He deserves to be thoroughly debunked, but I don't have time to do it today. It gets tiresome reading through vacuous RW fantasy novels to see if they even contact reality at any point or have any valid content within them. To quote from Fight Club:
(Marla Singer) "Oh, here comes an avalanche of bullshit."
December 01, 2005, 8:29 a.m.
Don’t Fear the Designer
Competing philosophies and beliefs.
By Tom Bethell
...
Charles Krauthammer tells us that Isaac Newton was religious and if he saw no conflict between science and religion, why can't we take our thin gruel of evolutionary science like good children and be satisfied, without dragging a Designer into the picture?
Because it isn't real science, Charles. Newton, in fact, thought that the "most beautiful system" of sun, planets, and comets could "only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful being." But the laws of physics that govern these motions are simplicity itself compared with the immense complexity of the biological machinery that governs the development, proliferation, growth, and aging of millions of reproductive species. These mechanisms have yet to be discovered or described. To believe that the feeble tautology of natural selection — laissez-faire political economy from the 1830s imported into biology — constitutes a sufficient explanation of the marvels of nature is to display a credulity that makes our fundamentalists seem sagacious by comparison.
George Will has made one accurate criticism of the idea he so dislikes: "The problem with intelligent design is not that it is false but that it is not falsifiable. Not being susceptible to contradicting evidence, it is not a testable hypothesis." This is true; but he should have added that Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection is not falsifiable either. Darwin's claim to fame was his discovery of a mechanism of evolution; he accepted "survival of the fittest" as a good summary of his natural-selection theory. But which ones are the fittest? The ones that survive. There is no criterion of fitness that is independent of survival. Whatever happens, it is the "fittest" that survive — by definition. This, just like intelligent design, is not a testable hypothesis. As the eminent philosopher of science Karl Popper said, after discussing this problem that natural selection cannot escape: "There is hardly any possibility of testing a theory as feeble as this." Popper was the first to propose falsification as the line of demarcation between theories that are scientific and those that are not; both intelligent design and natural selection fall by this standard.
The underlying problem, rarely discussed, is that the conclusions of evolutionism are based not on science, but on a philosophy: the philosophy of materialism, or naturalism. Living creatures, including human beings, are here on Earth, and we got here somehow. If atoms and molecules in motion are all that exist, then their random interactions must account for everything that exists, including us. That is the true underpinning of Darwinism. What needs to be examined in detail is not so much the religion behind intelligent design as the philosophy behind evolution.
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http://old.nationalreview.com/comment/bethell200512010829.asp
Can We Do Without Relativity?
By Tom Bethell from the September 2009 issue
The author introduces his new book, Questioning Einstein: Is Relativity Necessary?
SOMETHING TELLS ME THAT MY NEW BOOK -- Questioning Einstein: Is Relativity Necessary? -- is unlikely to be reviewed. So I shall say something about it here. I have been working on it on and off for years, and it is based on the original work of a good friend of mine, Petr Beckmann. A Czech immigrant who taught electrical engineering at the University of Colorado, he wrote a brilliant book called Einstein Plus Two. But it was also difficult -- written in the language of mathematical physics. I interviewed him at length, and told him I would write a simpler version. Then, too soon, he died (in 1993). I was able to finish the book with the help of Howard Hayden, who taught physics at the University of Connecticut and who became convinced that Beckmann's criticisms of relativity were right.
Most people know little about relativity theory, but we recognize that it was highly influential and that Einstein's theory somehow rewrote the laws of physics. It is divided into two parts, the special theory (1905) and the more difficult general theory (1916). The generally accepted view is that the special theory has been proven over and over again, while the general theory perhaps can be questioned and retested. In Beckmann's theory, this is more or less reversed. The general theory gives the right answers but by a complicated and roundabout route. Meanwhile a simpler path lay at hand. But the special theory may have to be discarded because the logical consequences of its postulates do not correspond to experimental results.
Here's one way of looking at the subject. We've all heard of the equation E = mc2, saying that the energy of a body is proportional to its mass. It was derived by Einstein using relativity theory. Less well known is that it was derived by him again later, without relativity. He called the later version his "elementary derivation." Relativity wasn't necessary to derive the most famous equation in physics.
Beckmann extends that way of looking at the issue across the board. The physical facts that seem to demand relativity can be explained by classical physics. That is the argument of my book. It is written without math and in plain English; only a few technical terms need to be explained.
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http://spectator.org/archives/2009/09/17/can-we-do-without-relativity/print
= new reply since forum marked as read
