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…