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How do proponents of Darwinian evolution respond to debate?

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Here’s what happened at the recent public discussion on Darwinism and intelligent design at Southern Methodist University.

Excerpt:

The evening started with a screening of Darwin’s Dilemma:The Mystery of the Cambrian Fossil Record for a standing room only crowd in the theater of the Hughes Trigg Student Center, and was rounded out by four presentations and a question and answer period with the speakers.

CSC’s Stephen Meyer moderated the discussion after the film which included four serious challenges to Darwinian evolution. The first speaker was evolutionary biologist Richard Sternberg, who presented the challenge of population genetics to Darwin’s Theory. He was followed by Biologic Institute’s Doug Axe, who spoke on the challenge of finding functional proteins, and CSC Fellow Paul Nelson, who explained why evolving animal body plans by random mutation and natural selection is probably impossible. CSC biologist Jonathan Wells concluded the short presentations by explaining the challenge of ontogenetic information. The evening closed with a robust 40 minutes of questions from the audience.

Is that crazy? Four scholars with Ph.Ds from Yale, Berkeley, Harvard, Cambridge, etc. – 6 Ph.Ds in all for FOUR speakers spoke. The four scholars presented information then had 40 minutes of unscripted public discussion with the audience.

Excerpt:

What do hox genes, gene duplication, evo-devo and ontogenetic information all have in common? They were among the subjects raised–in some detail–by audience members during the Q&A portion of 4 Nails in Darwin’s Coffin: New Challenges to Darwinian Evolution event at SMU last night.

Wow. Public, unscripted discussion of biological science between two opposing points of view.

I’ll bet that open discussion of controversial theories happens all the time in public schools, right?

Not so much.

Excerpt:

I was treated to a –sadly– all too typical story in the aftermath of the great 4 Nails in Darwin’s Coffin: New Challenges to Darwinian Evolution conference the other night at SMU. An SMU staffer told me about what happened to a student that wanted to let his friends know about the event.

Earlier this week the student asked his science professor if at the end of class he could make a quick announcement and the prof said no problem. At the end of the class the student stood up and very quickly announced the name of the event and that students could come and hear about some of the flaws in Darwin’s theory. At that point the professor put his hand on the student’s shoulder and said, in front of the whole class: “Hold on, if I’d known you were going to announce that I wouldn’t have let you stand up. There are NO flaws in Darwin’s theory!” The teacher continued to pontificate about how there simply are no flaws in Darwin’s theory and that any such claims are all myths.

Then yesterday I read the Nature blog about the new ID Centre that has just launched in the UK. There was a link to this story about the British Humanist Association which is lobbying for the government to grant what amounts to special status to Darwinian evolution in British schools. The ink has barely dried from the announcement and already British Darwinists are feverishly trying to stamp out any dissent.

Essentially, they want to put their hand on every British school student and tell them not to question Darwin’s theory.

Yeah, those secular humanists are as open-minded about dissent as Mao Zedong. He was a secular humanist, too.

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News

Mixed results for the Dearborn Four

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Here’s the story on Answering Muslims. (H/T Confident Christianity)

Excerpt:

Flags were at half-mast in Dearborn today when four out of five charges against the Dearborn Four were dropped. Defendants Qureshi, Wood, Rezkalla and Mayel were all found not guilty of their “Breach of Peace” charges, but defendant Mayel was found guilty of the charge “Willfully Disobeying the Lawful Order of a Police Officer.” She was sentenced to one day of jail, which had already been served in June. The credit was applied, and all four were free to go. The judge sent them on their way saying “You are welcome in Dearborn.” Clearly.

Even though the person who complained against Negeen, Roger Williams, was effectively shown to be a compulsive liar, and even though the police officer who arrested her admitted that she had done nothing illegal before he detained her for questioning, she was still found guilty. Is there no justice in Dearborn?

The trial process has been tasking in many ways. We’ve spent a week away from work, school, and our families. We’ve had a grueling week of preparing for court day after day, without break or diversion. And emotionally we are spent. But we’ve got so much to be thankful for.

But check this out:

To our friends who flew to Dearborn to testify on our behalf, especially those who waited for a week in the hotel only to be told by the court that their testimony would not be allowed: we cannot thank you enough for your show of support and willingness to sacrifice for us. We only hope we can express our sincere gratitude as wonderfully as you have expressed your love.

To those who supported us financially: we could not have done it without you! When we came to Dearborn a week ago, we had hoped to be done with the trial by Wednesday. By Thursday morning, the prosecution was still not done presenting its case, and so the defense still hadn’t started! Our expenditures skyrocketed because we had to unexpectedly extend our rental car, hotel rooms, and rearrange our flights. Your support has sustained us financially, and the love of Christ shines through your self-sacrificial attitudes. We cannot thank you enough!

Also, a million thanks go out to the Thomas More Law Center, without whom we would have been unable to defend ourselves from the persecution of the City of Dearborn. Robert Muise was not only our attorney and counsel, but he was fully invested in this issue with us, sharing our emotional burden and investing more time into the issue than even us. The way he approached the case, he might as well have been handcuffed and in jail with us 3 months ago. Truly our brother in Christ, we would have had to take pleas of guilty had it not been for him and his diligence.

And more details about Negeen are now out here.

This is why I tell young people to think ahead and build a savings account for situations like this. Everything costs money, and often your ability to take these bold stands are conditional on the size of your savings account. It reminds me of the Human Rights Commissions in Canada, and their war against free speech. They can put you on trial for several years and drain you of tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees if you fight them in court, like they did with pastor Stephen Boissoin. In a very real and practical way, your ability to be faithful under fire may rest on the degrees you have earned in school, and the money you earn and save while working.

An army marches on its stomach – and an army has to guard its supply lines. Similarly, Christians can only take bold stands on a full wallet. Nabeel, for example, is trained as a medical doctor. That is a field that would allow him to pay for loads of lawyers so he can get into as much legal trouble as he wants for speaking out about what he believes. If he chooses to continue his medical career, he would be well-supplied with funding, and able to mix it up with the other side. He would be able to back up his tough talk in the court room.

I am reminded of how the poor financial decisions made by the anti-intellectual fundamentalist Dan Barker cost him his faith. Do not test God by getting into more trouble than you can handle, and hoping that he will magically bail you out. Christianity is dangerous. People get hurt. Some even get killed. We are getting creamed in the courts, in the news and on campus every day. Do not waste your life having fun in your youth like the non-Christians do – prepare for your trials now. You cannot spend all your time dancing and singing and drinking and then still expect to be able to stand against powerful enemies who will have no mercy on you in the court room. Make wise choices. Learn everything you can. Work hard. Save your money.

Commentary

What is the best way to encourage young men to read?

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My answer is to have all-male schools, with all-male teachers, with all fiction books and drama selected by men, and field trips that appeal to male needs, (e.g. – the war museum! the air show! the underground caverns! a computer lab!).

But what about video games? Do they make reading seem boring to young men?

Consider this Wall Street Journal article.

The problem:

When I was a young boy, America’s elite schools and universities were almost entirely reserved for males. That seems incredible now, in an era when headlines suggest that boys are largely unfit for the classroom. In particular, they can’t read.

According to a recent report from the Center on Education Policy, for example, substantially more boys than girls score below the proficiency level on the annual National Assessment of Educational Progress reading test. This disparity goes back to 1992, and in some states the percentage of boys proficient in reading is now more than ten points below that of girls. The male-female reading gap is found in every socio-economic and ethnic category, including the children of white, college-educated parents.

The good news is that influential people have noticed this problem. The bad news is that many of them have perfectly awful ideas for solving it.

Everyone agrees that if boys don’t read well, it’s because they don’t read enough. But why don’t they read? A considerable number of teachers and librarians believe that boys are simply bored by the “stuffy” literature they encounter in school. According to a revealing Associated Press story in July these experts insist that we must “meet them where they are”—that is, pander to boys’ untutored tastes.

Spence explains how many publishers are writing books for boys that are really childish and disgusting.

Spence’s solution:

One obvious problem with the SweetFarts philosophy of education is that it is more suited to producing a generation of barbarians and morons than to raising the sort of men who make good husbands, fathers and professionals. If you keep meeting a boy where he is, he doesn’t go very far.

The other problem is that pandering doesn’t address the real reason boys won’t read. My own experience with six sons is that even the squirmiest boy does not require lurid or vulgar material to sustain his interest in a book.

So why won’t boys read? The AP story drops a clue when it describes the efforts of one frustrated couple with their 13-year-old unlettered son: “They’ve tried bribing him with new video games.” Good grief.

The appearance of the boy-girl literacy gap happens to coincide with the proliferation of video games and other electronic forms of entertainment over the last decade or two. Boys spend far more time “plugged in” than girls do. Could the reading gap have more to do with competition for boys’ attention than with their supposed inability to focus on anything other than outhouse humor?

Dr. Robert Weis, a psychology professor at Denison University, confirmed this suspicion in a randomized controlled trial of the effect of video games on academic ability. Boys with video games at home, he found, spend more time playing them than reading, and their academic performance suffers substantially. Hard to believe, isn’t it, but Science has spoken.

The secret to raising boys who read, I submit, is pretty simple—keep electronic media, especially video games and recreational Internet, under control (that is to say, almost completely absent). Then fill your shelves with good books.

What do you guys think about his idea?

I love video games. ECM helps me to find ones that I will like, and then I play those very sparingly. So this year, I played “King’s Bounty: The Legend”, “Brothers in Arms: Hell’s Highway” and “Arma II: Operation Arrowhead” on PC, “Etrian Odyssey 2: Heroes of Lagaard” and “Dragon Quest IX: Sentinels of the Starry Skies” on my Nintendo DS.

And previously I played games like “Silent Storm: Sentinels”,  “Dangerous Waters”, “Silent Hunter IV: Wolves of the Pacific”, “Combat Mission: Afrika Korps”, “Hidden & Dangerous 2: Sabre Squadron”, “Steel Panthers: World at War”, “Harpoon”, “Full Spectrum Warrior: Ten Hammers”, and my favorite RPG, “Wizardry 8”.

So I basically like large-scale tactical squad-based first-person shooters, large-scale realistic military simulations, and 2D turn-based fantasy role-playing games.

But what I noticed is that picking games like these that are adventurous, and playing them modestly, really hasn’t stopped me from reading. So long as I can link the topics that I read with apologetics or with developing a Christian view of politics, economics, marriage, family, parenting and foreign policy, then it seems to me that my reading is just an extension of my game playing. Life is an adventure, and books are weapons.

Specifically, I like to be adventurous and to fight, and I read books that help me to be able to have a job in engineering so that I can travel the world, and also fight about science, philosophy, history and religion. Maybe the real problem is that boys don’t see books as adventuring tools. My married friends view their marriages as very adventurous and subversive – they are very serious about reading and planning things out.