Tag Archives: Darwin

News

Is God’s existence compatible with Darwinian evolution?

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Report on a new book from Evolution News.

Excerpt:

Can you be an orthodox Darwinist and an orthodox theist? The plain answer is “no,” according to God and Evolution, an important new book coming out this fall. The book provides a thorough examination of the conflict between belief in God and Darwin’s theory of unguided evolution.

[…]”As the arguments in this volume make clear, to the degree that theistic evolution is theistic, it will not be fully Darwinian,” adds Richards. “And to the degree that it is Darwinian, it will fail fully to preserve traditional theism.”

God and Evolution includes chapters by William Dembski, author of The Design Revolution; Stephen Meyer, author of Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design; Denyse O’Leary, co-author of The Spiritual Brain; David Klinghoffer, author of The Discovery of God: Abraham and the Birth of Monotheism; Jonathan Wells, author of Icons of Evolution; John West, author of Darwin Day in America; Jonathan Witt, co-author of A Meaningful World; Casey Luskin, co-author of Traipsing Into Evolution; and Logan Paul Gage, whose articles have appeared in Touchstone, First Things, and other publications.

The book is a response to growing efforts by some Darwinists to enlist the support of the faith community by downplaying Darwinism’s core principles. Chapters of the book detail the failures of theistic evolution, address the problem of evil, and explain how intelligent design is consonant with orthodox belief.

“Our main focus remains on the science,” says John West, a contributor to the book and a senior fellow with Discovery’s Center for Science & Culture. “But it’s important to set the record straight about the broader implications of Darwin’s theory.”

I agree with the thesis of the book. Without the pre-supposition of materialism, the evidence for Darwinian evolution is not sufficient. With the pre-supposition of materialism, evolution has to be true. But then, God doesn’t exist, since he is not material.

News

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.

Related posts

Podcasts

Michael Behe and Stephen Barr debate intelligent design

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Michael Behe is Catholic and Stephen Barr seems to be a theistic evolutionist (naturalist). (H/T Evolution News via ECM)

The main page is here, and it has the video.

There is an MP3 file here, 71 minutes long.

Michael Behe goes first, then Stephen Barr.

Keep in mind that the dividing line in the debate on intelligent design vs. Darwinism is between open-minded scientists who think that there might be objective evidence that material cause-and-effect may not be able to account for specific kinds of complexity (specified complexity) in nature, and philosophers who believe that is never permissible to overturn the philosophical assumption of materialism, regardless of what the scientific evidence shows.

So the pro-ID side is like “let’s look at the evidence and see what naturalism can and can’t do” and the anti-ID side is “the presupposition of materialism is absolute for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door”. It’s ID scientists vs naturalist materialism pre-supposers. Reason vs faith. Inquiry vs dogmatism.

UPDATE:

Upcoming conference features pro-ID scholars and theistic evolutionists in Austin, Texas in October.