14Jun 2020 by Post

Weekend Reading: Heretics and Inquisitors

BioEssays, censorship, creationism, crime, Culture, Darwinists, Douglas Axe, establishment, Evolution News, free speech, Günter Bechly, Heresy, history, Inquisition, Intelligent Design, Italy, Middle Ages, mystery, novels, Politics, Richard Sternberg, The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco, William of Baskerville
Years ago, reading Umberto Eco’s novel The Name of the Rose, I got bogged down early on and stopped. Rereading it now, I can’t imagine what I found boring. It’s great! A learned crime-mystery about murders in a 14th-century Italian abbey, it deals in part with the relationship between heretics and inquisitors. What Eco relates (via his protagonist William of Baskerville) has a lot of contemporary relevance. Intelligent design is a heresy against the backdrop of conformist evolutionary thinking, and ID proponents must ever beware of Darwinist inquisitors. (See the recent threat of censorship from the biology journal BioEssays.) Eco observes that inquisitions generate heretics, rather than stamping them out. That is true. Many of the leading ID scientists (Axe, Sternberg, Bechly, and others) came to us because they were…
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28May 2020 by Post

“Nobody Expects the Darwinist Inquisition”? I Do

academic freedom, BioEssays, biologists, bullies, censorship, Center for Science & Culture, cosmos, Darwinism, Darwinists, Dave Speijer, Discovery Institute, Evolution News, Facebook, free speech, ideology, Inquisition, Intelligent Design, John Zmirak, nihilism, The Stream, Twitter, Worldview
As a reader and supporter of Evolution News, you must have noticed the same thing I have. It’s an ominous sight to observe the two waves approaching each other. On one side is an intensifying drive to police social media, where countless people get most of their information. On the other are biologists who (according to a Darwinist scientist!) spend a fifth of their time fretting about how to “combat intelligent design,” as we reported here the other day. One prominent scientific journal, BioEssays, has already brought the waves together. They have called for Internet censorship of intelligent design, identifying Discovery Institute by name as being in need of special attention by the censors. If giants like Facebook and Twitter don’t follow through on the threat, then says biologist Dave…
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22May 2020 by Post

Zombie History — Using Galileo to Whack Intelligent Design

Alison Abbott, Andrew Dickson White, Catholic Church, Christianity, climate change, creationism, Discovery Institute, Faith & Science, Galileo Affair, Galileo and the Science Deniers, Galileo Galilei, Heresy, historicity, Inquisition, Intelligent Design, John William Draper, Jonathan Wells, Leaning Tower of Pisa, Mario Livio, Michael Keas, Nature (journal), Nicolaus Copernicus, public schools, religion, science denialism, science deniers, Tychonian model, Unbelievable?, Urban VIII, Warfare Thesis, Zombie Science
A useful myth is hard to put down. The Galileo myth gives a premiere illustration. Ever since John William Draper and Andrew Dickson White fostered the “warfare thesis” of “science vs religion” in the late 19th century, appealing to the Galileo affair as the example par excellence, historians have had little luck convincing the scientific establishment that their version of the Galileo story is flawed. Fortunately, we have the new book by Michael Keas to help set the story straight: Unbelievable: 7 Myths About the History and Future of Science and Religion. Keas traces the development of the warfare thesis through the 19th century. Despite being largely discredited by historians, the warfare thesis lives on into our time. For instance, Mario Livio has a new book out, Galileo and the…
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