would think “YES”. In The Quantum Enigma of Consciousness and the Identity of the Designer I pointed out that the Richard Conn Henry, who is the Henry Rowland professor of physics at the Henry Rowland Department of Physics, wrote that notion of an Ultimate MIND isn’t precluded by physics, and physics even suggests, there is an Ultimate MIND. Suddenly my university began to seem slightly less hostile to ID, but that wasn’t all!

It turned out just a few years prior Paul McHugh had written an article critical of evolutionism in Teaching Darwin. And then a few years before that, a biophysicist Lee Spetner, a former researcher at the Applied Physics Lab wrote: Not by Chance which became the basis for some forms of front-loaded ID. And that book received and endorsement from a prominent professor at my university, a Nobel Laureate in Chemistry Christian Anfisen who was also professor at my university. But that was not the end of it, last but not least was Ben Carson! He was to be the commencement speaker until he withdrew under pressure from gay rights activists. But the fact that his creationism didn’t stop him from being invited in the first place was news in and of itself.

So those were the people, though few and far between, who supported ID at my university.

But were there at least reminders of ID elsewhere? Not explicitly, but they were always fun when found in places you’d least expect. My physics class text by Goldstein had the following tribute to the Intelligent Designer in the preface (2nd edition preface also contained in the 3rd edition):

And above all I want to register the thanks and acknowledgement of my heart, in the words of Daniel (2:23):

[in Hebrew]
I thank and praise you, O God of my fathers:
You have given me wisdom and power,
you have made known to me what we asked of you

Herbert Goldstein
Kew Gardens Hill, New York
January 1980

At the commencement exercise, the opening convocation prayer had the phrase that went something like:

God the creator, the architect of every cell
…
Amen

And finally there was the closing tribute at the ceremony Hopkins Ode:

Truth guide our university,
And from all error keep her free,
Let wisdom yield her choicest treasure,
And freedom reach her fullest measure;
O, let her watchword ever be:
The truth of God will make you free,
Will make you free!

And that theme is on the University coat of arms as “Veritas Vos Liberabit” which is Latin for that phrase from Jesus in the Gospels, “The Truth Will Set You Free”!

A science degree from the Whiting School was a detour from my current line of work in finance, but it was an important detour to bring me closer to understanding the world. And that detour was my journey to the class of 2013.

Yes indeed, “The Truth Will Set You Free”!

Sal in front of Gilman Hall, Thursday, May 23, 2013

Sal at the Homewood Commencement Field

Consider, for example, well known atheist and skeptic, Michael Shermer, who wrote in his book Why Darwin Matters: The Case Against Intelligent Design:

Darwin’s original claim of evolution by means of natural selection was an extraordinary claim in its time, so he was required to provide extra ordinary evidence for it. He did, and evidence has continued accumulating ever since. Today, the burden of proof is on creationists and Intelligent Design advocates to provide extraordinary evidence for their extraordinary claim that a supernatural being of great power and intelligence performed a supernatural act in place of or contrary to natural law. They have yet to do so.

(Michael Shermer, Why Darwin Matters: The Case Against Intelligent Design, Henry Holt and Co., LLC, 2006, pg 50)

Shermer’s intent here seems pretty clear: the claims of ID are extraordinary and as such require extraordinary evidence. We’ll come back to that in another post, but first I want to address something that Shermer did not intend to convey, but did. By juxtaposing Darwin’s claim, which was considered extraordinary in the 1800’s with ID’s claims of today (the extraorinariness of which Shermer assumes is “just obvious”), Shermer has unintentionally brought to the surface two important critiques against the EC-EE claim. The first is that what constitutes an extraordinary claim, and thereby extraordinary evidence, is quite worldview dependent (more on that in a moment); the second is that given the first critique the EC-EE claim itself is an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence. (more on this to follow as well).

Let us take a closer look at the first critique, that the EC-EE claim is worldview dependent. In his quote, Shermer assumes that the prevailing worldview of the mid-late 1800’s when Darwin wrote his famous tome was some form of theism and that most people, including scientists, operated on the assumption that we live in a created universe. If Shermer doesn’t think that was the case, then why say that Darwin’s evolutionary hypothesis would have seemed extraordinary when he wrote it? Further, Shermer is quite convinced that in current times the tables have been turned and that most people (or at least most scientific people) operate from a naturalistic worldview so the claims of ID, as he states them, are considered extraordinary. What Shermer has shown in making these two statements is that what counts as “extraordinary” in the EC-EE claim depends completely on one’s point of view which in turn is informed by one’s worldview. For Shermer, an atheist and philosophical naturalist, the claims of ID would seem extraordinary. Other atheists, like Richard Dawkins, claim that Darwin’s idea of evolution made it possible to be “intellectually fulfilled” atheists. The claims of creationists or of ID proponents are extraordinary indeed under that worldview.

However, to a theist or a Christian, the claims of ID are not only acceptable, but pretty straightforward and uncontroversial. It is the claims of Darwinism that seems quite extraordinary to many if not most of today’s theists or Christians. From the theistic worldview the claim that the blind, purposeless forces of matter and energy interacting over eons of time through chance and/or necessity could account for the rich complexity of biological systems is the extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence. For theists, if I might paraphrase Shermer’s quote above, “the burden of proof is on Darwinists to provide extraordinary evidence for their extraordinary claim that the blind, purposeless forces of matter and energy interacting over eons of time through chance and/or necessity can account for the complex, specified information exhibited in biological systems. They have yet to do so.” Both Shermer’s original quote above and my paraphrase here bear equal weight under the EC-EE claim.

The upshot of this contrast between the extraordinary claims of Darwin in the 1800’s and of ID today is that the terms “extraordinary” and even “evidence” are highly worldview dependent. And that leads us to the second critique mentioned above: is the EC-EE claim itself an extraordinary claim requiring extraordinary evidence? I’m not aware of anyone who thinks the EC-EE claim is on the same order as a First Principle of reasoning, such as the Law of Non-Contradiction would be. So, exactly what is the basis for the claim? Is it something that is “just obvious”? I hardly think so, because it is difficult to determine what constitutes “extraordinary” both in terms of a claim and in terms of evidence. Extraordinary in what way, exactly? A claim may run counter to someone’s worldview, but not everyone shares the same worldview, so is it extraordinary if it only appears so to some but not others? That hardly seems a solid foundation to make the EC-EE claim universal in some sense.

Then there is the EE side of the EC-EE claim: evidence, and ‘extraordinary’ evidence at that. What makes evidence extraordinary? (for that matter, what is even meant by evidence in this context?) For an atheist, would an event so obviously counter to natural causes that no one could deny its supernatural origin be enough? I hardly think so, because from an ID perspective, atheists, who are also scientists, are confronted daily with exactly such evidence: complex, specified information replete throughout biological systems. If that were not the case, why would Dr. Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the double helix of DNA write in his book What Mad Pursuit “Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved.” It seems here that Crick inadvertently let slip that the evidence of nature screams “design” and does so quite extraordinarily so biologists must remain vigilant against the impulse to attribute actual design. Whatever the case, the point is that what may or may not constitute “extraordinary evidence” is highly worldview dependent.

What all this boils down to is that the EC-EE claim itself is fairly indefensible and its use as an argument against ID is weak and ineffective. In another post, I’ll take up the issue of what exactly is the extraordinary claims being made and by whom. But for now, let’s discuss the (in)validity of the EC-EE claim itself.

Joan Roughgarden, an ecologist and evolutionary biologist at the -Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology, agrees that evolutionary biologists can be nasty when crossed. “I mean, these guys are impervious to contrary evidence and alternative formulations,” she says. “What we see in evolution is stasis-conceptual stasis, in my view-where people are ardently defending their formulations from the early 70s.”

Nagel really got their noses out of joint by sympathizing with theorists of intelligent design. “They do not deserve the scorn with which they are commonly met,” he wrote. “It is manifestly unfair.” To be sure, he was not agreeing with them. He notes several times that he is an atheist and has no truck with supernatural gods. He views the ID crowd the way a broad-minded capitalist would sum up Marx: right in his critique, wrong in his solutions. But ID, he says, does contain criticisms of evolutionary theory that should be taken seriously.

Whatever the validity of this stance, its timing was certainly bad. The war between New Atheists and believers has become savage, with Richard Dawkins writing sentences like, “I have described atonement, the central doctrine of Christianity, as vicious, sadomasochistic, and repellent. We should also dismiss it as barking mad. …” In that climate, saying anything nice at all about religion is a tactical error.

So what you think? Hanging? Hanging, drawing, and quartering?

Could be gruesome. Darwinists’ unearned incomes are at stake.

David DeWitt

Following up on the controversy over recent finds of Neanderthal art (which these missing links weren’t supposed to be able to do, remember?), it’s interesting to note the theories about why they were supposed to be less intelligent than the rest of us.

One is that big eyes caused their demise (because “more of their brains were devoted to seeing in the long, dark nights in Europe, at the expense of high-level processing”), so they were dumber than us small-eyed, shifty types.

Seriously, these are the theories of desperation, akin to the “Twinkies” defense at a murder trial. The Twinkies defense effaces the fact that there is no obvious causal connection between Twinkies and murder (compared with the obvious causal connection between deep resentment and murder, the connection the defense lawyer clearly hoped people would pay less attention to). Similarly, the “big eyes” explanation for Neanderthals’ (supposed) lesser intelligence doesn’t follow any general pattern like “the bigger the eyes, the lesser the intelligence,” that might be observed across many groups of life forms.

Some have pointed out that primates engage in a great deal of social networking and that Neanderthals might have had less brain capacity left over for that. That is hard to be sure of because how much brain capacity is even required for social networking is uncertain. Cattle and bees do a lot of networking, but the former are not considered very intelligent and bees seem to have outsourced their individual intelligence to some kind of colony brain.

Human social networking requires individual intelligence because the other humans with whom one is networking are intelligent. But that merely returns us to our starting point: Did Neanderthals not have the intelligence that would enable them to, say, interact with modern humans?

Many sources say that they did indeed “intermingle.” Some modern humans are said to have Neanderthal gene sequences to this day, and some experts even opine that that is how the Neanderthals came to disappear as a separate group.

Liberty University neuroscientist David A. DeWitt has this to say about the matter:

As a neuroscientist, I find the conclusions regarding “poor social networking” in Neanderthals far-fetched. Even if it is the case that the eyes and optic nerves are larger, you cannot draw conclusions about how much of the brain would be involved in visual processing and how much would be allocated toward other cognitive functions. The best way to do this is to stick electrodes in the brain and we don’t have any Neanderthals around to do that with.

You could also do functional MRI, but again, these require living Neanderthals to test. The brain is extremely plastic so you can’t have much certainty on how much brain space is allocated to particular functions. It is further complicated by neuronal and synaptic density differences, glial cells etc.

We have evidence of Neanderthals making musical instruments, burying their dead with rituals, using jewelry, and caring for their injured. These provide strong evidence of complex social networks. Further, FOXP2, a gene that is involved to language is identical in modern humans and Neanderthals. Moreover, the Neanderthal genome sequence demonstrated interbreeding with modern humans.

Svente Paabo, who sequenced the Neanderthal genome, has noted, “There are probably more paleontologists than there are important fossils in the world,” so we have a lot more speculation than evidence right now.

Thus we obviously haven’t anywhere near begun to unravel the whole story yet.  But we ought to begin by assuming that evidence of culture is real.

Incidentally, claims that Neanderthals were merely “imitating” current humans (and therefore weren’t really intelligent) are vacuous. If they were doing what is described, they weren’t imitating, in the sense that a parrot “talks,” they were appropriating—the way the Irish learned English and then began to make heavy inroads into the career- and prize-friendly world of English literature.

Similarly, Canadian explorers appropriated the birchbark canoe and the toboggan from the North American Aboriginal peoples.  And the Aboriginal peoples in turn appropriated horsemanship and produced breeds of saddle horses. Native animals didn’t do any of that because they couldn’t, because they lack the intelligence.

So even if the Neanderthals were appropriating current human culture, that requires the existence of a comparable intelligence in a way that mere imitation does not.

Here’s the Live Mint/WSJ question:

Are you a believer?

And Futuyma’s response:

I’m not going to answer that. If I did then that would tend to colour the issue in a particular way and affect people’s reactions to whatever I have to say.

Now, why didn’t the interviewer (Jacob B. Koshy) stop it right then and there, and say: You tell me what you believe about whether this universe shows evidence of design or this interview ends. Now.

Why? Because his Live Mint/Wall Street Journal editor would never let him just confront profitable pop Darwin.

So Futuyma is allowed to burble on:

The point is that as an empirical fact, people are able to reconcile evolution and religion. Usually, the way this is done, is the way the Roman Catholic Church does and that is to say there is a God and he created the rules and gave energy and he left it to develop on its own.

No, sorry, Koshy, that is deism. Not even theism, let alone Roman Catholicism.

A person cannot even be declared a saint in the Catholic Church unless God is believed to have suspended the rules of the universe at least once as a result of that person’s prayers.

This isn’t even some kind of hidden doctrine. It is conventional Roman Catholic belief. Maybe you missed it if you listen to “religion” journalists who got trained in a typical J-school (and decided not to embarrass the Catholic Church by pointing out that it is not materialist, as if the Church would care).

So Futuyma burbles further, unhindered by fact,

These are the rules that science then tries to discover. I really don’t know if any religious person really believes that every biochemical reaction which is happening in my body is being controlled by God.

Most people worldwide believe that. Otherwise, why would they pray for healing? How could healing occur otherwise when all human efforts are exhausted?

It is a disgrace that so many legacy media still front stuff by people like Futuyma with reverence instead of questions. No wonder legacy media are declining. They should.

For, unchecked incivility, willful disregard for the truth and fairness, and associated enabling behaviour are patently destructive. [For those who need help here, methinks the ghost of Pilate has somewhat to say to you, here.]

In this case, slander by unjustified invidious comparison and enabling thereof on the pretence that nothing wrong has been done.

A cross check at TSZ this evening has revealed a doubling down by the owner there, in response to my further corrective that the owner of that blog is denying patent reality, when she earlier posted a bland denial of unpleasant reality that is an enabling of the sort of incivility that characterises too much of objection to design theory.  Namely:

Kairosfocus, this is outrageous.  Nobody here, to my knowledge, has suggested that you are a Nazi, and I certainly have not.

I will show the first claim blatantly false in a moment, but we should note that the second is a loaded strawman distortion of what I have pointed out, several times: ENABLING BEHAVIOUR by harbouring the sort of behaviour indulged by AF and particularly OM.

Let’s get facts on the table again.

I think we can take it as a given that when one is characterised in the formula “both the Nazis and X think that . . . ” one is being compared to Nazis.

In a way obviously intended to taint one with the justly deserved odium that attaches to Nazism.

In short, the utterly offensive — and demonstrably unwarranted — suggestion is being made that one is a Nazi.

That, sirs, is slander.

Here are the specific words of OM that I object to and will proceed to expose for what they are:

And at what point is it KF that you expect to march Alan around the camps? When your religious war is won and the immoral atheists defeated?

I’d go on but I’m afraid I may say some things that would not be compatible with the general purpose of the thread or indeed civility.

I would like to note however that both the Nazis and KF think that homosexuals are immoral and/or deviants. So draw your own conclusion as to who’ll be marching who round what camp if they get their way.

This of course first utterly warps a grim example from history — one previously discussed here: after WW II, ordinary Germans (not major Nazis) were marched through death camps to rivet the facts on what their enabling behaviour had by passivity helped sustain, even as the White Rose Martyrs have said long since, at cost of their lives.

Here is a well-known picture of a woman from Wiemar on such a tour at neighbouring Buchenwald, averting her eyes in shame for what men acting in the name of her nation did:

I drew this horrible parallel out to underscore that enabling behaviour in the face of abuse, censoring, career busting and an “open hunting season, no rules” mentality of targetting design supporters in institutions, across the Internet and in the wider culture is intolerable and should be corrected. A limited but strong parallel meant to gain attention in the face of stubborn denial of wrongdoing and enabling.

In that context I pointed out that one day,  there will be a similar tour of shame, when this present witch hunt of design thinkers is all over.

Oh, yes, there will.

Here is a preview of that tour, the movie Expelled:

[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

One day, just as Schaeffer and Koop’s Whatever Happened to the Human Race has now proved sadly prophetic, Expelled will rise above the mocking and angry dismissals and will prove all too aptly prophetic.

As a matter of fact, it would be useful to watch this movie too:

[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

Overnight, I think it is important to add this, on the Darwin –> Haeckel –> Hitler issue, by means of a video a lecture by Weikart, as willful denial of that historical chain and its points of serious concern is a big part of the underlying problem:

[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

(Those who, having been mislead by conventional wisdom, imagine that Fascism is a specifically “right wing” problem, need to check here and here for a corrective. And if you think that homosexualisation of marriage is a question of equality of rights, I suggest here, here, here and here as initial points for second thoughts.)

AF and OM — instead of pausing to look themselves hard in the mirror –  latched on the issue of a tour of shame by the enablers whose passivity across 13 years allowed evil to triumph and wreak havoc, then twisted it into a strawman laced with ad hominems and outright slanders to be gleefully set alight.

For instance OM’s use of “religious” just above is meant to falsely smear ID as a tyrannical,  irrational theocratic crusade. The obvious target of this is that I have pointed out on evidence:

(i) that evolutionary materialism is inherently self referentially incoherent and irrational, citing Haldane’s famous remark on the point:

“It seems to me immensely unlikely that mind is a mere by-product of matter. For if my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true. They may be sound chemically, but that does not make them sound logically. And hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms. In order to escape from this necessity of sawing away the branch on which I am sitting, so to speak, I am compelled to believe that mind is not wholly conditioned by matter.” [["When I am dead," in Possible Worlds: And Other Essays [1927], Chatto and Windus: London, 1932, reprint, p.209. (Highlight and emphases added.)]

(ii) that the same worldview’s foundations — matter, energy and space-time interacting by blind chance and mechanical necessity — have in them no IS that can objectively bear the weight of OUGHT, even as say Provine and many others imply when they say that such views imply that there is no objective foundation for ethics;

(iii) that Plato long since warned about this, in The Laws Bk X, drawing out that from historical exemplars, the resulting radical subjectivism, relativism and want of moral grounds, too often open the door to ruthless, destructive nhilist factions who provoke continual contentions in order to dominate. (Looks like OM et al decided to provide a case in point . . . )

Now, these are seriously argued points that don’t simply come from some no-account fellow off in a corner of the Caribbean, but have been raised repeatedly as serious concerns that need to be soberly addressed.  If they were ill founded, they could be fairly easily shown false by objective refutation. The resort to polarisation — the war of religion on science toxic stereotyping myth [OM would be well advised to read Pearcey here on the roots of science, and this note on some roots of modern liberty as well as here on on the sins and blessings of Christendom] — and to personal abuse tells us that, far from being overthrown, these hit a raw nerve and hit home a little too close for comfort.

What does he do next, in his over-brimming hostility?

He plays the invidious comparison card, as cited. Where, today’s conventional wisdom usually lists homosexuals as the second or third group in Hitler’s list of targets to be exterminated. (A fairer, more balanced view — not neglecting any significant group that suffered at Hitler’s hands — would put nigh on 30 Million Russians a little higher and would also list the millions of Christian Poles, who were the very first targets of Nazi international aggression. )

But the point is there.

My having a principled objection to the agenda to homosexualise marriage in our day, and my wider concern that on significant evidence homosexual behaviour is disordered, damaging to the participant and potentially hazardous to society at large — which BTW is not even a part of the debates over design theory — is compared to Nazis.

The insinuation is blatant, save to the willfully blind: implicit accusation of hatred rather than principled concern along with those of a great many people including some of the most distinguished across the ages and down to today (BTW, cf. here for some thoughts and concerns that are too often ignored or suppressed today). That is, principled concern  is reduced to a loathsome caricature by invidious comparison with Nazis, in order to taint without good reason. And, to create a toxic, polarised atmosphere filled with the smoke of burning, slander-soaked strawmen, so that no reasonable and serious discussion of a serious concern can happen.

As though, only Nazis and this hateful bigot now under scrutiny by being pushed into the same boat as Nazis could possibly have such a view.

Sorry, TSZ management, this enabling of Alinskyite toxic rhetoric is not good enough, not by a long shot.

And to pretend that grievous wrong has not been done here is exactly an example of the sort of enabling behaviour I have been highlighting and calling for correction of all along.

At this stage, sadly, I hardly expect TSZ to be willing to heed correction, but the record needs to be set straight for reference.

One last plea: Dr EL, please do better than this. END

This in an age of information theory, the Cambrian explosion, and admitted large-scale stasis in evolution …?

Apparently, the Louisiana Science Education Act of 2008 (which protects teachers from Darwinists, who want you to know that Haeckel’s embryos are real and design in the universe isn’t) stands.

So Slate is in a dither, which means we all have to care. Send sobs, flowers, chocolates, and heart-shaped tissue paper via the Internet immediately.

But none of this addresses the big question: Young Zack has a choice before him. He can continue to be a progressive celeb (cough!) or consider the reasons for doubting Darwin. Way harder life, but much better facts.

Question: Why would a clever young person want to spend his life fronting Darwin when nature has never co-operated? Isn’t there a better life out there?

Update: Academic freedom petition for the prof (it seems the trolls have wandered in)

Freedom from Religion Foundation (FFRF)_ has been raising heck about Eric Hedin, a well-respected physics prof at Ball State U in Muncie, Indiana, teaching an elective course in the intelligent design controversy. And some are listening to them.

The first thing that struck the News desk here, investigating, is that the group complaining is dedicated to “Protecting the constitutional principle of the separation of state and church.”

State and church? An odd reversal. Some of us grew up with the opposite expression, “separation of church and state.”

For centuries in the Western world, it has been the church that needed protection from the state, not the other way around. The First Amendment to the United States’ Constitution reads in part

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof … .

The rest of the Amendment addresses other matters, but the tenor is obvious. The church is the more likely victim; it lacks a police force and an army.

The FFRF hopes, doubtless, to create such an uproar that no sessile administrator would dare lean on the Constitution even if religion were an issue.

But this isn’t about religion or churches, just that one prof decided to teach a course that interested some students, on the evidence for and against design in the universe, which is only a religious topic if you think it is.

Career atheists complained, backed up by new atheist Jerry Coyne. They have no real grounds, even in the view of other atheists here and here.

But, as Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE)’s Greg Lukianoff would likely say, in Unlearning Liberty, the complainers don’t need a case so much as a compliant administration. For more on what is going wrong at campuses (for which you are probably paying), start here.

What’s really interesting is that almost anything can pass for a course these days except something that challenges the intellect.

See also: World on Campus and The Blaze on this story.