As for professor Behe, I don't believe that he's ever done work of the caliber of Professor Gonzalez's astronomy work, which has been featured in Scientific American, among other magazines. Professor Behe's pre-ID biological work was rather undistinguished and I believe that he's only published one scientific paper since he became an ID advocate and that paper can most charitably be described as pathetic. Whether Professor Gonzalez will follow the same path, I don't know.

How many scientific papers has Dawkins published since publicizing his selfish gene theory in the popular science literature?

Blogworthies: A weekly round-up of noteworthy entries from a variety of weblogs on a variety of topics.

Where Mike gets his desire for sociological knowledge is hard to understand. People at Telic Thoughts may like to know more about it since it is assumed (obvious that) Mike is not a trained sociologist but a natural scientist. Why sociology is so important when the most important or effective IDists claim ID must be accepted as a natural science is an interesting dilemma that likely holds Mike Gene on its horns.

There is nothing hard to understand about it. I am a product of the ID critics. For years, I have argued with hundreds of them and have noted a pattern. Most critics posture as if they are Objective Judges, caring only about "the evidence" as they hand out their judgments. An understanding of human nature will tell you this is an illusion. When things happen that allow this illusion to break through, I point them out. What makes it fun is that no one else is pointing it out. Not even the social scientists.

I have a question for you and Mike. If science does say that God's unemployed and there's no evidence that he exists "“ - "“ what should we do about it? Cover it up? Lie? Just not mention it? Try to change the universe so God has something to do?

DataDoc doesn't understand how science works. While he demands that science provide evidence for God's existence, Eugenie Scott tells us that is not possible: "Whether God created is of course, not a scientific question, because science is restricted to explaining natural phenomena using only natural processes." Furthermore, she notes that scientific explanations deals only with proximate, never ultimate causes. Sorry DataDoc, according to the National Center for Science Education, science can make no judgment about God's employment status.

But what type of "evidence" does DataDoc want? Well, above he told us:

Rain is caused by the sun evaporating water, which rises until it cools enough to condense, at which time it forms droplets and falls as rain. Thunder is caused by the explosive heating of air by lightning and lightning in turn is a very large electrical spark. Most diseases are caused by infectious agents, such as bacteria and viruses, but others are caused by lack of some vital dietary material, such as vitamin C, inborn genetic defects, etc. Crops generally fail because of similar infectious agents as well as from lack of rain, lack of fertilizer, etc. Darwin was merely the last straw when he figured out the essentials of how humans came to exist. I think about the only significant thing left to explain is the origin of the universe and the cosmologists are working on that. But it was Darwin who really put God out of work when he found out how evolution works.

I see. If God existed, he would be miraculously causing the water to fall from the sky, bringing lightening into existence ex nihilo, and supernaturally poofing all those nasty diseases into existence. In other words, according to DataDoc Theology, the existence of God would entail a world without natural laws; a world that could not be comprehended through science. C'mon people "“ a God worth having is one who poofs lightening into existence.

I'm sorry DataDoc, but I find this to be a pathetic argument for the non-existence of God.

As for the rest of the scientific pack, I wish they would start pushing the news a little harder, but in a world where religious fanatics put a price on the head of novelists, hijack airliners and fly them into skyscrapers, cut people's heads off for belonging to the "wrong" religion, blow up trains in Spain and England and dictate who can and can't be nominated to the Supreme Court, I can't say that I really blame them for laying low.

That was a degenerate and ignorant bit of propaganda. It's the Christian charity workers that get their heads cut off. It's a young Christian boy in the Sudan who has spikes driven through his feet into a tree that is left to die there for no other reason than that he was Christian. Are there Darwinians who have had similar experiences to the same extent, thus justifying the supposed "laying low" out of fear? How fearful are they? They do seem scared about a suppposed end of science, but in a paranoid and phobic way.

As long as you're talking about how good Darwinism is compared to "religion" though, let's note a few historical facts about the struggle between good and evil:

Our whole cultural life for decades has been more or less under the influence of biological thinking, as it was begun particularly around the middle of the last century, by the teachings of Darwin…
Though it took decades before the courage was found, on the basis of the initial findings ofthe natural sciences, to carry on a systematic study of heredity, the progress of the teaching and its application to man could not be delayed any more.
(Hitler's Professors: The Part of Scholarship in
Germany's Crimes Against the Jewish People
By Max Weinreich
(New York:The Yiddish Scientific Institute, 1946) :33)

Yorck tried to explain. "Mr. President, I have already stated in my inter rogation that the Nazi ideology was such that I"”"
The judge interrupted him. ""”could not agree . . . You didn't agree with the National Socialist conception of justice, say, in regard to rooting out the Jews?"
"What is important, what brings together all these questions," Yorck replied, "is the totalitarian claim of the State on the individual which forces him to renounce his moral and religious obligations to God."
"Nonsense!" cried Freisler, and he cut off the young man. Such talk might poison Dr. Goebbels' film and enrage the Fuehrer, who had decreed, "No long speeches from them."
The court-appointed defense lawyers were more than ludicrous. Their cowardice, as one reads the transcript of the trial, is almost unbelievable. Witzleben's attorney, for example, a certain Dr. Weissmann, outdid the state prosecutor and almost equaled Freisler, in denouncing his client as a "murderer," as completely guilty and as deserving the worst punishment.
That punishment was meted out as soon as the trial had ended on August 8. "They must all be hanged like cattle," Hitler had ordered, and they were. Out at Ploetzensee prison the eight condemned were herded into a small room in which eight meathooks hung from the ceiling. One by one, after being stripped to the waist, they were strung up, a noose of piano wire being placed around their necks and attached to the meathooks. A movie camera whirled as the men dangled and strangled, their beltless trousers finally dropping off as they struggled, leaving them naked in their death agony. The developed film, as ordered, was rushed to Hitler so that he could view it, as well as the pictures of the trial, the same evening. Goebbels is said to have kept himself from fainting by holding both hands over his eyes.

(The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany
By William Shirer :1071)

I suppose they were "just animals" anyway according to Darwinists. And besides, he said something about God having something to do with the physical/political world, which is a Great Blasphemy against Mommy Nature's natural selections that will bring about the end of civilization and science according to half-wits.

On DataDoc's "theory" of science a scientist would never utter the word "If." LOL Scientists do not restrict themselves to what they can observe and often feel "free to use anything at all, including things that apparently don't exist," to advance science. I don't know what they teach second graders about science anymore, DataDoc, but your teachers lied to you. Scientists, just like religionists, just like everyone, use their imagination to explore the real world. Let's see you, or anyone else, advance science any other way. Is that insane?! LOL

Unwittingly, of course, DataDoc provided his own counterfactual: "Pre-determining the future, if it were possible, would necessarily involve knowing the exact position and velocity of every particle in the universe at one specified time. From that, the future position of every particle in the universe could, in theory, be calculated."

Throughout much of the 19th century physicists (and scientists or "natural philosophers" generally) took that very idea quite seriously. On a question related to probabilistic reasoning Laplace asked us to "imagine an Intelligence" that was capable of doing just what you said, ascertaining the exact position, etc., and thereby able to know the state and predict the future of the universe with unerring precision. Very influential idea in the history of science and philosophy. (Still commonly believed.) Similarly many other scientists have invoked such "supernatural" beings, forces, and even devices: James Clerk Maxwell, e.g. Even Charles Darwin (?!). Computer science is full of such "beings" and "devices," from "Merlins" to "Zeno machines."

One of my favorite examples is:
"Let us now suppose a Being with penetration sufficient to perceive differences in the outer and innermost organization quite imperceptible to man, and with forethought extending over future centuries to watch with unerring care and select for any object the offspring of an organism produced under the foregoing circumstances; I can see no conceivable reason
why he should not form a new race (or several were he to separate the stock of the original organism and work on several islands) adapted to new ends. As we assume his discrimination, and his forethought, and his steadiness
of object, to be incomparably greater than those qualities in man, so we may suppose the beauty and complications of the adaptations of the new races and their differences from the original stock to be greater than in the domestic races produced by man's agency."

I won't say who wrote that (as if it isn't obvious). A very highly respected, even revered scientist. But is that crazy or what?! Let me ask the more religiously inclined correspondents what, or maybe whom, they think is being described here? Who is this "Being" we are asked to "suppose" exists?

Close up or far away, the only way to deny the design inference is by living in denial. Or as Aacobb sez you are blind to the obvious.

DataDoc:
or wonder why God designed such a terrible world.

Who said the world we now observe is the designed world? Educated people understand that what we now observe is the result of many processes acting over many years.

DataDoc:
Or why he designed it to look just like no Gods are present.

If that were so we wouldn't have this design inference thing. The reason for the design inference is because it most certainly looks like the world and the universe were the product of design. Even Aacobb realizes that…

Actually, I don't agree that the atheistic implications of Evolution taken in pure darwinian terms are unavoidable. I think Provine is all wet. But that's another argument for another day.

I know "theology has come to terms with a Darwinian universe" but that hardly detracts from the obvious atheological implications. Pain and suffering caused by natural forces has atheological implications, it does not however make it so, it just lends support to atheism. If atheism were true, what sort of universe would you expect?

What irks me is that people like Provine and Dawkins utter words like "blind", "purposeless" and "undirected" and claim it is a "scientific" conclusion. Yet I wonder, are these terms drawn from the evidence or data or merely philosophical presuppositions superimposed on the data? I believe the main source of "scientific evidence" they have to support their atheiological interpretation of Evolution is actually "bad design" arguments?

You write..

"Human free will is nonexistent" is one of those shibboleths that the religiously (and philosophically) afflicted like to spread around as if they were saying something. The foundation of this belief appears to be defining "free will" as meaning "not influenced by anything in this universe". It's frequently accompanied by the belief that without "free will", every nuance of every thought and deed that we will ever have is somehow predetermined.

You know it's funny you say that. If all that exists is matter, energy, space and time and the laws of physics then every thought in your head, every choice you've ever made lacks any sort of independance.

When you come to accept the theory of evolution it's not because you had any say in the matter rather it's because you were determind in every single way to make that choice. Equally, if someone rejects the theory of evolution it's not because they had any say in the matter, rather that belief was determined, every step of the way. That's naturalism for you.

If you and I are as much trapped in this deterministic universe as a rock that rolls down a hill, or a planet that orbits with every second of it's existence determined by prior causes then this "naturalistic cosmology" destroys any meaningful concept of knowedge or free will.