The Center for Science and Culture
Note: The Simpson’s, television’s popular prime-time cartoon known for its satirical commentary on various social issues, recently took a shot at the creation-evolution debate by featuring Stephen Jay Gould prominently in one of its episodes. Here is Bill Dembski’s review and observations of that episode. For those of you who regularly watch the Simpsons, you’ll know that to have one’s Read More ›
In a retrospective essay on Carl Sagan in the January 9, 1997 New York Review of Books, Harvard Genetics Professor Richard Lewontin tells how he first met Sagan at a public debate in Arkansas in 1964. The two young scientists had been coaxed by senior colleagues to go to Little Rock to debate the affirmative side of the question: “RESOLVED, that Read More ›
Traditional approaches that fail to take account of new findings in molecular cell biology cannot survive the present day. Materialistic explanations for the origin of information have been systematically eliminated over the past forty years. Has origin-of-life research brought us to the brink of a new scientific revolution? Despite the now well-documented influence of Christian thinking on the rise of Read More ›
People who only want unbiased, honest science education that sticks to the evidence are bewildered by the reception they get when they try to make their case. Their specific points are brushed aside, and they are dismissed out of hand as religious fanatics. The newspapers report that “creationists” are once again trying to censor science education because it offends their religious beliefs. Why is it so hard for reasoned criticism of biased teaching to get a hearing? The answer to that question begins with a Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee play called Inherit the Wind, which was made into a movie in 1960 starring Spencer Tracy, Gene Kelly and Frederic March. You can rent the movie at any video store with a “classics” section, and I urge you to do so and watch it carefully… The play is a fictionalized treatment of the “Scopes Trial” of 1925, the legendary courtroom confrontation in Tennessee over the teaching of evolution. Inherit the Wind is a masterpiece of propaganda, promoting a stereotype of the public debate about creation and evolution that gives all virtue and intelligence to the Darwinists. The play did not create the stereotype, but it presented it in the form of a powerful story that sticks in the minds of journalists, scientists and intellectuals generally…
Read More ›Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds is directed at a lay audience who is trying to understand how to open up serious dialogue over evolution. UC Berkeley law professor Phillip Johnson and program advisor for the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture, explains that the core question in the creation/evolution debate is not about the age of the earth, but about Read More ›
“Man is the result of a purposeless and natural process that did not have him in mind.” George Gaylord Simpson (1) Where did you come from? Are you the result of a mindless, undirected process, or are you the handiwork of a purposeful Creator? According to several Gallup polls, only about ten percent of the American people believe in Darwin’s Read More ›
As Kansas wound down its week long observance of the 75th anniversary of the Scopes Trial, a striking irony largely escaped notice: Whereas in 1925 the teaching of evolution was banned from the classroom, in 2000 the teaching of anything but evolution is effectively banned from the classroom. Academic freedom is just as restricted as ever–only this time it’s the Read More ›
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Scientists, attorneys and teachers who support intelligent design instead of naturalistic evolution presented their side of the debate at a day-long symposium Saturday. More than 350 people attended a national symposium called “Darwin, Design and Democracy: Teaching the Evidence in Science Education” at Rockhurst High School. It featured presentations by biochemist Dr. Michael Behe, biologist Dr. Read More ›
Published on May 1, 1991, Centesimus Annus returns to the themes of a lapidary encyclical of 100 years before, Rerum Novarum, which refuted Marxism long before it had refracted into a global plague of tyranny and murder. The critique of socialism, however, did not signify an affirmation of capitalism. The `new things’ to which the Pope devoted his attention more Read More ›