America Online has been lobbying for months for laws mandating that cable companies offering broadband service provide “open access” to AOL and other Internet service providers. But last week AOL borrowed one of the late Gilda Radner’s old “Saturday Night Live” punch lines: “Never mind.” AOL succeeded in persuading local governments from Portland, Ore., to Broward County, Fla., to mandate Read More ›
The Definition of Death, Contemporary Controversies, edited by Stuart J. Youngner, Robert, M. Arnold, and Renie Schapiro. Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 346 pp., $ 54 In just thirty years, bioethics has grown from a group of ruminating philosophers and theologians into one of the country’s most fiercely secularized and influential intellectual forces. Bioethicists sit on presidential advisory commissions, teach in Read More ›
What’s Darwin got to do with it? When it comes to evolution, quite a bit! But many people don’t understand Darwin, creationism and intelligent design. Here’s a book that makes sense of it all! A group of scholars, teachers, writers and illustrators have teamed up to create an easy-to-read introduction and critique to this important issue. You’ll enjoy the lively Read More ›
I was recently on an NPR program with skeptic Michael Shermer and paleontologist Donald Prothero to discuss intelligent design. As the discussion unfolded, it became clear that they were using the phrase “intelligent design” in a way quite different from how the emerging intelligent design community is using it. The confusion centered on what the adjective “intelligent” is doing in Read More ›
It seems to be open season on religious speech in the public arena. Two weeks ago, a group of religious leaders called for a “moratorium on religious rhetoric” from presidential candidates, attacking candidates who shared their personal faith on the campaign trail. A few days earlier, the FCC issued a ruling discouraging noncommercial educational TV stations from offering “programming primarily Read More ›
Many critics of intelligent design have argued that design is merely a negative argument against evolution. This could not be further from the truth. Leading design theorist William Dembski has observed that “[t]he principle characteristic of intelligent agency is directed contingency, or what we call choice.”1 By observing the sorts of choices that intelligent agents commonly make when designing systems, a positive case Read More ›
Introduction The cosmological argument for God’s existence has a long history, but perhaps the most enduring version of it has been the argument from contingency. This is the version that Frederick Copleston pressed upon Bertrand Russell in their debate about God’s existence in 1948. In 1997 (“A New Look at the Cosmological Argument, American Philosophical Quarterly 34:193-212), I noted that Read More ›
In a memorable scene from the movie The Graduate, Dustin Hoffman’s parents throw him a party to celebrate his graduation from college. The parents’ friends are all there congratulating him and offering advice. What should Hoffman do with his life? One particularly solicitous guest is eager to set him straight. He takes Hoffman aside and utters a single word — Read More ›
The Sunday mails debate during the early nineteenth century was the first national controversy to focus on the meaning of the religion clauses of the First Amendment. The debate was sparked by the practice of transporting and delivering mail on Sundays. While the subject might seem arcane today, the issues underlying the controversy reached to the very core of American Read More ›