Belated Worship

The parents were in town last week. And the sister and her boyfriend.

It was a nice week. Probably a little above average on the angst-o-meter when the subjects of politics and religion came up, but otherwise, nice.

We went to church together on Sunday. We visited an Assembly of God church. Really nice website. Interestingly, the AG has always been on my short list of denominations that I wonder, "do these people know how this denomination formed, and when?" The Southern Baptists are another. While the SB formed as a result of Northern Baptist churches rejecting slave-owners as potential parishoners and missionaries, the AG formed (as they outline here) as a result of the Bethel Bible College (Charles F. Parham) "speaking in tongues" renewal, and subsequent Azusa Street Mission revivals. The year of BBC was 1901. There is another AG internal article here, by J. Roswell Flower, the first secretary-treasurer of the AG (1914), entitled, "The Genesis of the Pentecostal Movement." It seems historical so far as I can tell.

The denomination (AG) is well-known for its emphasis on the "evidence" of God's "baptism of the Holy Spirit". To them, God's presence in a believer's life can be "improved" by participating in this experience, which ought to involve "speaking in tongues". Doctrinally, whether they like it or not, this divides Christians into two classes: those "baptized in the Holy Spirit", and those not. This obviously begs quite a few theological questions, which I may delve into later, but not for now.

What moved upon me during the service was not contempt for these people's experessions, emotional outpouring, and exuberance. I have participated in those things first hand. I tried, not all that long ago, to stir up some feeling of God's reality in my life with such worship. Rather than contempt, I felt a kind of sadness. Not for them, per se, but for all of us.

What I was thinking about relates to the subject of yesterday's Shawshank Sunday (just published today): hope.

There is nothing wrong at all with hope. The real problem, and what stirred up such deep sadness in me, was that so much hope is misplaced. So much of our hope is put where other people tell us it must be placed. There are only so many things we know for certain in this world, but so many uncertainties. So many things we cannot control. I am of the persuasion that placing my hope in things that I will never know until I die is like putting your money in a trust for your grandkids: it is great if you have that much to work with.

Most of us just don't have that much hope to spread around. And so why shouldn't we choose to place it in places we can see it come to fruition? Why not hope for the graduate degree that you are going to have to work your tears out for? Why not hope for the job that it might land you? If you can't place hope in your own achievements, if you can't put your expectations on positive footing in your own life, how can you put hope in your failures?

The philosophy that starts out with the basic premises:
i) man is utterly depraved, anything good about man is external (divine)
ii) man can accomplish nothing of note or of worth, everything he accomplishes is imperfect
iii) perfection is demanded by god, thus man depends wholly upon god's grace for anything, everything, and can achieve nothing without god

Leaves one with only one logical place to put their hope: in death.

To me, that is worshipping death. That is placing death itself as the horizon to which we ought to strive. Jesus minced no words when he said that to follow him meant to bear one's cross. Dying to self is the paradigm of the Christian. Buddha, Confucious, and countless others have taught the same. These take for their basic premise that death is certain, and that our life ought to mimic our death in order to truly live.

To me, my basic premise is that life is certain, though its extent is not. I read Atlas Shrugged recently, and it got me looking into Neo-Objectivism [edited note: not a Randroid, just interested in how their basic philosophy works and how they claim it justifies government-free economics and egoism]. As such, I believe that subjective metaphysics are philosophically necessary, and pragmatically healthy to a degree, but I do not believe that one's quality of life is instrinsically linked to one's take on metaphysics. What I am thinking of by "subjective metaphysics" include things like one's appreciation of art, beauty, music, literature, and even the appraisal of "value" and "purpose" in life to some degree. These are often the purview of religion, but shouldn't be because aesthetics has a rigorous philosophical background. Further, I believe that those who place subjective experience and mysticism above objective reality are doomed to misery in this life. In Rand's words,

[T]he only real moral crime that one man can commit against another is the attempt to create, by his words or actions, an impression of the contradictory, the impossible, the irrational, and thus shake the concept of rationality in his victim.

Ayn Rand's ideas on morality, like the one outlined above in her fiction, are ridiculous. I agree that it is morally wrong to delude people, however, it isn't the "only moral crime"...

Her view on egoism as motivation in morality, though shared in part or in full by so many other philosophers, are perhaps some of the closest in their articulation to my own. I do not accept all the tenets of Objectivist philosophy fundamentally. I despise all forms of close-minded fundamentalism. To close one's mind and become dogmatic is, in essence, to say, "I already know everything, and no knowledge can shake my certitude...my hubris is equivocated as faith."

I reject assertions that life's quality is linked to someone else's subjective experience, and not to my own. If I cannot reason through a set of premises and assertions, then ought I to accept them as true? Why? I reject philosophical premises which are definitively subjective as having any authority over my life. Life's quality, instead, must depend upon objective reality, as mediated by reason. Reality depends largely on your perception and largely on your effort, but most of all upon your reason. What you know to be virtual, versus what you know to be "real", is 100% dependent upon your reason, unless we are all just brains in a vat.

Fear comes when reason is pushed out. Living your life in fear is the same as living your life in death. Living in fear and living as if "dead" to one's self, to one's rational self-interest, is, I am persuaded, worshiping the unknown as the known and death as life. Placing your hope in death, and consequently living one's life in fear, thus becomes belated worship.
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Technorati tags: God, Religion, Fear

Shawshank Sunday II: The Danger of Hope

Red said to Andy, after Andy's release from solitary confinement,

Let me tell you something my friend. Hope is a dangerous thing. Hope can drive a man insane.

Red had come to fear hope itself. More evidence of this is found as Andy explained to Red why he was glad he had played Mozart's "The Marriage of Figaro."

Andy Dufresne: That's the beauty of music. They can't get that from you... Haven't you ever felt that way about music?
Red: I played a mean harmonica as a younger man. Lost interest in it though. Didn't make much sense in here
Andy Dufresne: Here's where it makes the most sense. You need it so you don't forget.
Red: Forget?
Andy Dufresne: Forget that... there are places in this world that aren't made out of stone, and that there's something inside that they can't get to ,and that they can't touch. It's yours.
Red: What're you talking about?
Andy Dufresne: Hope.

When Andy "flew the coop," he left behind a note for his friend. It was this note that caused Red to choose the compass over the gun later on--to choose to live and conquer his fear. Andy Dufresne wrote his friend:

"...hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things. And no good thing ever dies."

Idealistic of him to say that no good thing ever dies, but it is true to say that we can preserve our hope up until the moment we do. When death becomes a trapdoor to escape fear, that life is already over. Red stood before Brooks' tombstone in one of the most tense moments in the movie. We don't know if Red has the courage to face his fear. Brooks already told us, "...I'm tired of being afraid all the time," in a goodbye letter to his friends. Hope is choosing not to fear. Hope is the choice we make when we let either:

1) our reason, our minds, work out all the conditions, evaluate probabilities, and we say, "there is a chance, and the chance is enough to make me go for it..."
2) our faith alone, our belief alone, motivate us to do something which may be irrational, or not, but is definitely not thought out. Hope of this sort is what is portrayed in "Braveheart" when Robert I the Bruce decides impetuously to charge against England and he wins. This sort of hope is the idealized/mystical version, considered superlative to (1)

Red made a rational decision. He was afraid, but he didn't have to be. And to escape his fear, he didn't have to end his life. He chose not to equivocate living with dying. Too many people don't have the reason, the courage, or the desire to avoid making that mistake.

Red said, in the closing lines of the book,

"...I find I'm so excited, I can barely sit still or hold a thought in my head. I think it's the excitement only a free man can feel, a free man at the start of a long journey whose conclusion is uncertain. I hope I can make it across the border. I hope to see my friend, and shake his hand. I hope the Pacific is as blue as it has been in my dreams. I hope."

Too many people believe that hope is a dangerous thing. I hear it all the time. It usually manifests itself as fear of the unknown, fear of what may happen if we choose wrongly. All we know for sure is that death is going to happen. My philosophy is that we ought to live in such a way so that death takes us by surprise, and that fear (death realized within life) doesn't become our way of life.

Hope may be a dangerous thing to some, leading them to the abyss of insanity. To me, insanity begins when we assert what we do not know, and induce fear where none must exist. To me, banking what we do know (that we are alive) on what we don't know (what comes afterwards) so that the former gets swallowed up in the latter is like being swallowed into the mouth of madness.
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Technorati tags: Hope, shawshank, God

Cognitive Dissonance

The Discovery Institute (hereafter, Intelligent Design Creationism) compiles a list of scientists "Dissenting from Darwinism". The statement that these scientists sign says,

We are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life. Careful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory should be encouraged.

On its surface, this list includes some seriously impressive credentials. Hell, I may be convinced to jump on the bandwagon and join the list, just to have my name appear beside such great minds and great titles. But forgot who has signed it for a moment. Whether it has 1 signature, or 1 million, let's examine what it really says [and what it doesn't].

Ok, let's start from the foundation--what is Darwinism? What is "Darwinian theory"?

Well, Webster.com defines Darwinism as:

a theory of the origin and perpetuation of new species of animals and plants that offspring of a given organism vary, that natural selection favors the survival of some of these variations over others, that new species have arisen and may continue to arise by these processes, and that widely divergent groups of plants and animals have arisen from the same ancestors; broadly : biological evolutionism

OK. So which part of "Darwinism" do these scientists dissent from? Also, what is meant by "the complexity of life": abiogenesis, metabolism, reproduction, all of the above? According to their own statement, it is about "the complexity of life" being reduced to two mechanistic contributions--random mutation coupled to natural selection. This statement on its face has, in all honesty, no problem whatsoever...

Also, ask any biology professor, "Can random mutation and natural selection account for every aspect of every complex feature of every stage of life," and if your professor is a good one, he or she will answer, "Nope." Huh? Wassup? Development and abiogenesis fall completely outside of the realm of "pure Darwinism".

This statement leaves out the contributions to evolutionary biology which have developed since Darwin's time. See, Darwin published his book before Mendel's experiments were accepted (although they had been published), before biochemistry was known to any degree, before heredity was understood...etc. Sexual selection, genetic drift, some of these concepts are "new developments".

So what is necessary to invoke for some features? Like, for example, peacock feathers?? Other forms of selection, components such as ecological selection, or, with the peacock tail feathers, sexual selection...which is not related (so far as one can tell) on any surface level to "survivability" in an organism in one generation [they should make it more difficult, actually], but is obviously integral to the survival of genes. How do peacock feathers help the bird survive? They don't. They actually attract more predators, make locomotion more difficult, etc. But, it is this fact that "selects for" the fittest males. Why do they exist, and why are they so beautiful? The eye-catching effect on the females doesn't make sense until you consider that all female birds force males through a rigorous screening process -- to ensure the fitness of their mate.

Sexual selection, genetic drift, reproductive isolation, founder effect, bottlenecking...et cetera, et cetera, ad nauseum. There are many important concepts in evolutionary biology outside of simple "survival of the fittest", as one must consider fecundity and viability components of "fitness". Also, genetic mechanisms which are random (unselected)...genetic drift. None of those things were known by anyone in Darwin's day. For scientists today to look in Darwin's publication for a current definition of evolution is like physicists today looking in Newton's notebook for the measurements of gravity. Why then does "Darwinism", rather than "evolutionary theory", which incorporates these other concepts, preferred by the DI?

For Intelligent Design Creationism to want to stick to "Darwinism" and "Darwin's theory" is a political gimmick on their part for three reasons:
1) Darwin was one man, one scientist, who laid an all-important foundation down for evolutionary biology. However, he is still just one man, and he had some wrong notions. Using his name attempts to isolate a globally-accepted, modern theory which millions of experiments, from molecular biology to morphological analyses, and the entire geological record, have failed to falsify from the global context. This gimmick makes evolutionary biology seem much more fragile by pushing it back to one particular idea from one person at one time.
2) "-isms" are not used in any scientific theory. They are used for philosophical or pseudoscientific concepts only. In this way, Intelligent Design Creationists, Young Earth Creationists, and Old Earth Creationists want to avoid "Creationism" for Intelligent Design, and assign a parallel label to muddy the waters of evolutionary biology.
3) Darwinism is a hugely vague term. Its meanings can stretch from sociology to sociobiology to ethics to economics. By using "Darwinism" the Intelligent Design Creationists appeal to confusion and ignorance.

So this statement is a bit ironic: maybe these signers actually are better biologists than we suppose them for at first glance. After all, dissenting from Darwinism as the sole explanation for everything in "the complexity of life" is therefore not unscientific, per se, as I have just explained.

As for the second statement:

Careful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory should be encouraged.

Intelligent Design Creationists are charlatans. First, this begs two major questions:
1) Are they implying that this does not already occur? Does any scientist disagree with careful examination of evidence for, or against, any theory? Part of the distinguishing feature of science is the attempt to falsify paradigms in order to improve them.
2) What is "Darwinian theory"? Dare we conflate this phrase with "Common Descent from Universal Ancestors"? Again, the trick of these ID Creationists is to not be specific. People like Behe acknowledge common descent, after presumed "careful examination". This confuses what it actually being contested.

Since Intelligent Design Creationism is such a "big tent", attracting worldviews as disparate as the wholly unscientific Carl Baugh to the subtly, seductively pseudoscientific Dembski the real enemy becomes specifics. They wouldn't have two signatures on that list other than the "same ol' same ol'" bunch of YECs and OECs if they were willing to say, "common descent" in the place of "Darwin's theory" and "Darwinism". You wouldn't see nearly so many accomplished scientists, and you probably wouldn't see more than one or two life scientists.

Part of the political gaming here, part of the scheme, besides the Wedge, is forIntelligent Design Creationism to remain like YHWH, something whose name cannot be taken in vain because its subject is vague and uncertain. And they slip these important distinctions right by the uneducated and credulous.
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Technorati tags: Intelligent Design, Evolution, Creationism

Inane Musings on Herd Mentalities and War

Some quotes on religion (and war and fear) and my thoughts:

Perchance you who pronounce my sentence are in greater fear than I who receive it.
--Giordano Bruno, quoted by Gaspar Schopp of Breslau in a letter to Conrad Rittershausen, written on the day of Bruno's burning at the stake for (among other things) the crime of being an "atheist," quoted from Dorothea Waley Singer, Giordano Bruno: His Life and Thought (1950), p. 179

Bruno was receiving, here, the sentence of death...and a terrible one at that. And how did he reply? He saw his accusors' fear. They killed him because they were afraid of him. They were afraid of his life and his ideas, and they were afraid others would think like him and be like him.

Whatever happened to, "...perfect love casts out all fear,"?

It appears here, and in the other accounts (and remember, these were written by and for the very people who killed him) that Bruno was unafraid to die. Maybe he had a dose of something that his accusors lacked.

Thinking freely, and rejecting a majority message solely on the grounds of "Appeal to Authority/Majority", that does indeed require some courage. People who fear are just like sheep who fear. They move in herds, where there is security and comfort in numbers.

Bruno once remarked on this himself:

It is proof of a base and low mind for one to wish to think with the masses or majority, merely because the majority is the majority. Truth does not change because it is, or is not, believed by a majority of the people.
-- Giordano Bruno, Heroic Furies, quoted in Mason, Great and Mind Liberating Thoughts, quoted from George Seldes, ed., The Great Thoughts (1985)

In light of our current politic climate, I thought the following quotes were germane--on war:

Before August, 1914, it was the correct thing to proclaim Christ as the Prince of Peace and Christianity as the religion of love and the brotherhood of man. We had a Peace Sunday each year when lip-service was paid to Peace from thousands of pulpits. After August, 1914, these sames pulpits resounded with prases of the Lord as a man of war (Exodus, xv. 3) and declarations that the great European War was a Christian war, sent directly by Almighty God himself. The earlier attitude, disassociating Christanity from war, was both dishonest and, to say the least of it, ungrateful; for Christianity has been nursed, nourished, and spread abroad by war and by what we now call frightfulness.
--Hypatia Bradlaugh Bonner, "Slavery" chapter of Christianity & Conduct; Or, The Influence of Religious Beliefs on Morals (1919), quoted from Gaylor, Women Without Superstition, p. 311
[PS: Hypatia was a woman scientist murdered in 415 by being hacked to death by an angry mob of Christian monks due to her "heresy"]

"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from a religious conviction"
--Pascal, Pensees (1670)

Need I explain this one? I think it clear that Bush linked the War in Iraq to religion in more ways than one. Need I quote him? He used the religious predisposition of America to ignite passions against "the axis of evil" (the only one of the three mentioned in the axis which posed no threat to us), and he unequivocally stated that he was doing the will of God Himself in ousting Hussein.

The revelation comes after Mr Bush launched an impassioned attack yesterday in Washington on Islamic militants, likening their ideology to that of Communism, and accusing them of seeking to "enslave whole nations" and set up a radical Islamic empire "that spans from Spain to Indonesia". In the programmeElusive Peace: Israel and the Arabs, which starts on Monday, the former Palestinian foreign minister Nabil Shaath says Mr Bush told him and Mahmoud Abbas, former prime minister and now Palestinian President: "I'm driven with a mission from God. God would tell me, 'George, go and fight those terrorists in Afghanistan.' And I did, and then God would tell me, 'George go and end the tyranny in Iraq,' and I did."

And "now again", Mr Bush is quoted as telling the two, "I feel God's words coming to me: 'Go get the Palestinians their state and get the Israelis their security, and get peace in the Middle East.' And by God, I'm gonna do it."

Mr Abbas remembers how the US President told him he had a "moral and religious obligation" to act. The White House has refused to comment on what it terms a private conversation. But the BBC account is anything but implausible, given how throughout his presidency Mr Bush, a born-again Christian, has never hidden the importance of his faith.

From the outset he has couched the "global war on terror" in quasi-religious terms, as a struggle between good and evil. Al-Qa'ida terrorists are routinely described as evil-doers. For Mr Bush, the invasion of Iraq has always been part of the struggle against terrorism, and he appears to see himself as the executor of the divine will. He told Bob Woodward - whose 2004 book, Plan of Attack, is the definitive account of the administration's road to war in Iraq - that after giving the order to invade in March 2003, he walked in the White House garden, praying "that our troops be safe, be protected by the Almighty". As he went into this critical period, he told Mr Woodward, "I was praying for strength to do the Lord's will.

"I'm surely not going to justify war based upon God. Understand that. Nevertheless, in my case, I pray that I will be as good a messenger of His will as possible. And then of course, I pray for forgiveness."

Another telling sign of Mr Bush's religion was his answer to Mr Woodward's question on whether he had asked his father - the former president who refused to launch a full-scale invasion of Iraq after driving Saddam Hussein from Kuwait in 1991 - for advice on what to do.
The current President replied that his earthly father was "the wrong father to appeal to for advice ... there is a higher father that I appeal to".

Why is it that so few people feel unease at reading these words? Why is it that so few people realize the danger of an elected official openly claiming to be doing the "will of God", regardless of what it is, and when that leader is making a decision to go to war???

How would we feel, for example, if Mr. Bush had said, "I consulted with the Wiccan Priests on this decision..." Or, "I laid a fleece out in the grass and asked God to repeat Gideon's experiment for me..." Or if our leader consulted an Oiuja (sp?) board...? We wouldn't feel very well about it at all, if we had a brain to think about it at all.

I also found this satirical comment on religion quite amusing:

Once again, we come to the Holiday Season, a deeply religious time that each of us observes, in his own way, by going to the mall of his choice.

It's almost that time again...

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Technorati tags:
Religion, Fear, Church-state

Shawshank Sunday

I've decided to run a series, every Sunday, considering literary, philosophical, and general points that can be inferred from Stephen King's The Shawshank Redemption. I read this novella when I was about 13, and it was one of my favorites...and still is to this day.

1. Shawshank Sunday I: Brooks vs. Red (11-20-2005)


2. Shawshank Sunday II: The Danger of Hope (11-27-2005)


3. Shawshank Sunday III: Psychogeolochemistry (12-4-2005)


4. Shawshank Sunday IV: Jake's Anthro (12-11-2005)


5. Shawshank Sunday V: Stoicism (1-1-2006)


6. Shawshank Sunday VI: Identity (1-15-2006)

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Technorati tags:
Shawshank, God, Religion, Philosophy

Shawshank Sunday I: Brooks vs. Red

Let's consider two of the characters from the novella--Brooks and Red:

Brooks had been imprisoned for more than 2/3 of his entire life. So had Red. Both were murderers. Both were young men as they entered prison, hard as the entered, broken as they left.

One commits suicide upon his discharge from prison, and the other barely averts it.

What made the difference? What decided Brooks' fate versus Red's? That is the thought of the day...

Both men, upon entering the big wide world after their prison discharge, find it a terribly scary place. For one thing, their "institutionalized" minds are used to structure, uniformity, and an authority to make decisions for them. The world, and its constituent freedoms, pose a daunting challenge for these men. How will they regain intellectual autonomy? Moral autonomy?

Brooks talks about wanting to commit another robbery, just so that he can go back "home". He associates the prison with safety = a known environment, a known set of standards and rules. I think we can learn something from this. People fear the unknown. This isn't a deep insight on my part, but a time-tested and proven fact of nature.

Red fears the unknown too. How does one find their way in a dark room? You have to start with some kind marker, something to identify with, something to give you direction. What makes the difference between these two men? Well...

The difference is that Red chose the compass, while Brooks chose the gun. When Red is shown (in the movie) strolling by the Pawn Shop, he stops to look in the window. He sees a gun (a way out, escape from "being afraid all the time") and he sees a compass (a symbol of retaining hope and "going for it"). Red says to himself, "hell with it, get busy livin', or get busy dyin' [symbolically]," by choosing the compass. But why?

Simple answer: there is no compass there for Brooks. Brooks hangs himself because he has no alternative. He is afraid of the unknown, and short of returning to the known, "safe" world of prison, he opts instead for choosing the known, "safe" escape from fear--death itself.

Both men came to the same place--a beam. To one man, it represented a foundation, a marker, a place to start. He writes, "Brooks was here" to show any/all who care that he wasn't just a transitory, soulless creature, but a human being. Another man (Red) sees the beam, and it represents a tombstone--his friend's eulogy.

Red had hope because Andy had hope. Brooks did not have Andy in his life. Red had a compass because Andy left him a direction (north end of the field, big oak tree...). Brooks had no place to go from that beam, and nothing to help him find his way. Andy represents a sort of Savior to Red. But Andy is no demi-god, no deity...only a man who refused to be broken as Red had. Generally, people call this sort of thing "pride," but Andy shows us that pride and sin are sometimes equivocated as "hope". That we can choose to be strong, and that we must.

Stephen King published "Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption" in a set of four novellas entitled, Different Seasons. This story was meant to be the "Spring" of those seasons--a time of change and hope. Red showed us that man can come to a place of fear, encircled by the unknown, and can choose to find his own way. He can stare in the face of death, in the face of fear, and not blink...but instead, smile. He could smile because he could see his friend smiling. And his friend could smile because he never let them break him.

"Brooks was here."

"Red was too."

I think there is something deep here to what King was showing us: What tombstone will we leave behind? How much hope will we spread? How do we handle fear, and the unknown? How many of us have a compass, or directions, versus a rope or a gun? We will all lose our way, at some point in our lives. What then?

How many of us read the tombstones of those gone on before? Which tombstones do we stay at a while? Which do we identify with? Does it comfort us to hold death as "the great unknown" or fill us with fear? How many of us need certainty and a homogeneous worldview?

Sum quod eris / Fui quod sis

Non sum qualis eram
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Technorati tags:
Shawshank, Philosophy

ID-iots Show Their True Colors

Let's see them squirm their way away from this one...or are people too stupid to notice? I'm just not sure anymore.

On the Discovery Institute (the Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture) website, they list the supposedly-“peer reviewed” scientific journal literature of their ID-iotic proponents. Well, I found, in one case, they certainly found a "friend" on the editorial board at one of these publications...and he is certainly peerless. The list:

1. Stephen Meyer, “The Origin of Biological Information and the Higher Taxonomic Categories” Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington 117 (2004):213-239.


2. Lönnig, W.-E. Dynamic genomes, morphological stasis and the origin of irreducible complexity, Dynamical Genetics, Pp. 101-119. PDF HTML


3. Jonathan Wells, “Do Centrioles Generate a Polar Ejection Force? Rivista di Biologia/Biology Forum 98 (2005): 37-62. Abstract


4. Scott Minnich and Stephen C. Meyer, “Genetic Analysis of Coordinate Flagellar and Type III Regulatory Circuits,” Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Design & Nature, Rhodes Greece, edited by M.W. Collins and C.A. Brebbia (WIT Press, 2004).

Hmmm…not quite an anthology, given the fact that the DI rides on like $20M per annum and has all these stellar credentials they’re paying the big bucks to do “research”…anyways. Let’s focus on reference 3, Wells’ paper.

When we visit the journal’s website, the editorial board includes, guess who? None other than Giuseppe Sermonti.You know? The guy who wrote “Why is a Fly not a Horse?”…a book which claimed, among other things, that insects appeared in the fossil record before plants, and specifically that leaf insects appeared before leaves. Quite a laugh riot.

Paleontologists everywhere, botanists and entomologists alike, shared a puzzled, “WTF,” look, then went back to characterizing the factual evidence (tongue-in-cheek...as if they read the damn thing).

Panda’s Thumb called the DI out on this blatant stack of lies, since their front man Behe repeated them, and since the DI Press published a book full of lies. No surprise that only crickets chirp in response. So, PT then published a pretty extensive critical review of the book, one in which the reviewer, (a fellow Italian) Dr. Andrea Bottaro, clearly shows Giuseppe Sermonti’s fallacies and factual errors for what they are.

Anyways, Sermonti recently posted an article which I almost fell out of my seat as I read.

Why, you ask? Simple: in this article, posted right on the CRSC website, Sermonti makes a case for Genesis being scientific!!

For the Darwinists, who in Kansas have abandoned the field, anyone who opposes Darwin is a poorly concealed religious fundamentalist. In Italy, by the way, the religious argument has never come into the debate; in fact, said debate does not even exist, as the Darwinists are much too convinced that truth lies with them to wish to waste time discussing the matter. G.L. Schroeder, in his book Genesis and the Big Bang (1991), thoroughly documents how the Book of Genesis is not a mythological cosmogony or a fairytale for children, as the Darwinists define it, but rather an insightful and scientific account, comparable to modern cosmology. "They reflect the same reality, described in different terminology."…

Genesis and Natural Selection
One difference between the two pictures deserves attention: in the Bible the great classes of creatures appear successively and autonomously; in the theory of evolution, each gradually derives from the transformation of the preceding one: from fish, amphibians; from amphibians, reptiles; from reptiles, mammals. The process of transformation of the classes is for Darwin a logical necessity, in order to avoid recourse to successive emergencies that might require repeated interventions of the Creator.

In two words, the theory of evolution is a revision of Genesis, or, in religious terms, a Biblical heresy. Genesis proclaims: "God said: 'Let there be light…Let there be a firmament…Let the waters…gather into one one…Let the earth bring forth grass…Let there be lights in the firmament…Let the waters bring forth abundantly…Let the earth bring forth creatures of every kind…Let us make man…" Darwin concludes his Origin of Species with a hymn to Life: "…with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one…" Atheism is an afterthought and not an inevitable consequence of Darwinism.

Wow.

What I guess I find so gee-golly-damn amazing is that the Discovery Institute, ever so proper about keeping itself all science and no creationism…even published this. I mean, these guys fall all over themselves trying to convince thinking people that book titles like Dembski's, Intelligent Design: The Bridge Between Science & Theology...

That those books don't mean anything...

They even linked to it on their front page. Of course, I guess one must consider that Sermonti’s book was published by their press (since no academic publisher in Europe would touch it with a ten foot pole). And thus, they may feel they actually have to stand behind this guy's "facts" and "definition of science..." I wouldn’t be surprised at all if they pulled this one from their website. They're gonna definitely get some fallout over it.

No worry, as I have already saved it as a backup just in case...
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Technorati tags:
Intelligent Design, Evolution, Creationism, Evolution-creation

First Post

This will be a personal blog, with commentary on politics, philosophy, culture, etc.

I've written some essays that I will post from recent years.

...enjoy