Weekly Wrap-Up

An Excellent Speech by Mark Steyn on the Link Between Freedom, Faith, and Government: "To rekindle the spark of liberty once it dies is very difficult. The inertia, the ennui, the fatalism is more pathetic than the demographic decline and fiscal profligacy of the social democratic state, because it's subtler and less tangible. But once in a while it swims into very sharp focus. Here is the writer Oscar van den Boogaard from an interview with the Belgian paper De Standaard. Mr. van den Boogaard, a Dutch gay 'humanist' (which is pretty much the trifecta of Eurocool), was reflecting on the accelerating Islamification of the Continent and concluding that the jig was up for the Europe he loved. 'I am not a warrior, but who is?' he shrugged. 'I have never learned to fight for my freedom. I was only good at enjoying it.'"

George Gilder on What Information Theory Tells Us About Biology: "Information is defined by its independence from physical determination... Like a sheet of paper or a series of magnetic points on a computer’s hard disk or the electrical domains in a random-access memory — or indeed all the undulations of the electromagnetic spectrum that bear information through air or wires in telecommunications — DNA is a neutral carrier of information, independent of its chemistry and physics....Wherever there is information, there is a preceding intelligence."

American Spectator Cover Story on Intelligent Design: "It is precisely because intelligent design relies upon scientific methods and evidence that it is regarded by the materialists as so extraordinarily dangerous. It threatens to allow religion to escape from the ghetto assigned to it by the dominant 19th- and 20th-century materialism...It might change conceptions about whether there is an objective moral order. It might help open minds that would otherwise be closed." (The article also contains a good explanation about the mathematical odds AGAINST natural selection being the source of complex life).

A profile of Philip Johnson, the "Father of I.D.": "I was struck by the breadth of Darwin's claims as opposed to how scanty were the observable changes...I said to my wife that I shouldn't take this up. I will be ridiculed and it will consume my life. Of course, it was irresistible."

Dr. Deepak Chopra on Evolution: The world-famous doctor provides a solid list of 12 major gaps in evolutionary theory. Then, when Martin Richard prints a rebuttal, Dr. Chopra takes the time to respond to his objections here.