Monthly Archives: July 2011

Review: Darwin on Trial

Darwin on TrialDarwin on Trial by Phillip E. Johnson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I’m rating this book on the assumption of a stipulated umpteen-billion-year history of the universe. That is not my current belief, but I have virtually no knowledge of the science of dating so I have nothing to say about it at this point.

I recently read Coyne’s much more recent Why Evolution is True. Seems that Darwinists have not been able to improve their presentation, because Darwin on Trial pretty much destroys Coyne as if he were responding to him, rather than writing a book twenty years ago.

This covers the issues really well. Given the fossil evidence, paleontology presents us with a picture of sudden appearances of intact species rather than any kind of gradual evolution. The "survival of the fittest" is a tautology rather than a testable hypothesis. And any theory looks good if you disregard all counter evidence.

What I learned from Johnson that I didn’t know before was how scientists are having to police other evolutionary scientists to punish them when they don’t sound dogmatic enough about the evidence for Darwinian evolution. It also seems that evolutionary biology is a "closed system" from biology in any other field even when the scientists are convinced Darwinists. An ape expert who bothers to look at the fossils and say that the idea that the creature walked upright is wishful thinking, will be marginalized and rejected. It is an insular field that expects to be accepted on faith.

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Tolkien and the Moderns

It seems hard to remember now that there was a time when the American counterculture embraced J.R.R. Tolkien and his masterpiece. Groovy dudes in pipe-weed jerkins yelling “Go Go Gandalf,” walls covered with graffiti proclaiming “Frodo Lives!”, and election-year “Gandalf for President” buttons were all popular sights on college campuses from Harvard to Berkeley.

Read the rest: Big Hollywood » Blog Archive » Bored with the Good: The Ennobling Fantasy of J.R.R. Tolkien Part 4.

I had mentioned this series earlier before Part 4 was posted. I’ll need time to read it more carefully. I frankly think of Howard as more of an anti-Tolkien than not. But it has been awhile since I read him.

Also, I’m not sure I would be quite as negative about Tolkien’s appeal to “hippies.”

Still, it is a post well worth reading and thinking about.