News to Note, April 6, 2013

1. Freedom Under Fire: Your Chance to Speak Up

Freedom under fire: your chance to speak up

2. Should Abortion Providers Be Required to Save Infants?

But what if she’s not dead?—Should abortion providers be required to save the lives of infants they fail to kill?

3. Thoughts on the Finale

“For He made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him” (2 Corinthians 5:21).

4. How Do Leafhopper Legs Survive the Launch?

How leafhopper legs survive the launch

5. Geologists Find Massive Volcanism Correlates with Mass Extinction

Massive volcanism correlated with the onset of the end-Triassic mass extinction, evolutionary geochronologists find.

And Don’t Miss . . .

• Andrew Ferguson—senior editor of The Weekly Standard—has written an insightful analysis of why philosopher Thomas Nagel’s name is now anathema to most of his fellow atheists. Ferguson, who is neither a creationist nor a religious fundamentalist, explains that Nagel’s book Mind and Cosmos, published last fall, points out that the materialistic neo-Darwinian drive to reduce all of reality to nothing more than evolutionary adaptations “flies in the face of common sense.” In fact, despite the now-popular belief that—as codiscoverer of DNA Francis Crick claims, “‘You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. Who you are is nothing but a pack of neurons”—such naturalism cannot possibly explain the world we live in. Nagel has an evolutionary worldview but does not believe molecules-to-man evolution can explain the origin of life from non-life nor how anything came to exist in the first place. He writes, “It is prima facie highly implausible that life as we know it is the result of a sequence of physical accidents together with the mechanism of natural selection.” Furthermore, he believes that much of what makes us human—morally, mentally, and emotionally—simply cannot be explained as survival-related adaptations. While Nagel’s philosophy is essentially a nod to intelligent design, he remains an atheist and does not identify a “designer.” Yet at least he acknowledges that materialism has been unjustifiably adopted by mainstream science as axiomatic. He further points out that acceptance of naturalistic materialistic philosophy “is not a necessary condition of the practice of any of those sciences”—a refreshing change from the ranting of children’s TV host Bill Nye and others that no one can be a good scientist without such beliefs. In other words, operational, experimental, and “here and now” science depends upon the ability to evaluate actual observations, not on espousing a materialist view of reality. Nevertheless, though Nagel can see evidence of a “designer” through “the things that are made” (Romans 1:20), he still fails to recognize that Designer as God or his need for salvation in Jesus Christ. For more information about intelligent design, see The New Answers Book 2 Is the Intelligent Design Movement Christian? Jesus Christ: Our Intelligent Designer, and The Intelligent Design Movement.