Tuesday Morning Comics #4

Today's comic is classic, in the sense that several other comics feature a similar joke.  Here we have a teacher holding up the Bible and instructing the children to get out their 'schoolbook' Bibles to learn about the subject of Intelligent Design (ID).  Clearly, this is a critique about Intelligent Design being taught in the classroom, which was a big topic when the Dover Area schoolboard tried to read a statement about ID to their class a few years ago.  Their argument was that ID presented a non-religious alternative to evolution.  Indeed, the proponents of ID are adamant that ID is not the same thing as Creationism, that it disregards religious arguments, and that it focuses on the scientific evidence for design.  They argue that, once one has seen the evidence for design, they are free in their religious beliefs to attribute that design to their deity, but that step is not a necessary part of ID.

Chromosomes, Chimps, and Human Evolution

I have been working hard in Quebec collecting my microarray data, and between that and a great visit from my dad over father's day, I simply have not had time to write the next article on chromosomes.  But in anticipation of the evolutionary importance of chromosomal mutations, here is a video clip from evolutionist and Catholic Kenneth Miller, discussing what I consider to be the single most powerful evidence for the evolution of humans from a primate ancestor, and it involves a chromosomal mutation.

The court case he refers to at the beginning is the trial that occurred in Dover, Pennsylvania, in 2004 over the religious nature of Intelligent Design.  Kenneth Miller testified against the school board, arguing that ID has no place in a science classroom.  The part of the lecture I am showing was part of a tour he gave after the court case, explaining exactly what he, as a religious man and a scientist, has serious issues with ID.

Enjoy.

Debunking Design - A Conclusion to Hume

We have finally reached the end.  I know it has been a long journey, but at last we today finish David Hume’s An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding.  I thank you all for your patience as we go through this remarkably important book.  You may wonder why I have bothered with this book on a science-religion blog; the answer is that, by refusing to be content with knowledge derived solely from philosophy or revealed religion, Hume paved the way for the empirical experimental method.  More specifically, though, Darwin cited Hume as a ‘central influence’.  You can readily see why: Darwin was up against a standard view of the world, which saw both the design of God in the complexity of nature and the goodness of God in the harmony of nature, as revealed through the opening lines of Genesis.  To question the standard interpretation of revealed religion, to wonder if our experience of the world could possibly address the question of life’s origins, was a very Hume-ian thing to do.