Here’s a good 21 min. movie to check out: Darwin’s Heretic. Then ask yourself why you never learned about him in school. Seems like your teachers would have wanted you to know the whole story, right?
One of the most renowned biologists of the nineteenth century, Alfred Russel Wallace shares credit with Charles Darwin for developing the theory of evolution by natural selection. Yet one part of Wallace’s remarkable life and career has been completely ignored: His embrace of intelligent design. Darwin’s Heretic is a 21-minute documentary that explores Wallace’s fascinating intellectual journey and how it sheds light on current debates.
The pastoral “call,” and how there isn’t one — The “called to _____” is one of the most common examples of sloppy God talk. People often ignore the clear requirements for pastors and elders and lead with vague statements about feelings. They let their self-validation trump what the Bible says, which, ironically enough, should be evidence that they aren’t “called.”
They were chuckling and sharing the story of how one of them felt, as a (young!) teenager and a brand-new convert, that he “had the call,” meaning “the call” to preach. So he announced his call one week, and got up to preach the next. Period. No training, no apprenticeship, no evidence, no clue as to what it meant Biblically to preach (let alone be a pastor). He attributes this to a move of the Lord at that time in that location, as He reportedly grabbed up a lot of young men and “called” them to preach.
The brothers clarified that in their culture, all one need to is announce that he has “the call,” and he is to preach. Like, right away.
How much success would we have had in World War II if politically servile top brass had punished military officers for failing to whitewash Nazi ideology? The answer sheds light on our current difficulties:
During a press briefing, Army General Martin Dempsey, President Barack Obama’s Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, publicly lambasted Lieutenant Colonel (LTC) Matthew Dooley, a 1994 graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and a highly decorated combat veteran. His reason: The course on Islamic Radicalism which LTC Dooley was teaching at the Joint Forces Staff College (JFSC) of the National Defense University was offensive to Muslims, according to a statement released on Monday by officials from a public-interest law firm in Michigan.
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Obamunists Call for Vandalizing Cars With Romney Stickers — I wish I was surprised by this. Even sadder are the people promising to riot if Romney wins. This all stems from the sense of entitlement brought by Liberalism and appealing to the lowest common denominators of coveting and instant gratification.
If you put a Romney sticker on your car and it is subsequently vandalized by the lower grade of human that is attracted to the Democrat Party, you can’t say you weren’t warned. Twitchy reports:
As Twitchy has reported, unhinged supporters of President Barack Obama are stealing, defacing, and urinating on pro-Mitt Romney yard signs and bumper stickers.
See One Long Bluff: A Review of Richard Dawkins’ “The Greatest Show on Earth” for a thorough dissection of Dawkins’ bad logic and philosophy. Here’s the summary, but I encourage you to read it all. Dawkins’ book is already outdated, for example, by his claim that the design of the eye is poor. You’d think they’d get tired of being embarrassed about the “bad design” claim after being proved wrong on not-so-vestigial organs, “junk” DNA and the like.
Conclusion: Does Richard Dawkins have the goods?
Richard Dawkins continues in the same vein throughout his book. One favourable review of Dawkins’ new book, published in The Guardian, commented that while The Greatest Show on Earth “demonstrates once again [Dawkins’] consummate skill as an explainer,” the science covered by the book mostly rehashed “pretty standard stuff.” The book fails to address the growing problems of biological information, the origin of life, how natural selection coupled with chance mutations can account for the origin of irreducibly complex systems, which continue to defy the Darwinism he preaches. Darwin called The Origin of Species ‘one long argument’ for his theory, but Richard Dawkins has given us one long bluff. The Greatest Show on Earth seeks to defend neo-Darwinism by appealing to theological arguments, by attempting to explain away the challenge of the Cambrian explosion by means of invoking ad-hoc conjectures, by exaggerating the evidence for the potentiality of natural selection, by misrepresenting design arguments, casting down ‘straw-men’, and by avoiding mention of the most sinister threats to the neo-Darwinian model of origins.
Another point which is worth mentioning is that one should not be so taken with the evidence that is consistent with evolution that we think we can ignore the evidence that contradicts it. And this isn’t a balancing act — weighing whether there is more evidence for or against the theory. We know from common experience that even a small amount of clearly contradictory evidence outweighs a large body of consistent evidence. A common thread running throughout Richard Dawkins’ book (The Greatest Show on Earth) is the analogy of weighing up incriminating evidence in a court of law. But in a court of law, no matter how much evidence appears to incriminate someone, it would be entirely outweighed by a reliable alibi that the accused was in a totally different location at the time of the crime. The same is true of science. Even a small amount of attestable data that clearly contradicts evolution is sufficient to demonstrate that it is false, despite a much larger body of evidence that is consistent with it.
The actual evidence shows that major features of the fossil record and cell biology are an embarrassment to Darwinian evolution. Judged by the normal criteria of empirical science, the data used to prop up neo-Darwinism is weak. We know today that there are multiple critical facts which strike hard blows at the conventional understanding of the theory. These are not merely trivial problems or anomalies that are likely to be solved, but fundamental matters that appear to be without prospect of solution.
I disagree with his premise of Darwinism, of course, but I think he is being consistent with his worldview. If the nothingness-to-molecules-to-Angelina Jolie worldview is correct, then universal ethics would be an illusion.
In The Nature of Nature , Darwinian philosopher Michael Ruse offers us his take on ethics: “Ethics is an illusion put in place by natural selection to make us good cooperators.” (—Michael Ruse and Edward O. Wilson, 1985), p. 855)
. . .
“Substantive morality stays in place as an effective illusion because we think that it is no illusion but the real thing. Thus, I am arguing that the epistemological foundation of evolutionary ethics is a kind of moral nonrealism, but that it is an important part of evolutionary ethics that we think it is a kind of moral realism.”
Eternity Matters 