It’s been difficult to keep journalists in this area; they tend to get scared off by aggressive Darwinists fronting their tax-funded, establishment line. And every weekend “relationships” news editor has endless time for “evolution” nonsense. But word leaks out. As executive director Dennis Wagner comments,

“I would never have predicted that an atheist [Thomas Nagel] would name a book about intelligent design as one of the top books of 2009, while another atheist [Bradley Monton] would write a book defending intelligent design? This is a sign that open minds in the academic and scientific communities are beginning to take the evidence for intelligent design seriously.”

Mind you, these two above mentioned are intelligent atheists. Nagel, for example, wrote the brilliant paper, “What is it like to be a bat?”, exploring the mystery of animal minds. They restore my faith in human nature; I used to think all atheists were the sort of people who fill my In Box with vitriol – I had good reasons for thinking that, but it is not necessarily true as a consequence …

It’s one thing not to believe in God; quite another to actually believe in the selfish gene, the Big Bazooms theory of human evolution, or how “evolution” explains why people vote for Sarah Palin or Al Gore.

So – ta-DA!! – here is the winner:

1.Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design by Stephen C. Meyer (Harper One, 2009). Stephen Meyer forcefully outlined the positive case for design and refuted arguments that ID isn’t science in his seminal book, Signature in the Cell, published by HarperCollins in June of 2009. The book was named one of the top books of 2009 in the prestigious Times Literary Supplement (TLS) annual “Books of the Year” issue. The selection was made by prominent philosopher (and noted atheist) Thomas Nagel at New York University. A companion three minute animated video, Journey Inside the Cell was released providing a stunning visual illustration of Meyer’s points.

[From Denyse: Most interesting. To me, the most significant thing about the book is that Harper One thought it worth taking a chance on. Harper One is a pretty big publisher and assumes that the books it signs have a wide audience. Clearly, lots of people are beginning to guess that Darwinism is the General Motors of biology. Yes, it is big, but today only government bailouts keep it going. The challenge for design theorists today is not to keep one step ahead of the Darwin inquisition or even to gain a hearing but to explain what design offers.

PS: Harper One also published The Spiritual Brain by Beauregard and - ahem - O’Leary, a comprehensive survey of the dead end of materialist neuroscience. I regularly get letters from people thanking us for helping them understand, in a publishing universe where two-neuron you-neuron nonsense had become the normal fare.]

The #2 pick is here.

(Note: These are the key books, not science or media news. The Top Ten Darwin and Design Science News Stories for 2009 are here, and my comments are here, the Top Ten Darwin and Design Media News Stories for 2009 are here, and my comments on the latter are here. Also, to get the links, you must go here.)

God is dead. Long live morality: Morality is something fashioned by natural selection. That doesn’t diminish its usefulness, or its comfort

‘God is dead, so why should I be good? The answer is that there are no grounds whatsoever for being good….Morality then is not something handed down to Moses on Mount Sinai. It is something forged in the struggle for existence and reproduction, something fashioned by natural selection….Morality is just a matter of emotions…So morality has to come across as something that is more than emotion. It has to appear to be objective, even though really it is subjective.’

There a number of angles to respond to Ruse. Firstly, what is moral? It isn’t enough to say that evolution can make us moral, we have to ask what is good morality.

Why should we consider murder to be wrong at a foundational level. As Ruse notes lion’s are often multiple murders so Darwinism doesn’t help us decide. Is morality just about social cooperation? In Hobbes state of nature every man is against every man, or with Darwinian filial affections, every tribe is against every tribe in a state of nature. But that doesn’t stop tribes fighting, whether they be football supporters, Africans or Caucasians. In a state of nature how do we determine what is moral? Darwinism could lead to family or tribal cooperation in exterminating a rival tribe, but not to good morality. Morality has to transcend human emotions to be at all real.

Secondly, what of truth? A commitment to tell the truth is good morality. But if our genes have evolved to lie to us, then how can we know anything moral with confidence, or trust that what our genes are telling us really is the good? This is an argument for relativisim and confusion in ethics. Modernism opens the door to post-modernism.

Ruse would do well to read Phillip Johnson’s article Nihilism and the End of Law.

http://www.orthodoxytoday.org/articles/JohnsonNihilism.php

“Arthur Leff had a deeper understanding of what the death of God ultimately means for man. He saw modern intellectual history as a long, losing war against the nihilism implicit in modernism’s rejection of the unevaluated evaluator who is the only conceivable source for ultimate premises. Leff rejected the nihilism implicit in modernism, but he also rejected the supernaturalism that he had identified as the only escape from nihilism.”

BioLogos-Gordon College Conference 2010: “A Dialog on Creation”

The BioLogos Foundation will offer summer courses in science-and-religion starting in the summer of 2010. These courses provide short 1–3 week overviews of the key ideas in developing a sophisticated and mature understanding of life’s origins in an explicitly Christian context. Participants will have the opportunity to interact with leaders in the field of science-and-religion who will lead discussions of these core concepts.

The BioLogos-Gordon workshop provides a unique opportunity to explore questions at the intersection of science & faith. In this inaugural BioLogos workshop, held on the beautiful campus of Gordon College on Boston’s historic North Shore, participants will explore the compatibility of evolution and Christianity. Thee three-day program will be led by the senior staff of the BioLogos Foundation — Peter Enns, Darrel Falk and Karl Giberson.

ID supporters in that area that might be interested in attending this event, I would encourage you to do so.

My comments follow.

2. Darwin’s Dilemma: The Mystery of the Cambrian Fossil Record (DVD). The final film in Illustra Media’s long-planned Intelligent Design trilogy, Darwin’s Dilemma, was released in September 2009 and quickly made headlines when it was barred from public viewing by the California Science Center. The documentary examines what many consider to be the most powerful refutation of Darwinian evolution—the Cambrian explosion. The Cambrian explosion is actually the sudden appearance of biological information over a relatively short geological time period. Darwin’s Dilemma is a high-quality documentary that includes interviews with world-class paleontologists Simon Conway Morris and James Valentine, as well as leading intelligent design theorists and scientists Paul Nelson, Jonathan Wells, Stephen C. Meyer, Paul Chien, Doug Axe, and Richard Sternberg. As with the first two Illustra Media ID documentaries, Unlocking the Mystery of Life and The Privileged Planet, Darwin’s Dilemma is full of high quality animations to help the viewer visualize the amazing complexity and design of the Cambrian creatures.

[From Denyse: The real scandal is - and I have said this elsewhere - that the problem that the Cambrian poses for Darwinism was recognized in Darwin’s day, and never confronted then or now. Otherwise, there would be no reason to ban the film.]

# 3 Top Ten book is here.

Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss

Only in recent years have people addressed situations that can deviate from a Gaussian. For example, one of the criteria that produce a Gaussian, is that the probability of a “small” step must be greater than the probability of a “big” step. That is, if we consider the random walk of the proverbial drunk near a lightpole, if he staggers in small steps most of the time, a plot of his position taken, say, every other second, would be a Gaussian. But if he staggers in big steps with a few small ones thrown in, then the plot begins to look peculiar. Instead of being a Gaussian, it develops a “fat tail“, with many locations far from the lightpole.

Now why is this important? Because many people predict that Darwinian evolution is driven by random processes of small steps. This implies that there must be some Gaussians there if we knew where to look.

Read more…

Phillip Johnson

I normally don’t write reviews of slanderous articles, but Pennock’s article piqued my curiosity by claiming that ID-founder, Phillip Johnson, is a Post-Modern Fundamentalist Creationist. Since most Fundamentalists would deny any relation to PoMo, and most Presbyterians would deny being Fundamentalists, I had to read the article, and once I began to read the article, I had to post a response. So here goes.

Pennock starts out with the worst name-calling he can think of, calling Johnson “illegitimate” and a “bastard” child of his two worst nemeses: fundamentalism and post-modernism. Then on page 4 he whines that Johnson is name-calling when he says Darwinism is a creation-myth. Somehow I get the sense that this isn’t going to be a cool-headed, objective analysis.

Nevertheless, having written often on the subject of PoMo and its influence in biblical studies, I wanted to know the basis of his identification. His footnotes are telling: Barbara Forrest and himself. He even goes so far as to quote a paragraph or so of himself as proof of Johnson’s PoMo! (I can’t make this stuff up.) Here’s him quoting himself:

“When he claims, for example, that scientists are attracted to naturalism because ‘‘It gives science a virtual monopoly on the production of knowledge,’’ he is echoing the deconstructionist charge that knowledge is not discovered but rather is fabricated by the intellectual capitalists who own the factories of the knowledge business.”

Read more…

In addition to instituting a peer-review system, an external advisory board assembled by Elsevier also recommends that articles on controversial subjects, such as any that support racism, not be considered for publication.

The journal’s editor-in-chief Bruce Charlton told The Scientist that such changes are “vehemently opposed” by the editorial advisory board, as well as at least 150 scientists who have published in the journal.

Is the moral such that if you happen to find yourself in disagreement with an editorial advisory board, as Elsevier is, create your own advisory board to counteract them? It reminds me that expert witnesses are for hire on both sides of a court case. It’s indicative, really, of a narrowing of thought and research all too common in modern science, a certain tribalism and gang mentality.

Medical Hypotheses has been in hot water since earlier this year, after AIDS researchers complained about an article it ran by AIDS denialist Peter Duesberg. The journal currently aims to publish provocative papers, which are selected by Charlton.

Publishing provocative papers for the sake of being provocative doesn’t strike me as a sound policy (I am not saying this is what the journal indeed does), but neither does suppressing research findings in science, which is, by definition, an ongoing affair. I am not advocating for anything published in the journal, I am representing a story, the particular viewpoints of which go to the heart of a philosophical point of view regarding science and it’s publications:

But it does consist in its destroying the accepted, universal and proclaimed and popularised dogma: “You must accept the conclusions of science.” Scores and hundreds of times I have heard, through my youth and early manhood, the repetition of that ultimatum: “You must accept the conclusions of science.” And it is that notion or experience that has now been concluded; or rather excluded. Whatever else is questionable, there is henceforth no question of anybody “accepting” the conclusions of science. The new scientists themselves do not ask us to accept the conclusions of science. The new scientists themselves do not accept the conclusions of the new science. To do them justice, they deny vigorously that science has concluded; or that it has, in that sense, any conclusion. The finest intellects among them repeat, again and again, that science is inconclusive.

~G. K. Chesterton, The Well and The Shallows