Tas Walker in Palmy North 26 Sept

Tas Walker from Creation Ministries international is in Palmy North on Friday night.

Details: Friday 26 September, 7.30pm, public meeting, Central Baptist Church, 190 Church Street, Palmerston North.

More here.

Darwin and Evolution

Two lectures at Te Manawa. Details here.

See also the calendar on Thinking Matters.

Does Intelligent Design Have Merit?

This is looking like a nice (and useful) interchange by the ID experts and those opposing them:

http://www.opposingviews.com/questions/does-intelligent-design-have-merit

North Island ‘Evidence For Design’ Tour with Dr Tas Walker

Friday 26 September, 7.30pm, public meeting, Central Baptist Church, 190 Church Street, Palmerston North.

Dr Tas Walker has been working for CMI–Australia since 1999 and is one of the conrtributing editors for the world-renowned Creation magazine which has subscribers in over 140 countries.

Tas is an engaging speaker, answering many questions such as, ‘Is the creation/evolution debate just a side issue?’ or ‘Doesn’t evolution remove the need for a designer?’ In his easy-to-understand illustrated presentations, Tas will show how you can be confident in the Bible, strengthen the faith of your family, and witness with enthusiasm to your neighbours and friends.

This is your chance to hear a scientist talk about:

• evidence for the accuracy of the Bible

• evidence for creation and against evolution

• evidence that geologic observations confirm the event of Noah’s Flood

Help Us Get Lawmakers Expelled

Dear friends,

We’re excited to be able to tell you that on October 21^st Expelled: No Intelligence Allow, starring Ben Stein, will be released on DVD. In Expelled, Stein brilliantly exposed the widespread persecution of scientists and educators who are pursuing legitimate science that challenges Darwin’s theory of evolution.

Rush Limbaugh called the movie “powerful” and “fabulous” and said Stein’s “interviews with some of the professors who espouse Darwinism are literally shocking.”

Read more

The Darwin Lectures

National Radio are running this series. Check out the MP3s here.

Darwin or Design Show Notes

These are some useful interviews by an Aussie! Webpage here: http://thesciphishow.com/darwinordesign

The author of Darwin or Design is Jason Rennie. Jason is also the host of The Sci Phi Show a podcast that looks at questions of science fiction and philosophy. He lives in Sydney Australia and works as a software engineer when he isn’t busy doing things like this.

If you want to contact Jason in regards to Darwin or Design he can be reached at darwinordesign@gmail.com. He checks his email regularly so you can expect a speedy reply.

An overview of Evolution

Chapter 1 : PZ Myers, An overview of Evolution and ID 15:48
Chapter 2 : Sean Carroll, What is Evo Devo ? 20:17
Chapter 3 : Nick Matzke, Can the flagellum evolve ? 29:27

Design in the ID advocates own words

Chapter 4 : Salvador Cordova, What is ID ? 20:20
Chapter 5 : Mike Behe, What is Irreducible Complexity ? 17:51
Chapter 6 : Angus Menuge, Agency and how to identify it 18:28
Chapter 7 : Guillermo Gonzalez, The Privileged Planet 17:26
Chapter 8 : Joey Campana, Does ID research actually exist ? 26:17

Non-Darwinian approaches to Evolution and Common Descent

Chapter 9 : James Shapiro, Sentient Cells ? 33:50
Chapter 10 : Mike Gene, What is Front Loading ? 23:37

ID’s critics

Chapter 11 : Elliot Sober, ID and the Philosophy of Science 10:46
Chapter 12 : Scott Turner, The problem of Design 24:02
Chapter 13 : Glenn Morton, Can ID work in Biology ? 15:19
Chapter 14 : Ryan Nichols, Are ID and Theology Inseperable ? 14:28
Chapter 15 : Georgia Purdom, Isn’t ID just Creationism in Disguise ? 21:44

ID, The Philosophy of Science, History and The Law

Chapter 16 : David Livingstone, Evolution and Christianity, The History 32:37
Chapter 17 : Del Ratzsch, Can ID be Science ? 25:38
Chapter 18 : Massimo Pigliucci, Evolutionary Epistemology and ID 28:34
Chapter 19 : Henry Schaefer, Science and Religion 14:40
Chapter 20 : Donald McConnell, Intelligent Design, Creationism and The Law 34:42
Chapter 21 : Steve Fuller, ID & Social Epistemology 19:11

ID in the Wild

Chapter 22 : John Davison, The Price of Dissent 35:26
Chapter 23 : Denyse O’Leary, ID & The Media 22:51
Chapter 24 : Geoff Simmons, Darwinism, ID & Medicine 27:40
Chapter 25 : Rob Sawyer, Calculating God 25:27

A New Edition of Apologetica Now Available!

Are Christians delusional?

Read the latest edition of Apologetica for a response to Richard Dawkins attempt to answer intelligent design theorists regarding irreducible complexity.

Is Natural Selection sufficient to produce the obvious elements of design found in the universe? Brian Thomas doesn’t think so! He argues that the concept of irreducible complexity eliminates the possibility of a graduated development of biochemical “machines” that are essential to functioning cells.

To find out more read the new edition of Apologetica.

Sign up to receive Apologetica by email: cca@apologeticscenter.org

Oxford Scholar John Lennox on Atheism and Richard Dawkins

Well - has science buried God? Of course not. John Lennox answers his own question decisively. No one who understands what science really is and is not could suppose that such interment was ever on the cards. No one who understands what religion really is, beneath its sometimes ugly face, could suppose that it would be good to bury it.

From article:

“He is taken seriously in this not because his arguments are sound but because he is an outstanding rhetorician. It is the art of bamboozlement.”

Source: http://books.guardian.co.uk…

New ID Briefing Packet for Educators

Tired of misinformation about Intelligent Design?

Grumpy about people telling you what Intelligent Design is, when it isn’t?

Fed up of the ID misrepresentations in the media?

Bored by the ID = Creationism in a cheap tuxedo rhetoric?

Want to know more about what ID actually is?

Here are some valuable resources for you:

Educators packet here.

Download color version of the PDF here.

Download B/W printable version of the PDF here.

Enjoy!

Christmas present: Letter from a Christian Citizen: A response to Sam Harris

You can get this book at an introductory price or at the heavily discounted price of 5 for $25 making them inexpensive enough for you to share with sceptical friends and even the media. We are also including a FREE DVD with every book. This DVD is of a ‘hard hitting’ video clip showing the irrationality of the claims of Dawkins and Harris. Also included are PDFs of related CMI articles and some video clips featuring CMI scientist Dr Jonathan Sarfati.

Get Letter from a Christian Citizen and the DVD Imagine … there’s no God here.

New book: The Design of Life

http://www.thedesignoflife.net

Excerpts from the book…

“Most of origin-of-life research is as relevant to the real problem of life’s origin as rubber-band powered propeller model planes are to the military’s most sophisticated stealth aircraft.” (Ch.8)

“The origin of information is not a problem of chemistry. Chemistry can be a carrier of information, but it cannot be its source.” (Ch.8)

“Chemists typically do not concern themselves with the problem of the origin of information because their work presupposes a smart chemist ready to provide it!” (Ch.8)

“The claim that natural laws are sufficient to account for the origin of life is far-fetched. Natural laws work against the origin of life. Natural laws describe material processes that consume the raw materials of life, turning them into tars, melanoids, and other nonbiological substances that thereafter are completely useless to life.” (Ch.8)

“For Clarence Darrow, evolution justified a biological determinism that turned humans into puppets of their evolutionary past.” (Ch.9)

“Darwinists have traditionally hidden behind the complexities of biological systems to shelter their theory from critical scrutiny. Choose a biological system that is too complex, and one can’t even begin to calculate the probabilities associated with its evolution. Consider the eye. A widely held myth in the biological community is that Darwin’s theory has explained the evolution of the vertebrate eye. In fact, the theory hasn’t done anything of the sort.” (Ch.7)

Flash New Intelligent Design Website

http://www.intelligentdesign.org/

“… www.intelligentdesign.org is not a Discovery Institute focused website, but rather a site that highlights the websites owned and operated by a number of pro-ID organizations, scientists and scholars, such as the Intelligent Design Network, Access Research Network, and Uncommondescent.com.”

I Liked the Old Atheists Better

William Dembski

Philosopher Antony Flew used to be the most prominent atheist in the English-speaking world. In the last decade, however, that has changed.

Unlike Flew, who has always been civil and insightful, a new breed of atheists, who are crass and unruly, has supplanted him, notably, Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins. Also, Flew is no longer an atheist.

Flew’s newfound belief in God and his assessment of today’s neo-atheism are both described in his delightful new book (coauthored with Roy Varghese), There Is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind.

More here.

Finnish school shooting: Student social Darwinist dies, kills eight others

Do beliefs have implications? Many people argue in the negative. “His private life has no bearing on his ability to operate in the job”.

Well, this is plainly true in some cases, like, whether you prefer french vanilla or banana flavored ice-cream. Or perhaps which football team you support. But what about a person’s views on the deeper things in life, their worldview, their noetic structure? Can these things really have no effect on their actions?

Finnish school shooting: Student social Darwinist dies…

Reclaiming Science from Darwinism: A Clear Understanding of Creation, Evolution, and ID

Foreword: William Dembski, PhD.

Darwinism is a 150–year–old icon that has been propped up by unproven suppositions. The scientific discoveries of the last few decades are now kicking out the props.

Dr. Kenneth Poppe is convinced the icon is ready to topple. Providing extensive scientific evidence of Darwinism’s failures, this career biology instructor uses enlightening analogies and examples to explain the theory’s problems:

• blind–luck assembly of the first cell
• mathematical improbabilities
• the laws of thermodynamics
• hypothetical sudden mutations
• biased mind–sets

Spiced with humor and helpful graphics, this popularly targeted text shows readers that—in regard to objections to evolution—the science is truly there.

A superior resource for students, parents, and private– or public–school educators.

Amazon.com have it here.

From Darwin to Hitler

New book by Discovery Institute
Fellow shows influence of
Darwinian principles on
Hitler’s Nazi regime

Discovery Institute is pleased to announce the publication of the provocative intellectual history, “From Darwin to Hitler, Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics and Racism in Germany” (Palgrave MacMillan), by Richard Weikart.

In this compelling and painstakingly researched work of intellectual history, Weikart convincingly makes the argument that Hitler built his view of ethics on Darwinian principles.

“Richard Weikart’s outstanding book shows in sober and convincing detail how Darwinist thinkers in Germany had developed an amoral attitude to human society,” says Dr. Richard Evans, Professor of Modern History, University of Cambridge, and author of “The Coming of the Third Reich.” “This provided Hitler and the Nazis with a scientific justification for the policies they pursued once they came to power.”

More here.

Evolutionary Logic

Argument by assertion is unanswerable. If, for instance, some vague waffle about an evolutionary transition does not satisfy a recalcitrant student, the instructor simply says, “This point should be intuitively obvious. I’ve explained it as clearly as I can. If you still cannot see it, you will just have to think very carefully about it yourself, and then you will see how trivial and obvious it is.” The instructor at this point might also want to add, “What are you, a creationist?” or “Are you one of those Christian fundamentalists?” or “Where have you been brainwashed?” Arguments by demonization like this are particularly effective when one or a few students get unruly, but the majority sides with the instructor.

Source: here.

Darwin Day in America

Darwin Day in America tells the disturbing story of scientific expertise run amuck, exposing how an ideological interpretation of Darwinian biology and reductionist science have been used to degrade American culture over the past century through their impact on criminal justice, welfare, business, education, and bioethics.

At the dawn of the last century, leading scientists and politicians giddily predicted that science—especially Darwinian biology— would supply solutions to all the intractable problems of American society, from crime to poverty to sexual maladjustment.

How ’bout this quote:

All we are doing is catching up with Darwin. He showed in the nineteenth century that we are simply animals. Humans had imagined we were a separate part of Creation, that there was some magical line between Us and Them. Darwin’s theory undermined the foundations of that entire Western way of thinking about the place of our species in the universe.

Bioethicist Peter Singer, Princeton University

You can buy Singer’s so called ‘ethics’ books in our bookshops, today.

Kiwis more liberal than Americans

This Stuff article is really interesting and begins as follows:

Kiwis are significantly more liberal than Americans on issues of religion and morality, but are still not convinced by the theory of evolution, new research shows.

The UMR Research study compared New Zealanders’ attitudes with those of Americans using findings from a US Gallup Poll conducted this year.

Just 26 per cent of Kiwi respondents said the theory of evolution was definitely true.

Around the same percentage believed in the theory of creationism, with 24 per cent agreeing that “God created human beings in their present form exactly the way the Bible describes it”.

With our culture so saturated in Darwin-speak, this is a real surprise to me, especially in light of the fact that I was once heavily in that 26 percent.

Read more

Scientist Mike Behe again attacks evolution

The Edge of Evolution
The Search for the Limits of Darwinism
By Michael J. Behe

Free Press. 320 pp.

Reviewed by Cameron Wybrow

In 1996, Pennsylvania’s own Michael J. Behe launched a frontal attack upon Darwinian evolution with the publication of Darwin’s Black Box. Behe, a mild-mannered molecular biologist at Lehigh University, argued politely but vigorously that the standard Darwinian explanation (random mutations plus natural selection) simply couldn’t explain the evolution of a number of significant structures and processes observed in living things. Intricate processes like human blood clotting, and intricate structures like the bacterial flagellum (which is built uncannily like an outboard motor) were “irreducibly complex” arrangements that couldn’t have arisen by a series of chance steps. They therefore must have been designed, by an intelligence of some kind. Behe’s book soon became the flagship of the movement known as intelligent design (ID).

Source: here.

Answers to questions about Intelligent Design

These answers are in reply to a student from France who wants to know more about ID in relation to Darwinism.

George Orwell’s New Europe

William Dembski

Here are extracts from the Council of Europe’s Draft Resolution against ID, Creation, and anything that does not toe the materialist line. Note the passages in bold.

Source here.

More here.

DNA unraveled — Darwinism or Intelligent Design?

A ’scientific revolution’ is taking place, as researchers explore the genomic jungle

By Colin Nickerson, Globe Staff  |  September 24, 2007

Snippets from the full article below…

The science of life is undergoing changes so jolting that even its top researchers are feeling something akin to shell-shock… they find themselves confronted by a biological jungle deeper, denser, and more difficult to penetrate than anyone imagined…

“To our shock and consternation, we’re learning how little we know about the parts of the genome that may matter most,” said Dr. David M. Altshuler, associate professor of genetics…

“The picture that’s emerging” of how living cells actually operate and evolve “is so immensely more complicated than anyone imagined, it’s almost depressing,” Rigoutsos said…

But few had predicted the complex orchestration of genes and nongenetic DNA suggested by the Encode research…

“We were looking at droplets,” she said. “Now we’re suddenly viewing the ocean. It will take time just to get our bearings.”

Source here.

ExPELLED - No Intelligence Allowed

This movie, due out Feb 2008, looks really exciting in the context of the culture wars going on at present.

There is a website you can visit to get a preview of the movie here:

http://www.expelledthemovie.com

In case you don’t know, a number of very good scientists have been denied tenure because of their support of ID and skepticism of Darwinism. See a recent case on www.uncommondescent.com for example.

Update: More here.

Next Page »