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It seems the movie Creation may get a US distributor. Strangely, it could be Mel Gibson’s Icon Productions. Then again, Mel released a movie that killed off Jesus so not why be involved in a movie that kills off God?

Posted via email from shaunc’s posterous

The Times has an excerpt from Richard Dawkin’s new book The Greatest Show On Earth detailing the evidence for the theory behind the fact of evolution. In the excerpt, Dawkins decides that a mild, mannered approach to combating creationism is required. Just kidding. He throws the following bomb at creationists:

Imagine you are a teacher of more recent history, and your lessons on 20th-century Europe are boycotted, heckled or otherwise disrupted by well-organised, well-financed and politically muscular groups of Holocaust-deniers. Unlike my hypothetical Rome-deniers, Holocaustdeniers really exist. They are vocal, superficially plausible and adept at seeming learned. They are supported by the president of at least one currently powerful state, and they include at least one bishop of the Roman Catholic Church. Imagine that, as a teacher of European history, you are continually faced with belligerent demands to “teach the controversy”, and to give “equal time” to the “alternative theory” that the Holocaust never happened but was invented by a bunch of Zionist fabricators.

Fashionably relativist intellectuals chime in to insist that there is no absolute truth: whether the Holocaust happened is a matter of personal belief; all points of view are equally valid and should be equally “respected”.

The plight of many science teachers today is not less dire.

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It internecine battles mark the maturity if a movement then atheism has reached a high point with the stoush between Jerry Coyne and Chris Mooney. It all started with Coyne’s review of two theistic evolution books in the New Republic. This was followed some criticism from Barbara Forrest and then an exchange of blog posts at dawn between Coyne and Mooney. Needless to say there is more to come.

Coyne does a grand job showing the inadequacies of certain strain of theistic evolution in his New Republic article. A provocative and well argued review that has reverberated around the community where evolution and religion is discussed. It is a civil review and Coyne is at pains to ensure that he was fair in both praise and criticism. Unfortunately, it has lead to the creation of an unfortunate term “accomodationist” to disparage those that find no problem with the like of Ken Miller. Accomodationist is a stupid term and is a distraction from the main game. I don’t see why we simply name Miller et al as collaborationists and call for their removal from the order of proper sciency folk.

I’m not really sure what the point of this stoush really is. It seems to be based around that any religious ideas are poisonous and if scientists have religious ideas it will corrupt science. But science has accommodated religious beliefs for centuries with no problems. And given the religious nature of some of the past evolutionary science heavyweights, I see no danger if someone does have religious beliefs yet is quite happy to accept evolution as is.
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February 12th will mark the 200th anniversay of Charles Darwin’s birth as is know as Darwin Day.  Expect a lot of interesting media presentations over the next few days. Also expect a lot of rubbish as well.  And Brisbane newspaper, The Courier Mail, decides to start the week with a horribly wrong piece titled Questions Darwinism cannot answer.

The author is Tom Frame, a professor of Theology as Charles Sturt University who has a book Evolution in the Antipodes: Charles Darwin and Australia out at the moment.

After a few expository paragraphs Frame gets to the point:

Evolutionary theory does not explain everything we want to know about the natural world or human life, and some of what evolutionary theory purports to explain it hardly elucidates at all. While we might know how some things occurred we still want to know why. Most importantly, why is there something rather than nothing?

Interesting choice of words especially “everything we want to know.” Evolutionary theory does not have to explain everything that we want to know. We want to know are many things. The idea that evolutionary theory may have the answers is borne out of the mistaken notion that is an alternative to religious creation stories and thus should be able to offer answers to the same questions that religious stories attempt to answer.
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