Free Republic

Atheism is so often considered in the negative: as a lack of faith, or a disbelief in god; as an essential deprivation. Atheism is seen as being destitute of meaning, value, purpose; unfertile ground for growing the feelings of belonging needed to overcome the alienation that dogs modern life. In more extreme critiques, atheism is considered to be another name for nihilism; a fundamental negation of existence, a noxious blight on creation itself. Yet atheists – rather than flippantly dismissing the insights of theologians – should take them seriously indeed. Humans, by dint of being human, are confronted with baffling...

New Voices in Evolution Activism: From Madalyn Murray O'Hair to Eugenie Scott by Lawrence Ford* Recently, the prestigious publication Scientific American honored Eugenie Scott as one of its ten most influential science people in America, along with a manager at a computer chip company, an electric car industry executive, an infectious disease physician, and even Bill Gates from Microsoft. Who is Eugenie Scott and why is she being honored? Did she contribute to lifesaving cancer research? No. Did she invent a device that will help millions of people in need? No.Kate Wilcox of Scientific American writes of Scott: Thomas Henry...

Atheism, for Good Reason, Fears Questions --snip-- That theists and open-minded agnostics and atheists on the pro-Darwinist side of this debate are finally engaging the same fundamentalist atheist dogma that intelligent design proponents have engaged for several decades is a good sign. Fundamentalist atheists are of course fighting back ferociously, because they understand, as perhaps the accomodationists don’t, the profound implications of an understanding of the natural world that is not causally closed. Teleology is obvious in nature. Atheists and materialists intrinsically deny the reality of teleology-- Aristotelian final causation-- in nature, yet nothing in the natural world can be...

Junk DNA RoundUp (and Rebuttal): How Neo-Darwinism Creates Junk-Hypotheses, Then Resists Their Demise Sometimes after explaining how the now-defunct junk-DNA mindset was encouraged and fostered by neo-Darwinian evolution, evolutionists respond by asserting that nonetheless some individuals from their camp explored function for junk-DNA. This, they claim, absolves their neo-Darwinian camp from any charges of science-stopping, and shows that the neo-Darwinian paradigm did not hinder research into junk-DNA. But if a 2003 article in Science is any indication, then it seems that the neo-Darwinian paradigm did indeed impose a taboo on research into function for junk-DNA. As the article stated:Although catchy,...

Atheist Ads in Chicago Say Man Created God by Christine Dao* “In the beginning, man created God,” according to recent advertisements posted on 25 Chicago buses. The Indiana Atheist Bus Campaign targeted the country’s third largest city to espouse “the idea that man created God as well as all religions.”[1] The ads were inspired by similar campaigns elsewhere, including...

On 1st November 2007, Professor Antony Flew’s new book There is a God: How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed his Mind was published by HarperOne. Professor Flew has been called ‘the world's most influential philosophical atheist’, as well as ‘one of the most renowned atheists of the 20th Century’ (see Peter S. Williams’ bethinking.org article “A change of mind for Antony Flew”). In his book, Professor Flew recounts how he has come to believe in a Creator God as a result of the scientific evidence and philosophical argument. Not surprisingly, his book caused quite a stir – as can...

With a name like T. rex, you'd expect to be safe from even the fiercest paleo-bullies. Turns out, ancient, flying reptiles could have snacked on Tyrannosaurus Rex To uncover these feeding habits, Witton and Portsmouth colleague Darren Naish analyzed fossils of a group of toothless pterosaurs called azhdarchids, which are muchbabies and other landlubbing runts of the dinosaur world. A new study reveals a group of flying reptiles that lived during the Age of Dinosaurs some 230 million to 65 million years ago did not catch prey in flight, but rather stalked them on land. Until now, paleontologists pictured the...

No one knows how life began, but so-called theories of evolution are continually being announced. This book, The Altenberg 16: Will the Real Theory of Evolution Please Stand Up? exposes the rivalry in science today surrounding attempts to discover that elusive mechanism of evolution, as rethinking evolution is pushed to the political front burner in hopes that "survival of the fittest" ideology can be replaced with a more humane explanation for our existence and stave off further wars, economic crises and destruction of the Earth. Evolutionary science is as much about the posturing, salesmanship, stonewalling and bullying that goes on...