Today I attended Pensacola’s First United Methodist Church where Dr. Wesley Wachob is pastor. He recently saw the movie Expelled!, and though he said he recommended people see it, he proceeded to dump pretty heavily on the movie’s content. He encouraged the church’s young people to become “brilliant scientists” and noted that there is no…
“The enemy of my enemy is my friend” is an interesting philosophy in politics and war. Usually the amity between “enemies of enemies” lasts about as long as hostilities between those particular enemies. Wesley Elsberry has posted an excellent article on problems with the “two model” approach to the creation-evolution debate. To summarize, though you…
Many people get the idea from my posts on evolution that I believe all creationists are stupid or at least irremediably ignorant. In today’s atmosphere, that may be a reasonable view to take from the posts, but I don’t mean it that way, and I don’t intend to accept the current atmosphere. In current American…
I found these 10 ways rather amusing (part 1, part 2, part 3. Perhaps we should all take advice from the opposition and say just the things they’d like us to say. Here’s my response, briefer than my usual! Well, if ID advocates would just define an actual theory and quit trying to disguise the…
Supposing some scientist goes out into some wilderness area and observes the behavior of predators with a species of herd animals. He observes that the slowest and weakest of the herd animals tend to fall prey to the predators while the stronger or faster ones survive. This scientist comes back and and reports on this…
Well, I got past my hardware problems, and then started to read my e-mail and some of my RSS feeds. First, I came across an e-mail from Christianity Today’s ChristianBibleStudies.com, from which I often get useful material. Today, they’re wanting me to pay $5.95 for a discussion of the movie that I can use in…
People often think that legalism is about trying very hard to be right, and that the main problem with it is that people can’t succeed at it. I would suggest that there’s something more characteristic of legalism, and that it results from trying to paste on the narrow letter of some “right” things to oneself…
As has been previously reported by a number of bloggers, XVIVO believes that Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed has infringed on their copyright by using portions of their video The Inner Life of a Cell. In a letter demanding that this material be removed prior to the movie’s release, and threatening legal action if it is…
The badly misnamed Academic Freedom Bill has advanced through the judiciary committee of the Florida senate. You can find an account of the event on the Florida Citizens for Science blog, and some additional commentary by Pete Dunkelberg on The Panda’s Thumb. Pete notes quite correctly that teachers are not prevented from presenting any scientific…
I’m constantly on the lookout for books on evolutionary theory aimed at the general public rather than specialized audiences, so when I saw this little book on the shelf of the local university library, I took it home to check out. My response to it is a bit mixed. There are a number of good…
