Comments

1. Jeff Stables says

   Sunday, January 22, 2006 at 7:31 pm

   This “find” begs the question: what did these ancient fish do for oxygen while their very gills were becoming “ears”?

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2. David Ennis says

   Tuesday, January 24, 2006 at 3:01 pm

   I was just surfin around the site where that article came from and found an article touting Intelligent Design as “the death of science.”

   How “scientific” is this?

   “The most basic problem [with ID] is that it’s utterly boring,” said William Provine, a science historian at Cornell University in New York.

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3. Hugh Williams says

   Wednesday, January 25, 2006 at 6:47 am

   Will Provine is an interesting character. I had the opportunity to see Provine and Phillip Johnson debate evolution at Cornell sometime around 1992, and I remember being struck by Provine’s discourteous manner.

   Here are some of Johnson’s vignettes (written in October 1995) about dealing with Provine:

   …Will Provine then told about the Hawaiian Drosophila species, and concluded with an overhead showing Phil Johnson’s theory of speciation (a complete blank, repeated 3 times). After this demonstration of what is apparently considered good scientific thinking at Cornell, I gave a 10-minute statement of my position, and then took questions from the class. Unprejudiced observers (i.e., the people on my side) thought the performance was effective, but of course anything I would say is a drop in the bucket compared to the gallons of indoctrination the students have received. Questions throughout the day indicated that students have a great deal of trouble even getting started on thinking critically about evolution. They tend to ask questions about “whether evolution has occurred,” as if I were denying that it is possible to breed cows to become better milk-producers. The purpose of these invasions of the inner sanctum of scientific materialism is to plant a seed, not to overcome in a single hour the effects of years of miseducation.

   …and another…

   …Will Provine also came, and this had its awkward aspects. Will is so overbearing in his evangelism for atheism that I have to put on the most aggressive side of my own personality to handle him, and this gets in the way of more restrained discussion with other people. Will’s own idiosyncratic views about free will and ethics tend to become the subject of discussion, crowding out more significant issues. Will is quite open about his medical condition; his untreatable brain tumor causes occasional seizures, resembling petit mal epilepsy, and there is no telling how long it will be before the condition becomes crippling or life-threatening. Facing so directly the fact of his own mortality doesn’t seem to have changed Will’s stance towards the ultimate reality. He is healthy in appearance, and still looks ten years younger than he is.

   On the other hand, I got a report from Aaron, a good friend of mine and a follower of Christ, who studied abroad for a semester in France. The supervisor for his overseas program was Provine’s wife. Given the dynamics of being far from home with them for an extended period of time, he got to know the Provines much better than most who cross their paths. He had very salutory things to say about them; he confessed they were strident in their worldview, but he found it interesting how they could be (in all other respects) quite pleasant folks. All in all, they had a pleasant relationship that they remember fondly.

   It illustrated to me how a variety of tactics must be employed – usually by different people – to reach the world for Christ. Johnson is a wrecking ball to bad thinking; Aaron made it difficult for them to reject the gospel for any reason other than the content of the gospel itself.

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