‘I rarely have an urge to whisper,” says George Gilder — loudly — as he settles onto a divan by the window of his Times Square hotel room. I’d asked him to speak as audibly as possible into my recording device, and his response, while literal, could also serve as a metaphor: Nothing Mr. Gilder says or writes is ever Read More ›
We live in decadent times. Universal human rights have not been fully attained, yet radical environmentalists insist that flora, fauna and even geological features and structures should be deemed legal persons, a meme known as “nature rights.” The drive to grant rights to the entirety of the natural world has already achieved stunning victories. In 2008, Ecuador granted human-type rights to “nature” Read More ›
Imagine two science teachers. Mr. Smith teaches straight out of the textbook. He expects students simply to memorize and correctly regurgitate. The other, Ms. Jones, supplements her teaching with challenging mainstream material that casts the textbook’s position in a new, more critical light. She asks students to weigh some of the evidence for themselves, like real scientists do. Which sounds like the better teacher? This is a question that lawmakers have considered in a series of legislative battles across the country over academic freedom for high school science instructors. The idea that students are well served by creative, challenging instruction would seem uncontroversial. Except, that is, when the subject is evolution. Then all hell breaks loose.
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No one can say when exactly the modern age began, but it was clearly tied to the Reformation, Renaissance, and the Scientific Revolution which had their roots in 14thand 15th century Europe.
The reformation of church corruption and pursuit of spiritual truth promoted by Martin Luther had its analog with the pursuit of truth regarding the physical universe by contemporary Nicholas Copernicus, who is credited as a key founder of the scientific revolution. Copernicus’ empirical evidence and reasoning upset the prevailing geocentric view that the earth was the center of universe with the heliocentric model that took its place — placing the sun at the center, with the earth and other planets orbiting it.
The Reformation and Renaissance set in motion a cultural awakening as well as an unusual concentration of human genius and extraordinary wisdom that culminated in the birth of a new nation, the United States — dedicated to the rule of law, separation of powers and limited government, and accountability to its citizens whose rights were God-given and thus unalienable and not subject to infringement by the state — a truly revolutionary model that subsequently influenced other nations worldwide well into the 20thcentury.
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In the 1985 classic American science fiction film Back to the Future, Marty McFly travels back in time in a DeLorean time machine, and with the help of its inventor, the eccentric scientist “Doc,” history gets repaired so that when McFly returns to the present he finds healthy relations restored, providing optimism for the future and a happy ending. As a film Read More ›
July 4th is a generally more festive American holiday — with cookouts, parades, parties, and fireworks — than other patriotic holidays, such as Memorial Day or Veterans Day.
Most people forget that when the Declaration of Independence was drafted and signed on or about July 4th 1776 it was both a revolutionary and a somber occasion. It was revolutionary in being the first political doctrine in human history to assert that the rights of the people come from God, and not the state — which made those rights natural, absolute, and “unalienable.”
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For a year now, I’ve been discussing my book Undeniable: How Biology Confirms Our Intuition That Life Is Designed with my friend Hans Vodder, who thinks I got it wrong. Although Hans agrees that life came from God, he thinks natural evolutionary processes could have been the means by which God did his creative work. As is often the case, it has taken some Read More ›
According to a new International Monetary Fund research paper, the answer to the above question is yes. As one story on the IMF report put it, “The future of work run by robots appears to be a dystopian march to rising inequality, falling wages and higher unemployment.” This is just the latest in a long line of predictions that artificial intelligence and automation will soon create massive “technological unemployment.”
I get it. Doomsday predictions gain shares on Facebook and Twitter. But these apocalyptic fears defy the lessons of both history and economics.
Read More ›Sputnik: What is your take on euthanasia and assisted suicide? How justified is this practice? Wesley Smith: I’ve been opposing assisted suicide and euthanasia for 20 years. I see it as a form of abandonment, when you have somebody who is suffering. To say to them: “Yes, the way to eliminate suffering is to eliminate the sufferer,” is to confirm the person‘s worst fears that they are a Read More ›
There seem to be cycles in city politics. Fifty years ago a small band of Young Republicans and Young Democrats came together in an unusual alliance to overturn the existing Seattle City Council. They called themselves CHECC: Choose an Effective City Council. It took a couple of elections, but they prevailed and it was then — in the 1970s — that formerly …