ID literature is more sophisticated than creation science literature, perhaps because it is (except for Of Pandas and People) usually directed more toward a university audience…

Eugenie Scott
Eugenie Scott defeats Ed Brayton

and

I feel that the essential argument has to be carried on at the higher level, at the university level, and it’s interesting you see that the people that come from the NCSE side are always trying to say this is just an issue in the high schools

Phil Johnson

The link below is a video of a debate was between 3 Darwinists vs. 3 Creationist students of science. The Creationists relied heavily on ID materials and rarely appealed to theology or philosophy, they just kept pounding facts and mathematics and information theory and cybernetics.

The debate was, in some dimension, quite boring as what you’d expect from a dispassionate scientific inquiry. But that was also its strength. The Creationists appeared termperate, knowledgeable, and intelligent. A good fraction of their arguments came from ID literature, not from creation science literature or theology.

There was Raquel Murray, a Master of Science student in Modeling and Computational Science, with a BS in physics with math minor! Her proficiency in understanding biochemistry was amazing. Although her delivery was nervous and stuttering, her points were unassailable. She drew heavily, not on the Bible, but the work of atheist biologist Jack Trevors! Talk about a subtle and sophisticated line of argument! She made reference to the inability of any future discovery of physical law to thwart claims for the intelligent origin of information (the paradoxical fact that physics makes high levels of information possible but also simultaneously improbable, ala Shannon).

At best for the evolutionists, the debate was a draw, and the evolutionists had to rely on some fabricated “facts” (howlers such as the claim genetic code is created via thermodynamics, a total misinterpretation of this paper). If this is representative of the next generation in the Creation/Evolution debate at the university level, the creationists will fare very well. ID’s influence (which is not Bible based) is evident in its effect on biblical creationists. I didn’t watch the whole debate, but focused on the origin-of-life part of the debate and the origin-of-information part of the debate. The creationists were quite sophisticated in not making appeals to the authority of the Bible. They pounded the facts, math, information theory and cybernetics. God made the facts of nature, and He expects us to use those facts.

The way they argued reminded me of Phil Johnson’s admonition in dealing with Darwinists:

Get the Bible and the Book of Genesis out of the debate

The creationist students, for the most part, did exactly that. Here is the video:

Creation vs. Evolution University Debate

NOTES:
Christ said in John 10:38

though you do not believe me, believe the works

Here is a link to a few sections of Unlearning Liberty, by Greg Lukianoff (of Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE)), to get you started understanding how things have changed since the days you went to school to learn how to think. You could get disciplined for refusing to stomp on Jesus, for example. Or complaining about campus parking policies.

Today, it isn’t what you did, it is what someone chooses to make of it because remember, as any good Darwinist will tell you, the mind is an accidentally evolved illusion. Your brain is shaped for fitness, not for truth, so tyranny is fully justified.

More examples here.

It will be you, if you ever get fed up enough. Otherwise, you must front the garbage.

Kooteninchela deppi (reconstruction)/Imperial College London

Here is a claim made by a commenter at an ID-friendly site:

They lie because 99% of the time noone will never know, and they can easily win the debate. There is little integrity on their side. Most pro-ID people, if shown one of their arguments is bad, will stop using it. Most anti-ID people don’t care whether their arguments are bad, they just want to use whatever is effective at winning. There’s a lot of bad faith on their side.

I (news writer O’Leary) only raise this because I had been researching the Cambrian explosion, and everything you ever wanted to know about the reasons to doubt Darwin’s followers’ history of life can be found by studying their reactions to the Cambrian explosion: All seem to be attempts to explain away the fact that most basic life forms appeared suddenly within a comparatively short period of time. It is just like atheist cosmologists’ attempts to explain away fine-tuning of the universe—as if there would ever be any problem with that for anybody other than diehard atheism or Darwin believers.

So life and the universe are designed? So?

Here’s an interesting Cambrian animal recently found in British Columbia, Canada, that started my question:

The researcher believes that Kooteninchela deppi would have been a hunter or scavenger. Its large Edward Scissorhands-like claws with their elongated spines may have been used to capture prey, or they could have helped it to probe the sea floor looking for sea creatures hiding in sediment.

Kooteninchela deppi was approximately four centimetres long with an elongated trunk for a body and millipede-like legs, which it used to scuttle along the sea floor with the occasional short swim.

It also had large eyes composed of many lenses like the compound eyes of a fly. They were positioned on top of movable stalks called peduncles to help it more easily search for food and look out for predators.

The exquisitely complex eyes, absolutely necessary for the way of life described, just evolved accidentally at the same time, right? All just sorta happened.

Like things never do in real life.

Researchers mostly get public instead of private money.  So no one forces them to ask critical questions.

typical short plants/stockcreations, Fotolia

There is at least some evidence that this is true. But why?:

The researchers suspect the difference may be driven by genetic changes that accumulate in the actively-dividing cells in the tip of the plant shoot as it grows. Cells don’t copy their DNA perfectly each time they divide. In animals, most DNA copy mistakes that occur in the cells of the animal’s body can’t be inherited — they’re evolutionary dead ends. But this isn’t the case for plants, where genetic changes in any part of the plant could potentially get passed on if those cells eventually form flowers or other reproductive organs

Hmmm. From the wayback machine, when gene mapping first attracted attention a decade ago:

Gilbert introduces his lectures on gene sequencing by pulling a compact disk from his pocket and announcing to his audience, “This is you.”*

No. It ain’t.

It probably ain’t even a weed.

Plants by nature grow toward a suitable light source. Most plants that remain short by growth habit are likely responding to other factors. In northern regions, reducing heat loss is critical. Virtually all Arctic plants are comparatively short** because getting rid of most of the stem reduces heat loss. Some short plants in dry areas conserve water by reducing leaves or even developing a spherical shape.

What we don’t know is how readily plants will just change their habits in response to different environments and what genetic mechanisms enable them to do so.

*(Dorothy Nelkin, “Less Selfish than Sacred? Genes and the Religious Impulse in Evolutionary Psychology,” in Hilary Rose and Steven Rose, eds., Alas, Poor Darwin: Arguments Against Evolutionary Psychology (London: Random House, Vintage, 2001), p. 18. )

** A century ago and more, schoolteachers in the North American Arctic had to try to explain what a “tree” is to people who had never seen one or imagined its possibility. The situation also posed a challenge for Bible translation. (For fun, if you read or hear the Bible read, consider how you would respond if you had no idea what “tree” means. = A plant that can be taller than a human? Really? Even though it has no internal heat source? Aw come on!)

human brain/unlim3d, Fotolia

Often as an explicit result of a choice to pay attention to one thing rather than another.

(Which isn’t supposed to happen, remember? The brain is just a hunk of meat responding, as all other such pieces of meat do, to Darwin’s theory of evolution).

A recent piece informs us,

Brain Rewires Itself After Damage or Injury, Life Scientists Discover

May 15, 2013 — When the brain’s primary “learning center” is damaged, complex new neural circuits arise to compensate for the lost function, say life scientists from UCLA and Australia who have pinpointed the regions of the brain involved in creating those alternate pathways — often far from the damaged site.

The researchers found that parts of the prefrontal cortex take over when the hippocampus, the brain’s key center of learning and memory formation, is disabled. Their breakthrough discovery, the first demonstration of such neural-circuit plasticity, could potentially help scientists develop new treatments for Alzheimer’s disease, stroke and other conditions involving damage to the brain.

It is apparent that the mind was seeking a solution, a pathway through the damaged brain.

Neuroplasticity findings are much avoided because they imply that what we think is real and has an effect. We can’t just decide for ourselves whether it will be real or will have an effect.  It does anyway, materialism notwithstanding.

See also: There is a country for old men

Denyse O’Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain.

Yes, remember that Ball State U prof in Indiana who was under attack from the exotic “Freedom from Religion Foundation” because he taught an elective course that included readings on the ID controversy? Yeah, whassname, Eric Hedin, pictured above right.

Interesting that he is with the physics and astronomy department. Atheist mathematician Peter Woit has warned atheist celeb Michael Shermer against crackpot (anti-ID, as it happens) cosmologies, many of which depend on assumptions derived from Darwinism and Darwin’s god.

Apparently, this has got beyond a “Godless Sunday at Home” joke. The anti-God crackpots have muscle (if not brains), and can easily frighten administrators (but who can’t frighten them?).

Here is an academic freedom petition to sign.

Apparently, even a well-respected academic like Thomas Nagel isn’t immune from the Night of the Long Weasels, so why should this guy expect to escape, unless … ?

Unless enough people make it clear that education is about listening to both sides and that they will not continue to provide a tax-funded bullhorn for one side only.

I (news writer Denyse O’Leary) was surprised by the pattern when I added up all the instances where nothing much happens for millions or tens or hundreds of millions of years. But  here’s a new one on me, because it was only recently published:

Researchers had previously believed that ichthyosaurs declined throughout the Jurassic Period, which lasted from 199 million to 145 million years ago, with the only survivors rapidly evolving to keep ahead of repeated extinction events. The new fossil, however, dates from the Cretaceous Period, which lasted from 145 million to 66 million years ago. It looks remarkably like its Jurassic brethren, revealing a surprising evolutionary status.

The fossil “represents an animal that seems ‘out of time’ for its age,” study researcher Valentin Fischer of the University of Liège in Belgium said in a statement.

Note: The last word in the first paragraph above should almost certainly read “stasis,” not “status.”

That usage error just shows you how unfamiliar Darwin-drenched reporters are with the realities of the history of life on Earth. Chances are, they do not know the term “stasis.” Or if they do, it is only from the flak aimed at them by Darwin’s hacks, advising them to ignore it as a key fact about life on Earth: Stasis = Evolution rarely happens.

Stanford biologist Joan Roughgarden, it should be noted, could be sneered at by tenured career Darwinists for having dissented in the past, for example at AAAS’s 169th meeting, February 17, 2003. Roughgarden is the author of Evolution’s Rainbow: Diversity, Gender and Sexuality in Nature and People (University of California Press, 2003). Of Darwin’s sexual selection, she has said, “The exceptions are so numerous they cry out for explanation.” The meeting she spoke at is headlined, “Darwin may have been wrong about sex. Or at least too narrow minded.”

Oooh, bad, bad, bad, when it might mean doubting Darwin, the greatest mind that ever accidentally evolved. Who had the best idea anyone ever had, the most powerful idea ever. Who, now long dead, pays a bunch of people’s salaries to spout stuff at students that just ain’t so, unhindered and largely unopposed.

Say what you want about Darwinists: They have the most genteel thugs.

Many engineers near where I live are hired to construct satellites and space probes, and in order to familiarize the engineers with the nature and challenges facing these satellites and space probes, it is sometimes helpful for the engineers to get additional training in areas of physics beyond the cursory introduction they get as undergraduates. For example, it may be helpful for engineers to learn more physics in order to appreciate the effects of general and special relativity on some of the ultra accurate clocks in space probes and satellites. And engineers might find plasma physics helpful in understanding environmental challenges facing space probes and satellites as well as Earth-based systems since there are many plasma phenomenon in the solar system and beyond.

To meet this need for retraining engineers in physics, the Whiting School of Engineering (WSE) offered classes specifically geared to retrain engineers in physics. The Whiting School has a modest ranking of #26 overall in the US, but #1 in Biomedical Engineering. Being a former engineer, I decided I’d enroll in the WSE’s Master of Science Applied Physics program which was usually taught at the Applied Physics Laboratory (APL). APL is not to be confused with its more prestigious little brother, The Henry Rowland Department of Physics and Astronomy that boasted a Nobel Laureate in 2011 by the name of Adam Riess for his work on dark energy. The Applied Physics Laboratory boasts a budget of around 1 bilion dollars. The Henry Rowland Department of Physics and Astronomy is rich in prestige, whereas the The Applied Physics Laboratory is just rich.

One of the former faculty members of the Whiting School of Engineering, Daniel Schectman, won the Nobel in Chemistry the same year Adam Riess won the Nobel in Physics. Ironically, Schectman left the Whiting School in disgrace because his claim of discovering quasi crystals was viewed as an embarrassment. Linus Pauling quipped, “there are no such things as quasi crystals, only quasi scientists”.

In 2007, I decided to enroll in the Whiting School’s program of Applied Physics. Only a few months before, Robert Marks invited me get a Master’s degree and work as his assistant at the Evolution Informatics Lab in Baylor. I had degrees in Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, and Math, so I was supposedly qualified. The Baylor Darwinists shut Marks lab down, while that same week I got an acceptance letter from the Whiting School. Happily the evolution informatics lab was reopened, and instead Winston Ewert succeeded where I did not. Marks’ plight was featured in the movie Explelled, the Baylor president who shut down the lab was fired, and Baylor issued an apology. Score one for ID!….

My fellow students at the Whiting School were incredibly bright coming from schools like MIT, Stanford, UC Berkeley, Cal Tech…you get the picture. I came from that little old creationist factory known as George Mason (yes, at least 4 PhD biologists associated with George Mason are creationists or pro-ID). Regrettably I dropped out for a few years to mend my financial business, and it looked like I would never return to school, but I returned. Thus it is with incredible embarrassment that I admit, after a shaky start, several times dropping out, I maintained an A- GPA and completed my MS degree August 2012 and was invited as part of the 2013 commencement. Yay!

So what did I learn in engineering grad school? My classes were:

Modern Physics
Mathematical Methods
Quantum Mechanics
Classical Mechanics
Astrophysics
General Relativity
Solid State Physics
Plasma Physics
Cosmology
Statistical Mechanics and Thermodynamics

One may wonder how I can be sympathetic to Young Earth Creation given what I learned in these classes. It would be fair to say what I learned in these classes casts enormous doubt on the viability of the Young Earth Creation model, and at some point one must be willing to accept irresolution or even error in what one believes. For YECs to find resolution to the problems that physics poses for their religious beliefs, they’ll have to face the challenges offered by the subjects listed above, and then some. The resolution is above my pay grade, and I’m willing to accept alternatives…Some of my YEC friends get upset that I might even question their YEC ideas, and I tell them, “redo Maxwell’s equations to account for distant starlight, redo nuclear physics to account for radiometric dating, etc…then we might have basis for a reasonable discussion”…

Now what did I learn in relation to ID? I learned how utterly irrelevant evolutionism is to most of modern science, medicine, and engineering. To be fair there are disciplines like population genetics (such as developed by Joe Felsenstein) which are important to creationists. Felsenstein’s software is being used to find genes related to the high priest Zadok in the time of King David, and I would presume YECs are using Felsenstein’s work to go back even farther than David!

Can someone understand science without understanding evolution? It would be fair to say someone can understand almost all fields of science without evolution. Darwinists often argue that creationists are anti-science because they reject evolution. Well what if we required evolutionists to become proficient in general relativity before they practice evolutionary biology? The field would absolutely shut down! So what if a creationist can’t do evolutionary biology, there are many other science fields like physics, chemistry, medicine, engineering, and even within biology that don’t require a profession of faith in evolution.

Many evolutionary biologist don’t have to be proficient in physics to do science, so it’s very wrong then to disqualify someone from the scientific enterprise merely because they are not proficient in one discipline of science such as evolutionary biology. So how needed is evolutionism? Jerry Coyne put it well:

“In sciences pecking order evolutionary biology lurks somewhere near the bottom, far closer to phrenology than to physics.”

It is mostly to promote evolutionism that evolutionists argue creationists are anti-science. Creationist can succeed in other disciplines of science outside of evolution. Why? Can one understand genetics without evolutionism? Yes. Anatomy, physiology, and medicine? Yes. Molecular biology? Yes. Cellular biology? Yes. Micro biology? Yes. Certain aspects of population biology? Yes. The only biology one where they might hard pressed is evolutionary biology, and yet the most central evidence for the entire field are phylogenetic trees that are conflicted!

Whatever Darwin belched out in Origin of Species paled in comparison to real science like Einstein’s Field Equations. Even if I were wrong to accept ID and creation, I could still get acquainted with far more important scientific concepts in science than evolution.

One problem is that evolutionists have is an over-inflated view of the utility of their ideas in the world of science. Another problem is that though evolutionism has low scientific utility (even possibly harmful to science), it has extreme utility philosophically and politically and even financially, such as: 40 million taxpayer’s dollars wasted on venerating Darwin.

Fundamentally the ID/creation/evolution isn’t about what is taught in public schools, it is fundamentally about the possibility of purpose in the universe. What happens in school board politics pales in comparison to this fundamental question of reality. And that is the heart of my quest…

So is there Intelligent Design in the universe? One physicist at my university said “NO” but proceeded to give reasons that an ID proponent would think “YES”. In The Quantum Enigma of Consciousness and the Identity of the Designer I pointed out that Richard Conn Henry, who is the Henry Rowland professor of physics at the Henry Rowland Department of Physics, wrote that notion of an Ultimate MIND isn’t precluded by physics, and physics even suggests, there is an Ultimate MIND. Suddenly my university began to seem slightly less hostile to ID, but that wasn’t all!

It turned out just a few years prior Paul McHugh had written an article critical of evolutionism in Teaching Darwin. And then a few years before that, a biophysicist Lee Spetner, a former researcher at the Applied Physics Lab wrote: Not by Chance which became the basis for some forms of front-loaded ID. And that book received and endorsement from a prominent professor at my university, a Nobel Laureate in Chemistry Christian Anfisen. But that was not the end of it, last but not least was Ben Carson! He was to be the commencement speaker until he withdrew under pressure from gay rights activists. But the fact that his creationism didn’t stop him from being invited in the first place was news in and of itself.

So those were the people, though few and far between, who supported ID at my university.

But were there at least reminders of ID elsewhere? Not explicitly, but they were always fun when found in places you’d least expect. My physics class text by Goldstein had the following tribute to the Intelligent Designer in the preface (2nd edition preface also contained in the 3rd edition):

And above all I want to register the thanks and acknowledgement of my heart, in the words of Daniel (2:23):

[in Hebrew]
I thank and praise you, O God of my fathers:
You have given me wisdom and power,
you have made known to me what we asked of you

Herbert Goldstein
Kew Gardens Hill, New York
January 1980

At the commencement exercise, the opening convocation prayer had the phrase that went something like:

God the creator, the architect of every cell
…
Amen

And finally there was the closing tribute at the ceremony Hopkins Ode:

Truth guide our university,
And from all error keep her free,
Let wisdom yield her choicest treasure,
And freedom reach her fullest measure;
O, let her watchword ever be:
The truth of God will make you free,
Will make you free!

And that theme is on the University coat of arms as “Veritas Vos Liberabit” which is Latin for that phrase from Jesus in the Gospels, “The Truth Will Set You Free”!

A science degree from the Whiting School was a detour from my current line of work in finance, but it was an important detour to bring me closer to understanding the world. And that detour was my journey to the class of 2013.

Yes indeed, “The Truth Will Set You Free”!

Sal in front of Gilman Hall, Thursday, May 23, 2013

Sal at the Homewood Commencement Field

Consider, for example, well known atheist and skeptic, Michael Shermer, who wrote in his book Why Darwin Matters: The Case Against Intelligent Design:

Darwin’s original claim of evolution by means of natural selection was an extraordinary claim in its time, so he was required to provide extra ordinary evidence for it. He did, and evidence has continued accumulating ever since. Today, the burden of proof is on creationists and Intelligent Design advocates to provide extraordinary evidence for their extraordinary claim that a supernatural being of great power and intelligence performed a supernatural act in place of or contrary to natural law. They have yet to do so.

(Michael Shermer, Why Darwin Matters: The Case Against Intelligent Design, Henry Holt and Co., LLC, 2006, pg 50)

Shermer’s intent here seems pretty clear: the claims of ID are extraordinary and as such require extraordinary evidence. We’ll come back to that in another post, but first I want to address something that Shermer did not intend to convey, but did. By juxtaposing Darwin’s claim, which was considered extraordinary in the 1800’s with ID’s claims of today (the extraorinariness of which Shermer assumes is “just obvious”), Shermer has unintentionally brought to the surface two important critiques against the EC-EE claim. The first is that what constitutes an extraordinary claim, and thereby extraordinary evidence, is quite worldview dependent (more on that in a moment); the second is that given the first critique the EC-EE claim itself is an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence. (more on this to follow as well).

Let us take a closer look at the first critique, that the EC-EE claim is worldview dependent. In his quote, Shermer assumes that the prevailing worldview of the mid-late 1800’s when Darwin wrote his famous tome was some form of theism and that most people, including scientists, operated on the assumption that we live in a created universe. If Shermer doesn’t think that was the case, then why say that Darwin’s evolutionary hypothesis would have seemed extraordinary when he wrote it? Further, Shermer is quite convinced that in current times the tables have been turned and that most people (or at least most scientific people) operate from a naturalistic worldview so the claims of ID, as he states them, are considered extraordinary. What Shermer has shown in making these two statements is that what counts as “extraordinary” in the EC-EE claim depends completely on one’s point of view which in turn is informed by one’s worldview. For Shermer, an atheist and philosophical naturalist, the claims of ID would seem extraordinary. Other atheists, like Richard Dawkins, claim that Darwin’s idea of evolution made it possible to be “intellectually fulfilled” atheists. The claims of creationists or of ID proponents are extraordinary indeed under that worldview.

However, to a theist or a Christian, the claims of ID are not only acceptable, but pretty straightforward and uncontroversial. It is the claims of Darwinism that seems quite extraordinary to many if not most of today’s theists or Christians. From the theistic worldview the claim that the blind, purposeless forces of matter and energy interacting over eons of time through chance and/or necessity could account for the rich complexity of biological systems is the extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence. For theists, if I might paraphrase Shermer’s quote above, “the burden of proof is on Darwinists to provide extraordinary evidence for their extraordinary claim that the blind, purposeless forces of matter and energy interacting over eons of time through chance and/or necessity can account for the complex, specified information exhibited in biological systems. They have yet to do so.” Both Shermer’s original quote above and my paraphrase here bear equal weight under the EC-EE claim.

The upshot of this contrast between the extraordinary claims of Darwin in the 1800’s and of ID today is that the terms “extraordinary” and even “evidence” are highly worldview dependent. And that leads us to the second critique mentioned above: is the EC-EE claim itself an extraordinary claim requiring extraordinary evidence? I’m not aware of anyone who thinks the EC-EE claim is on the same order as a First Principle of reasoning, such as the Law of Non-Contradiction would be. So, exactly what is the basis for the claim? Is it something that is “just obvious”? I hardly think so, because it is difficult to determine what constitutes “extraordinary” both in terms of a claim and in terms of evidence. Extraordinary in what way, exactly? A claim may run counter to someone’s worldview, but not everyone shares the same worldview, so is it extraordinary if it only appears so to some but not others? That hardly seems a solid foundation to make the EC-EE claim universal in some sense.

Then there is the EE side of the EC-EE claim: evidence, and ‘extraordinary’ evidence at that. What makes evidence extraordinary? (for that matter, what is even meant by evidence in this context?) For an atheist, would an event so obviously counter to natural causes that no one could deny its supernatural origin be enough? I hardly think so, because from an ID perspective, atheists, who are also scientists, are confronted daily with exactly such evidence: complex, specified information replete throughout biological systems. If that were not the case, why would Dr. Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the double helix of DNA write in his book What Mad Pursuit “Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved.” It seems here that Crick inadvertently let slip that the evidence of nature screams “design” and does so quite extraordinarily so biologists must remain vigilant against the impulse to attribute actual design. Whatever the case, the point is that what may or may not constitute “extraordinary evidence” is highly worldview dependent.

What all this boils down to is that the EC-EE claim itself is fairly indefensible and its use as an argument against ID is weak and ineffective. In another post, I’ll take up the issue of what exactly is the extraordinary claims being made and by whom. But for now, let’s discuss the (in)validity of the EC-EE claim itself.

Joan Roughgarden, an ecologist and evolutionary biologist at the -Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology, agrees that evolutionary biologists can be nasty when crossed. “I mean, these guys are impervious to contrary evidence and alternative formulations,” she says. “What we see in evolution is stasis-conceptual stasis, in my view-where people are ardently defending their formulations from the early 70s.”

Nagel really got their noses out of joint by sympathizing with theorists of intelligent design. “They do not deserve the scorn with which they are commonly met,” he wrote. “It is manifestly unfair.” To be sure, he was not agreeing with them. He notes several times that he is an atheist and has no truck with supernatural gods. He views the ID crowd the way a broad-minded capitalist would sum up Marx: right in his critique, wrong in his solutions. But ID, he says, does contain criticisms of evolutionary theory that should be taken seriously.

Whatever the validity of this stance, its timing was certainly bad. The war between New Atheists and believers has become savage, with Richard Dawkins writing sentences like, “I have described atonement, the central doctrine of Christianity, as vicious, sadomasochistic, and repellent. We should also dismiss it as barking mad. …” In that climate, saying anything nice at all about religion is a tactical error.

So what you think? Hanging? Hanging, drawing, and quartering?

Could be gruesome. Darwinists’ unearned incomes are at stake.