A Chinese paleontologist lectures around the world saying that recent fossil finds in his country are inconsistent with the Darwinian theory of evolution. His reason: The major animal groups appear abruptly in the rocks over a relatively short time, rather than evolving gradually from a common ancestor as Darwin’s theory predicts. When this conclusion upsets American scientists, he wryly comments: Read More ›
In this scientific age, it is impossible to quarantine the claims of science. They invariably leak into other cultural domains. So we should attend to what scientists tell us. Sometimes it is quite important. For instance, in The Meaning of Evolution, George Gaylord Simpson repeats what is surely the “official” dogma of the contemporary scientific guild: “Man is the result Read More ›
For over a century, the scientific establishment has ignored challenges to the theory of evolution. But in the last decade such complacency about its scientific and philosophical foundations has been shaken. As cracks in the Darwinian edifice have begun to appear, many are asking whether a defensible alternative exists. In response to this growing crisis, a movement has emerged among Read More ›
Last Monday, Mark Edwards, PR man for the conservative think tank the Discovery Institute, was excited. “We landed on the front page of yesterday’s New York Times,” he enthused. Two weeks prior, the Discovery Institute was featured in a story on the front page of the Los Angeles Times. And CNN recently turned its cameras on the Seattle institute. The Read More ›
While others search the skies for extraterrestrial life, Michael Denton has examined the recent discoveries in all the sciences to ask — Could life elsewhere be substantially different from life on Earth? Drawing on a staggering knowledge of physics, biochemistry, geology, and evolution, Denton builds a step-by-step argument for human inevitability. Life requires water, DNA, and protein; it can only Read More ›
One thing I love about the creation/evolution controversy is that it provides no end of amusement.Take the summer of 1999 for example. When the Kansas state board of education voted to de-emphasize the more speculative aspects of evolution in the state science standards, folks went wild. In a broadside published in Time, Harvard paleontologist and science writer Stephen Jay Gould Read More ›
Objections Sustained is a collection of essays by UC Berkeley law professor Phillip Johnson, also the Program Advisor to Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture. In the first half of the book, Johnson presents nine short chapters about Darwinists and Darwinism. Johnson first takes aim at the myth that science and religion occupy completely separate realms. This myth, formally Read More ›
The Fordham Foundation’s highly touted report by Lawrence Lerner, “Good Science, Bad Science: Teaching Evolution in the States,” recommends increased emphasis in America’s public schools on biological evolution–which the report never adequately defines. (1) But the Lerner report fails to point out that students are being systematically misled about the scientific evidence, and it thereby encourages precisely the sort of Read More ›
The school board in Melvindale had what it thought was a reasonable idea: Let students know there are increasing scientific arguments against the Darwinian dogma of evolution by chance and natural selection (“materialism”). But then they ran up against “the script.” The script is Inherit the Wind, a popular film from 1960 that presented a fictional version of the famous 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 ›
Introduction From its inception Darwinism posed a challenge to Christian theology. Darwinism threatened to undo the Church’s understanding of creation, and therewith her understanding of the origin of human life. Nor did the challenge of Darwinism stop here. With human beings the result of a brutal, competitive process that systematically rooted out the weak and favored only the strong (we Read More ›