Tag Archives: Religion

News

Peer-reviewed journal apologizes for censoring pro-ID article

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From Evolution News. (Excerpt below, with links removed)

Excerpt:

In one of their favorite soundbytes, members of the Darwin lobby like to assert that intelligent design scientists do not publish peer-reviewed research. That claim is manifestly false. But the fact that intelligent design scholars do publish peer-reviewed articles is no thanks to Darwinists, many of whom do their best to ensure that peer-reviewed articles by intelligent design scientists never see the light of day.

Witness the brazen censorship earlier this year of an article by University of Texas, El Paso mathematics professor Granville Sewell, author of the book In the Beginning and Other Essays on Intelligent Design. Sewell’s article critical of Neo-Darwinism (“A Second Look at the Second Law”) was both peer-reviewed and accepted for publication by the journal Applied Mathematics Letters. That is, the article was accepted for publication until a Darwinist blogger who describes himself as an “opinionated computer science geek” wrote the journal editor to denounce the article, and the editor decided to pull Sewell’s article in violation of his journal’s own professional standards.

The publisher of Applied Mathematics Letters (Elsevier, the international science publisher) has now agreed to issue a public statement apologizing to Dr. Sewell as well as to pay $10,000 in attorney’s fees.

“It’s hard to imagine a more blatant assault on intellectual freedom and the free exchange of ideas,” says attorney Pete Lepiscopo with the California firm of Lepiscopo and Morrow, which represented Sewell.

Lepiscopo points out that in retracting Sewell’s article, Applied Mathematics Letters “effectively accepted the unsubstantiated word and unsupported opinion of an inconsequential blogger, with little or unknown academic background beyond a self-professed public acknowledgment that he was a ‘computer science grad’ and whose only known writings are self-posted blogs about movies, comics, and fantasy computer games.” This blogger’s unsupported opinion “trumped the views of an author who is a well respected mathematician with a Ph.D. in Mathematics from Purdue University; a fully-tenured Professor of Mathematics at the University of Texas–El Paso; an author of three books on numerical analysis and 40 articles published in respected journals; and a highly sought-after and frequent lecturer world-wide on mathematics and science.”

After Dr. Sewell’s article was pulled, Darwinian zealots crowed about their achievement and maliciously speculated that the article was withdrawn because it wasn’t really peer-reviewed or because it was somehow substandard. The journal, meanwhile, left Dr. Sewell to twist in the wind, seemingly endorsing the Darwinists’ smears. The journal editor Dr. Rodin wrote a groveling letter to the Darwinist blogger who complained to him in which he agreed that publishing Sewell’s article would involve “impropriety.” Rodin further apologized “for our erroneous judgement in even considering this paper for publication.”

Dr. Rodin and his journal now have to issue a public statement providing “their sincere and heartfelt apologies to Dr. Sewell… and welcom[ing] Dr. Sewell’s submission of future articles for possible publication.” More important than the apology, the journal has to set the record straight by reiterating that “Dr. Sewell’s article was peer-reviewed and accepted for publication” and by making clear that his article was not withdrawn because of “any errors or technical problems found by the reviewers or editors.”

Wow. I actually clicked on some of the links in the post at Evolution News and was carried off to the lands of naturalistic blogging. It’s amazing how confident they are in their little echo chambers, but I cannot fathom why this should be since they are unwilling to debate their views in public. To me, you can only know something if you are willing to hear the criticisms against it. If you censor all your opponents and hang around in little online chat rooms gloating to your choir about how smart you are and how right you are, why think that you really know anything about what you are talking about?

The only way to be sure about any issue is to listen to both sides in a debate, and let your opponents have a hearing. I would not feel confident in asserting anything if I only heard the arguments on one side of the question. Not only do the Darwinbots seem to be confident in asserting their views without hearing their opponents, they are actually arrogant and insulting about it. But before you can be trumpet your victory in a disagreement, doesn’t there have to be an actual debate first? Canceling the debate by censorship doesn’t mean that you won the debate.  It means you’re scared of debate.

Here’s what you do. Slap a defamation lawsuit on the blogger who complained for a million dollars and let them have their day in court to explain why they said what they said. Then we’ll find out which side has the blind faith and which side has the knowledge.

News

Secular government uses your tax money to limit your religious liberty

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Map of Canada
Map of Canada

Often, Christians, Jews and other religious people are swayed to vote for left-leaning parties in elections. The leftists promise all kinds of goodies that they will provide, freeing us from the responsibility to provide for ourselves. And they promise that it won’t cost us a thing, because they will take the money from our rich neighbors, or from some other group of people who, they tell us, have no right to their own money. Well, what happens when religious people trust the secular government and vote them into power in order to get these goodies?

This is what happens in Quebec. (H/T Don Surber)

Excerpt:

MONTREAL — The 3- and 4-year-olds at the Childcare Center of Hebrew Foundation were always excited on Fridays. They’d get to re-create the rituals their parents typically perform for Friday night dinner, an integral part of the Jewish Sabbath, or Shabbat.

On a rotating basis, each child would be designated, if female, to light candles and say a blessing or, as a boy, bless the challah bread. The “wine” would be grape juice.

But on Friday, there was no Shabbat simulation. And there probably never will be again, if the Quebec government can help it.

“My 4-year-old daughter is devastated she can’t do her Shabbat next year,” said Sandy Jesion, who sends his child to the daycare in Dollard-des-Ormeaux, a Montreal suburb where he lives.

Nor are there any more prayers before the mid-morning snack. No stories about Noah’s Ark. No recounting of the parting of the seas.

Don Surber writes:

But the center could prevent this if it refused government money.

From the Toronto Star: “As of last Wednesday, subsidized daycare and early-childhood learning centres in Quebec have had to abide by a new directive prohibiting religious activities, which the government expects to foster the integration of all children.”

Don’t get me wrong. Canadians should fight this. But the Childcare Center of Hebrew Foundation is not helpless. It could tell Quebec where it can shove that money.

Notice though, that a much better solution that not taking the subsidies is to NOT VOTE FOR THE TAXES in the first place. Vote to shrink government, and then you get to keep your own money and spend it as you see fit. Your employer gets to keep the money, so that he will be able to raise your salary, or to not LAY YOU OFF in a recession. It is never a good idea for religious people to give a secular government their money, or even their neighbor’s money. The secular government can never spend the money as efficiently as private citizens can. It’s your money – you keep it and spend it on helping others the way YOU think is best. And if you want to have a religious education, then that’s your decision. Don’t let the government use your money and then make that decision FOR YOU. Don’t let someone else take your money, or your neighbor’s money, or your employer’s money, and then use it to PUSH THEIR VIEW ONTO YOUR CHILDREN. You keep your money and raise your own children. You call the shots with the money you earn.

Polemics

Has Christianity held back the progress of science? What about Galileo?

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First, here’s an article from the peer-reviewed journal Nature, probably the best peer-reviewed journal on science in the world. (H/T Letitia)

The article is written by James Hannam. He has a PhD in the History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Cambridge and is the author of The Genesis of Science: How the Christian Middle Ages Launched the Scientific Revolution (published in the UK as God’s Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science).

Excerpt:

Few topics are as open to misunderstanding as the relationship between faith and reason. The ongoing clash of creationism with evolution obscures the fact that Christianity has actually had a far more positive role to play in the history of science than commonly believed. Indeed, many of the alleged examples of religion holding back scientific progress turn out to be bogus. For instance, the Church has never taught that the Earth is flat and, in the Middle Ages, no one thought so anyway. Popes haven’t tried to ban zero, human dissection or lightening rods, let alone excommunicate Halley’s Comet. No one, I am pleased to say, was ever burnt at the stake for scientific ideas. Yet, all these stories are still regularly trotted out as examples of clerical intransigence in the face of scientific progress.

Admittedly, Galileo was put on trial for claiming it is a fact that the Earth goes around the sun, rather than just a hypothesis as the Catholic Church demanded. Still, historians have found that even his trial was as much a case of papal egotism as scientific conservatism. It hardly deserves to overshadow all the support that the Church has given to scientific investigation over the centuries.

That support took several forms. One was simply financial. Until the French Revolution, the Catholic Church was the leading sponsor of scientific research. Starting in the Middle Ages, it paid for priests, monks and friars to study at the universities. The church even insisted that science and mathematics should be a compulsory part of the syllabus. And after some debate, it accepted that Greek and Arabic natural philosophy were essential tools for defending the faith. By the seventeenth century, the Jesuit order had become the leading scientific organisation in Europe, publishing thousands of papers and spreading new discoveries around the world. The cathedrals themselves were designed to double up as astronomical observatories to allow ever more accurate determination of the calendar. And of course, modern genetics was founded by a future abbot growing peas in the monastic garden.

But religious support for science took deeper forms as well. It was only during the nineteenth century that science began to have any practical applications. Technology had ploughed its own furrow up until the 1830s when the German chemical industry started to employ their first PhDs. Before then, the only reason to study science was curiosity or religious piety. Christians believed that God created the universe and ordained the laws of nature. To study the natural world was to admire the work of God. This could be a religious duty and inspire science when there were few other reasons to bother with it. It was faith that led Copernicus to reject the ugly Ptolemaic universe; that drove Johannes Kepler to discover the constitution of the solar system; and that convinced James Clerk Maxwell he could reduce electromagnetism to a set of equations so elegant they take the breathe away.

Given that the Church has not been an enemy to science, it is less surprising to find that the era which was most dominated by Christian faith, the Middle Ages, was a time of innovation and progress. Inventions like the mechanical clock, glasses, printing and accountancy all burst onto the scene in the late medieval period. In the field of physics, scholars have now found medieval theories about accelerated motion, the rotation of the earth and inertia embedded in the works of Copernicus and Galileo. Even the so-called “dark ages” from 500AD to 1000AD were actually a time of advance after the trough that followed the fall of Rome. Agricultural productivity soared with the use of heavy ploughs, horse collars, crop rotation and watermills, leading to a rapid increase in population.

I hope this will set the record straight – monotheism created experimental science. If you want atheistic science, you’re looking at things like the steady-state model, directed panspermia and man-made global warming. You could call that speculative science, I guess.

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