Republican Science

Writer David Klinghoffer's latest offering highlights the divide between Republicans and Democrats insofar as how the two groups think scientific theories should be viewed and and the role they should play in our daily lives...

"What's wrong with Republicans, anyway? Scientists and journalists offer a variety of diagnoses. Some say a backwoods element in the population has abandoned the Enlightenment, a result of poor education or religious fundamentalism or both.

Other experts find no convincing sociological explanation and opt for a more scientific (or scientific-seeming) approach, pointing to faulty brain chemistry. A forthcoming book title by journalist Chris Mooney says it all: The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science and Reality...

In coverage of the evolution debate, for example, Darwin defenders have convinced many journalists that only two sides exist: Darwinists themselves versus advocates of a naïve Scriptural view that insists the world is just thousands of years old.

But most Americans understand that a more credible view exists, one that accepts a history of life going back more than 3 billion years but that doubts blind Darwinian forces can account for life's development, seeing, instead, evidence of purpose and design.

There is a persistent sense that we are being manipulated by fellow citizens who use the prestige of the word "science," coupled with the technique of the excluded middle, to intimidate us in service to a political agenda. Not just any political agenda, but one that violates our own experience of who, as human beings, we really are.

At stake is an anthropological view that, on "scientific" grounds, equates humans with animals who climbed too high in their own estimation and need an attitude adjustment. In this picture, government plays the role of zookeeper. We need our modes of transportation and industrial production tightly constrained, our diets controlled, our claim of possessing marks of divine intention or favor firmly denied, our offspring available immediately from conception to be consumed for medical research...

..It's not "science" that we deny but this effort to redefine man in the name of science that we resist."

The entire article is a great read if you have the chance to peruse it in it's entirety.

Meanwhile, over at the DI, their staff has put together a list of 50 peer-reviewed and peer-edited publications supporting the theory of Intelligent Design. Feel free to bookmark that one for the next time you encounter the snarky, internet materialist who tries pushing the fallacy that 'there is no peer-reviewed science' when it comes to Intelligent Design.

Colebatch: Evolution Needs to Evolve

Hal G.P. Colebatch makes it known that he doesn't necessarily believe in a young earth or even that we came from Adam and Eve. But he raises matters that even the most evangelical of materialists would have difficulty and struggle to provide an explanation...

"If a monkey was born capable not only of gathering nuts and bananas but also of building cathedrals, writing Hamlet or flying to the moon, we would see it as a major objection to the pure theory of evolution. We might even be tempted to believe that a God had intervened somewhere along the line.

But Man is born capable of doing these things and has done them. The fact speaks for itself. Further, as far as paleontology can tell us, Cro-Magnon Man, the earliest form of Homo sapiens, had brains as good as modern men -- Cro-Magnon Man simply knew less. We know from cave paintings that 16,000 years ago at least Man had highly developed art.

Why? Art is useless for survival. There is no reason why evolution should have produced it. It is possible to be reminded of Gandalf's cryptic comment in The Lord of the Rings: "Something else is at work." (About Neanderthal Man we can only make guesses from a few ambiguous hints -- in at least one Neanderthal burial, for example, a dead body was found to have been buried bedecked with flowers. Why did the dead Neanderthal's fellow-tribesmen take time off from hunting and gathering food to do that? Further, there were different types of Neanderthal Man and the more we discover about them the more complex the picture becomes.)

The unique quality of the human brain is one of the things which evolution, and Professor Dawkins, fails to explain. Humanity is special, and evolution can give no reason for it. Shall we perhaps be so unkind as to paraphrase Professor Dawkins, and call anyone who believes these things to be fully explained -- with that explanation being perhaps that they are the result of blind chance -- "ignorant, stupid or insane"?"

Berlinski on the Scientific Pretensions of Atheism

I just thought I'd throw this out there for anyone who might be interested in evolution. Human Events has posted a 5 part, videotaped interview with Dr. David Berlinski. The bulk of the interview is concerning questions about his book The Devil's Delusion, Atheism and it's Scientific Pretensions. To begin viewing the interview put out by the Hoover Institution, just click here.

EDIT: Youtube has a large part of the DVD The Incorrigible Dr. Berlinski here.

The Myth of Horse Evolution

I've been meaning to do a series of posts lately based on a book I started to crack open by James Montgomery Boice entitled Genesis Volume I, Creation and Fall, An Expositionary Commentary and given the interest the bacteria flagellum thread has generated, I just thought I'd throw this out there for discussion. On page 45, Boice writes...

"[A] major problem with the use of fossils to support evolution is the subjective nature of arranging fossil histories. It might be argued...that there is nevertheless evidence for development within one of the ancient time periods, even if not from one to the other. The supposed development of the horse from the Eocene period to modern times is an oft-cited example. During 60 million years or so the horse is supposed to have increased in size, lengthened its limbs, reduced and then eventually discarded toes and became a grazer. Many museums have skeletons or pictures that are supposed to represent this development. But the fossils do not prove this development. They may suggest it, and the development they suggest may in fact be right. But there is still no evidence that one supposed form of the horse gave place to another. In actuality the skeletons may have come from similar but otherwise unrelated animals. Moreover, even if the fossils of these horselike animals prove a development, it is still not an example of the development of a new species but only of a change within a species."

So what is your take on all of this? I agree with Boice in that a case could be made of change over time but at this point, we just don't know yet and cannot argue as if this example of evolutionary change is a cold, hard FACT.