Creation and evolution; those two words frequently pop up in discussion of Christianity and usually generate more heat than light.
I’ve just returned from the 2011 Intelligent Design Conference, held at the Elim Conference Centre, in beautiful Malvern. The Centre for Intelligent Design has been putting on various study conferences that have sought to network those engaged in relevant sciences. The September conference, ‘Darwin or Design?’, had the sub-heading ‘Allowing the evidence to speak’. That is part of the problem. The evidence does not get a fair hearing in a culture where questioning evolution is about the only thing still considered blasphemous!
Privileged planet
The three main speakers all questioned the state of contemporary science. Dr. Jay Richards, from the Discovery Institute, will be well known to many readers as the philosopher behind The Privileged Planet book and film. His opening paper engaged with the history of science and demonstrated that the definition of science has changed over the centuries. A lot of contemporary science, we can call it scientism, excludes the possibility of intelligent design behind the universe by declaring that it isn’t proper science. This is a neat way of avoiding having to engage with the evidence and arguments. It is also entirely unscientific!
Comedy, free speech and warnings from the past
Hannah Arendt was a Jewish philosopher who grew up in Nazi Germany. Eventually she had to flee to France and, …