The political Left and Right began with the French National Constituent Assembly of 1789. The Left supported the revolution and democracy, the Right opposed the revolution and supported the aristocracy, and the Democratic Royalists supported a constitutional monarchy. Today there is no aristocratic Right to speak of, at least not in countries such as America. […]
Articles about creationism (and intelligent design) almost always misrepresent them for one or more of the following reasons: (1) Articles about creationism don’t quote or reference documents by creationists. Instead they explain what the author thinks creationism is. However, the author is wrong about what creationism is and ends up arguing against a position that
Congress passes a bill to authorize a government program and expenditure of funds before passing an appropriations bill to approve the expenditure of funds. Authorization bills cover multiple years (such as 3 or 6) whereas appropriations are usually annual. Some programs such as so-called entitlements do not follow this process. One advantage of periodic authorizations is that they
Indeed, the commonplace distinction between the fact of evolution and the mechanism of evolution may apply equally well to design—recognition of a fact of design need not be anchored to an understanding of the mechanisms by which design is introduced into natural phenomena. Incidentally, that point was already made by Paley. (And in fact Dembski’s
Mathematicians have built axiomatic systems since Euclid that have become more and more extensive and sophisticated. But Kurt Gödel performed a great service when he showed that there is much more truth to mathematics than could ever be formalized in an axiomatic system. Mathematicians gave up looking for a complete theory, except within limited domains
There is a kind of scholarship that starts with a very literalistic reading of a source text, finds contradictions in it, and concludes either that it is a combination of contradictory texts or that a very non-literal reading is justified. This is a method that seeks to justify one extreme by criticizing another extreme. No
Isaac Newton was the first science “star” — someone who achieved great prestige as a result of their scientific investigations. His contemporary Alexander Pope famously wrote about him: Nature and nature’s laws lay hid in night; God said “Let Newton be” and all was light. Newton himself was more modest of his own achievements, writing
I attended a seminar recently with Stephen Meyer of the Discovery Institute. He’s a good speaker who talked mostly about his book Darwin’s Doubt and anthropic fine tuning. Here are some highlights and things I hadn’t heard before from an ID speaker: He spoke not only about design but also about “a designing mind”. There
Augustine of Hippo wrote crede, ut intelligas, “believe so that you may understand” (Tract. Ev. Jo., 29.6), which contrasts with what many want to do, that is, understand so they may believe. Both of these have their place but the point of Christian faith is to trust that we may trust more. Christian faith is in the
This is not intended to be a political blog, but sometimes a warning message needs to be given about where things are going. We don’t like to think our lives will be interrupted by national or international events, but that has happened to many if not most people in the past and there’s no reason
