Expelled! seems to haunt New Scientist
Joel Kontinen
With Charles Darwin’s 150th birthday approaching, the popular British science magazine New Scientist has recently featured some rather militaristic articles. In early July it had an article entitled New Legal Threat to Teaching Evolution in the US and a recent print edition had an ever more exciting title: Creationists Declare War Over the Brain. Both articles were written by Amanda Gefter.
So what is going on? The July article was a report on the Louisiana Science Education Act that allowed a critical examination of Darwinian evolution in classrooms. Gefter used expressions like “the latest manoeuvre in a long-running war” to present her case that criticism of evolution endangers science education. Darwinian rhetoric notwithstanding, it seems that the only thing this act could threaten is an uncritical presentation of evolution as self-evident truth.
The more recent headlines had to do with the research of neurosurgeon Michael Egnor and other scientists who believe that matter cannot explain consciousness – a view that Darwinists consider heresy. In reporting on an international symposium called Beyond the Mind-Body Problem: New Paradigms in the Science of Consciousness that was held in September in New York, she used expressions like “battleground” and “war on science”.
New Scientist has a track record of using the terms creationism and intelligent design as synonyms, although the only thing that is common to both of them is criticism of Darwinian evolution. Moreover, in a typically Orwellian manner, by “science” the magazine almost always means “Darwinian evolution”.
When the Darwin centennial was celebrated in Chicago in 1959, Sir Julian Huxley announced that creationism was essentially dead. The recent articles adorning the pages of New Scientist magazine are at least proof of the growing suspicion that Huxley’s comment was probably slightly premature.
Could it be that Ben Stein’s documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, which is now available as a DVD, bothers Darwinists more than they are willing to admit?
Sources:
Gefter, Amanda. 2008. New legal threat to teaching evolution in the US. New Scientist 9 July 2008. http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19926643.300
Gefter, Amanda. 2008. Creationists declare war over the brain. New Scientist 22 October 2008. http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20026793.000?DCMP=NLC-nletter&nsref=mg20026793.000.
Whitcomb, John C. 2006. The History and Impact of the Book, "The Genesis Flood". Acts & Facts 35:5, I-iv. (May 2006) http://www.icr.org/article/2719/
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