From Unnatural Science by Virginia Heffernan:

And while I found interesting stuff here and there, I also discovered that ScienceBlogs has become preoccupied with trivia, name-calling and saber rattling. Maybe that’s why the ScienceBlogs ship started to sink.

and:

Though Myers and other science bloggers boast that they can be jerky in the service of anti-charlatanism, that’s not what’s bothersome about them. What’s bothersome is that the site is misleading. It’s not science by scientists, not even remotely; it’s science blogging by science bloggers. And science blogging, apparently, is a form of redundant and effortfully incendiary rhetoric that draws bad-faith moral authority from the word “science” and from occasional invocations of “peer-reviewed” thises and thats.

Not unrelated to the film ‘Expelled -no intelligence allowed’-I submit for your thoughts and comments:

‘Dawkins is prepared to acknowledge the facts while denying their significance. Neither the Nazis nor the Communists, he affirms, acted because of their atheism. They were simply keen to kill a great many people. Atheism had nothing to do with it. They might well have been Christian Scientists.

In the early days of the German advance into Eastern Europe, before the possibility of Soviet retribution even entered their untroubled imagination, Nazi extermination squads would sweep into villages, and after forcing the villagers to dig their own graves, murder their victims with machine guns. On one such occasion somewhere in eastern Europe , an SS officer watched languidly, his machine gun cradled, as an elderly and bearded Hasidic Jew laboriously dug what he knew to be his grave.

Standing up straight, he addressed his executioner. “God is watching what you are doing,” he said.

And then he was shot dead.

What Hitler did not believe and what Stalin did not believe and what Mao did not believe and what the SS did not believe and what the Gestapo did not believe and what the NKVD did not believe and what the commissars, functionaries, swaggering executioners, Nazi doctors, Communist Party theoreticians, intellectuals,Brown shirts, Black shirts,gauleiters, and a thousand party hacks did not believe was that God was watching what they were doing.

And as far as we can tell, very few of those carrying out the horrors of the twentieth century worried overmuch that God was watching what they were doing either.

That is, after all, the meaning of a secular society.”

(taken from David Berlinski’s book ‘The Devils delusion Atheism and its scientific pretensions’)

here

What do babies know about right and wrong? Perhaps more than is realized. Results of Paul Bloom's study may challenge some ingrained secular assumptions. From the source:

Dr. Bloom's study was carefully designed to challenge one very persistent and pernicious modern belief about childhood, the belief that children are moral blank slates upon which anything can be written. On this view, morality is entirely unnatural—something imposed upon children by "socialization." The most famous advocate of this view was the 18th century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau's view was not the result of careful observation of children, but of his own desire to overthrow the Christian notion that there is a God who defines the moral contours of human nature. Rousseau wanted natural man to be amoral, and so he taught that babies enter the world carrying no moral "baggage." The dual, contradictory result of Rousseau's philosophy was the spread of the notion that children were at once entirely innocent and it was society that made them bad, and the notion that since children were entirely morally unformed it was only society that could make them good. Rousseau's "children" are simultaneously those who are allowed to do anything they want because that is most natural, and those who are taken to be formless clay ready for molding social manipulators.

HT: Clare

What can Darwin teach us about morality? is a brief piece which packs quite a bit into two paragraphs. Anti-IDists are fond of using stalking horse imagery and historic incidents to mold a public perception of a "movement" with ulterior motives. The ID movement is said to be a sociological and political one which uses biological design as a wedge to further a related agenda. In support of the charge quotes from Philip Johnson are often linked to as is the notorious DI wedge document. I've pointed out many times previously that if ID is a movement it is a very amateurish one that needs to takes a cue or two from the real movement- one that uses Darwinian biological concepts to spearhead an effort to advance sociological and religious views. This comment comes from the linked piece:

According to Hamilton and his fellow sociobiologists, altruism is real, but only to the extent that it is not in fact disinterested. What's left of morality in such a world?

HT: Clare

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From atheist and professor emeritus of physics and astronomy, Victor Stenger's book, Quantum Gods; Creation and the Search for Cosmic Consciousness:

The story of Galileo's trial by the Inquisition of 1633 for teaching the Copernican system is often presented as a classic example of religion and science coming into conflict. But the story is also part myth and part fact. Historians now largely agree that Galileo was not tried for teaching heliocentrism, but for disobeying a Church.

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The Real Wedge- Out of the Closet links to a blog entry by Jason Rosenhouse containing a comment I'll use for this blog entry. The author uses an internet handle and the comment is not noteworthy because of its source. But the writer repeats often argued positions based on modern mythologies. The ancients were not unique in their attachment to mythology. Westerners have their own although they are loathe to think so. Western mythologies impact discussions of Intelligent Design. I'll dissect the comment to highlight the separation of myth from reality.

There are at least two sources of incompatibility between science and religion:

1. Evidence in religion is considered unnecessary, perhaps even undesirable, in forming beliefs.

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