I was meandering in cyberspace, and stumbled onto this column by Australian Michael Ruse: The struggle between evolution and creation: an American problem. This appeals to me after all the news about Australian Ken Ham and his Creation Museum here in the U.S. The muse of Mr. Ruse is that…
We have a nice brewery run by the Schlafly family in our town. A town already renowned for beer. But a relative by marriage is more famous than the beer because of her stance against women's rights and against progress through knowledge. Yes, Phyllis Schlafly is in the local news…
According to this article, essentially copied from the AP, Adnan Oktar, who writes as Harun Yahya, has been convicted of fraud. His extensive organization has the goal to persuade the world (or at least the schools therein) of the Truth of Young Earth Creationism, as revealed in the Bible. In…
Arianna Huffington has just released her new book, Right Is Wrong: How the Lunatic Fringe Hijacked America, Shredded the Constitution, and Made Us All Less Safe. Huffington has reviewed the main themes of her book at Huffpo. In the book, Huffington concludes that there are three main areas to consider…
I’ve been following the reviews of the Ben Stein “Expelled” movie since it was first shown. Many of them properly criticize it for its many inherent cinematic flaws. Others angrily take it to task for its clear violations of sense or sensibility. There is also ExpelledExposed.com, the not-mentioning of which I get chided for every time I post about this movie.
Then there are some who applaud it for “speaking the truth” and “opening conversations”. On my second post about this movie, I asked people to send me links to any non-negative review coming from sources outside of the Discovery Institute (Answers in Genesis, EvolutionNews.org, etc). I suspect that there is now an effort afoot to produce as many positive reviews as there are negative ones, in order to keep things “fair and balanced” online.
After the initial spate of bad reviews by reputable critics, various Christian columnists have been lauding it for exposing the religious suppression of the “Scientific Theory of Intelligent Design” and especially the efforts of reviewers (and scientists, and “W” appointed conservative judges) to associate this “scientific theory” with the openly religious (and mostly equivalent) ideas of Creationism. Bad intellectuals, bad experts.
But, what is this Scientific Theory? Well, an idea has to have 3 elements to qualify as a scientific theory :
