materialism

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The Unofficial Guide to Cosmos

The 2014 reboot of Carl Sagan’s classic 13-part series Cosmos struck a chord with viewers, garnered 12 Emmy Award nominations, and is headed straight into schools as a science teacher’s instructional aid. It’s also an agenda-driven vehicle for scientific materialism, casting religion as arch foe of the search for truth about nature and pressing its message that human beings occupy Read More ›

Stephen Meyer on the Dennis Miller program

Stephen Meyer on the Michael Medved Show discusses materialism and how it affects our constitution

On the Michael Medved show, Dr. Stephen Meyer discusses the conflict between the materialistic worldview espoused by such thinkers as Darwin, Marx, Freud, and the principles articulated in the Constitution. Stephen Meyer is the author of The New York Times best selling book Darwin’s Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the case for Intelligent Design (HarperOne, 2013). For Read More ›

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Rocks underwater on riverbed with clear freshwater. River habitat. Underwater landscape. Mountain river. Litle stream with gravel. Underwater scenery, algae, mountain river cleanliness.
Licensed from Adobe Stock

Darwinism and Materialism

Recently the Discovery Institute’s Stephen Meyer published Darwin’s Doubt, a book that raises many questions about the theory of evolution. As his title tells us, Darwin himself shared one of these doubts. Read More ›
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Thomas Nagel, via Wikipedia

Dissent of Man

If someone had predicted a year ago that Oxford University Press would publish a book with the subtitle Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False, I might have wondered what alternate universe he was inhabiting. But Oxford did publish it, and the aftershocks among the intellectual elite have yet to abate.

The book’s author, philosopher Thomas Nagel, is a professor at New York University and the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including an honorary doctorate from Oxford University; fellowships from the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities; and elections to such august bodies as the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. It is a testament to Professor Nagel’s stature that his critique of Darwinian theory was allowed to be published at all. But his stature has not immunized him from a flood of abuse and even suggestions of creeping senility.

It’s not often that a book by a professional philosopher attracts the notice — let alone the ire — of the cultural powers-that-be. One can think of Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind in the 1980s, but other examples are hard to come by. At any rate, Mind and Cosmos is well on its way to becoming a book that can’t be ignored by the thinking public. Thus far, it has been denounced in the Nation and the Huffington Post, dubbed the “most despised science book of 2012” by the London Guardian, defended in the New Republic (where Nagel’s critics were blasted as “Darwinist dittoheads” and a “mob of materialists”), subjected to a feature story in the New York Times, and put on the cover of the Weekly Standard, which depicted Nagel being burned alive, surrounded by a cabal of demonic-looking men in hoods.

The author has attracted special displeasure from the powers-that-be for using Mind and Cosmos to praise intelligent design proponents such as biochemist Michael Behe and philosopher of science Stephen Meyer. As the New York Times explained, many of Nagel’s fellow academics view him unfavorably “not just for the specifics of his arguments but also for what they see as a dangerous sympathy for intelligent design.” Now there is a revealing comment: academics, typically blasé about everything from justifications of infanticide to pedophilia, have concluded that it is “dangerous” to give a hearing to scholars who think nature displays evidence of intelligent design.

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Mind & Cosmos

The modern materialist approach to life has conspicuously failed to explain such central mind-related features of our world as consciousness, intentionality, meaning, and value. This failure to account for something so integral to nature as mind, argues philosopher Thomas Nagel, is a major problem, threatening to unravel the entire naturalistic world picture, extending to biology, evolutionary theory, and cosmology. Since Read More ›

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Portrait of a samurai in armor in attack position
Image Credit: Warpedgalerie - Adobe Stock

Samurai Bioethics

Because they are trying to avoid the stigma of being associated with “fundamentalists”, a number of conservative intellectuals appear all too willing to postpone indefinitely the serious questions raised by Darwinism. Read More ›

Happy Darwin Day?

Today marks the bicentennial of two notable birthdays, Abraham Lincoln’s and Charles Darwin’s. Lincoln is a hero to many Americans, but an international campaign is now under way to declare Feb. 12 Darwin Day. According to many of his modern followers, Darwin is the world’s greatest scientist, and his theory is the cornerstone of modern biology – if not the Read More ›

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The Spiritual Brain by Beauregard and O'Leary

The Spiritual Brain

Do religious experiences come from God, or are they merely the random firing of neurons in the brain? Drawing on his own research with Carmelite nuns, neuroscientist Mario Beauregard shows that genuine, life-changing spiritual events can be documented. He offers compelling evidence that religious experiences have a nonmaterial origin, making a convincing case for what many in scientific fields are Read More ›

The Divine Comedy: Dawkins’ Disco Inferno

Richard Dawkins has got himself in a bit of a pickle and, in an effort to wash off the brine, now appears to be lathering up mountains of foam. In an article in the LA Times (see here), he is at pains to distance himself from remarks he made in the newly released movie Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. Toward the Read More ›