Smell Crisped Hair?

Wow.

I just read an amazing evaluation of the amicus briefs filed by the Discovery Institute, the presumptuously self-titled "Foundation for Thought and Ethics", and a group of self-described "Biologists and Other Scientists in Support of Defendants" on behalf of the defendants in the Dover Design Trial (henceforth, DDT...snicker). The Plaintiff's Response contains the full-text, but the real zingers were:

In short, the amicus briefs add nothing new to the argument for intelligent design as science. What could have been helpful to the Court, and was uniquely in control of the amicus organizations, is some explanation why the Discovery Institute’s and FTE’s own descriptions of their mission and activities as Christian apologetics are not dispositive of the religious nature of intelligent design.5

As one obvious example, the Discovery Institute does not explain — literally does not say a word about - the organization’s Wedge Document (P140), which sets forth the goals and objectives of the intelligent-design movement. The Governing Goals of the Discovery Institute are “[t]o defeat scientific materialism and its destructive moral, cultural and political legacies” and “[t]o replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God.” P140. The Wedge Document is no anomaly, but rather reflective of the positions of the Discovery Institute and the intelligent-design movement’s leaders, such as Phillip Johnson (originator of the “Wedge” strategy described in the Wedge Document), 10: 16-17 (Forrest), William Dembski (avowed Christian apologist who advocates intelligent design as the theology of John the Apostle translated into the technical language of information theory), P357; 11: 18,48-50, 55 (Forrest), and Stephen Meyer (director of the Discovery Institute, and advocate of intelligent design as “the God hypothesis.”).6 P332; 552 (Pennock); 11: 31 (Forrest)

Similarly, the FTE declines to address facts that it is best situated to explain. Numerous documents in evidence reveal FTE to be a religious organization with religious objectives, not a scientific one pursuing scientific aims. P12; P28; P168A; P566; P633; 10:90-92, 96-101 (Forrest). The FTE ignores all this evidence in its amicus brief.

In a pre-trial hearing in this case, FTE president Jon Buell attributed religious descriptions of his organization, in legally required public filings he had signed, to mistakes by lawyers and accountants. The Court can decide whether Mr. Buell and the FTE were filing false documents with the federal government and the State of Texas, or whether they were instead misrepresenting themselves to this Court, by disowning the religious agenda stated in those documents. The overwhelming evidence from Mr. Buell’s own writings regarding his and FTE’s Christian, creationist objectives gives the Court ample basis to make that judgment. P12; P28; P168A; P566; P633; 10:90-92,96-101 (Forrest). Either way, the FTE’s submission is entitled to no credence or respect from this Court.

This is particularly true of the FTE’s rationalization for the substitution of the phrase “intelligent design” for “creation” in versions of Pandas prepared after Edwards. FTE makes the impossibly silly argument that by discarding the words “creation” and “creationism” found in early drafts, the FTE expressly rejected creationism. FTE Brief at 17. The only way the drafting history of Pandas could be interpreted as rejecting creationism is if the authors had discarded not just the word, but the explanation of what the word means — “various forms of life began abruptly through an intelligent agency with their distinctive features already intact — fish with fins and scales, birds with feathers, beaks, and wings, etc.” The retention of the central creationist concepts using a different term, “intelligent design,” dictates only one inference: intelligent design equals creationism.

If this were not true, surely the FTE would have provided an explanation in its brief for why Pandas was written by two admittedly creationist authors, one of whom was an advocate for creation science in the federal courts, and for why Buell thought that the Edwards ruling on creation science would matter so much to the financial success of Pandas. P350; 10: 102-104, 126-128 (Forrest). But there is no discussion of these facts.

In summary, the amicus originations [sic] have a lot of explaining to do. But they studiously avoid their own words and history, which reveal the religious content of intelligent design.

What all three amici are clearly devoted to is getting the Court to blame any Establishment Clause violation on the defendant board members — without addressing the facts that show that the Board was right in understanding intelligent design to be a religious, God-friendly alternative to the theory of evolution. FTE has stated in a fundraising letter that if the Court “rule[s] narrowly, focusing only on the school board’s action and not ruling on the status of Pandas … that would be great news.”7 (emphasis in original). The Discovery Institute and the FTE, having provided the Dover Board with the idea and the materials to advance its religious agenda, are content to throw the Board under the legal bus, so long as it does not involve the exposure of intelligent design as an inherently religious proposition.

The reason for this approach is obvious: it allows the FTE and Discovery Institute to fight on in the culture wars — perhaps in school boards in Kansas or Ohio — where they may be able to exert greater control over the message broadcast by government officials, avoid the type of rigorous cross-examination applied in this case to expose intelligent design’s alleged scientific underpinning to be an empty vessel, and suppress the kind of revealing acknowledgments of the religious reasons for promoting intelligent design made by Dover school board members.8 As FTE and Discovery Institute attorney Wenger recently explained to a church audience, the Dover Board could have improved its case for intelligent design by being “clever as serpents.”9

If there is anything I can possibly say that has not already been said about this trial, it is this: The DI had really been ousted for exactly what they are by this case. From their betrayal of the defendants' counsel, their duplicity in supporting and opposing the teaching of ID, Behe's absolute meltdown on the stand in admitting he would like a science which included astrology in order to incorporate ID, their empty "lists" of scientists...

...people, wake up! How long does it take, knowing this group started out with a title which clearly stated its objective--"The Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture", to figure out that this is a politico-religious movement and has nothing to do with science?

Go read some facts, note the changing name and banners* of the DI, note that all of "Intelligent Design" is contained within the DI and their fellows...and freakin' think!

*the picture in the later versions of the banner is fortuitously known as the "eye of God"...hmmm...
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Technorati tags:
Discovery Institute, Intelligent Design, Evolution, Creationism

Abby and Her Five Senses

Recently I've had abiogenesis on my mind. After reading a PT post on the topic, I started thinking about how abiogenesis is so much like cosmology. I wrote recently about my attitude towards the unknown--that I view rational skepticism as the best approach to both (ab and cos). Some people give up with "goddidit" while others believe the answers are already in hand.

Why is it that so many fundies see methodological naturalism as "faith"? They say things like, "i have faith god made everything, you have faith things made themselves," (which is of course a straw man, considering the 1st Law and cosmology and etc.)...without realizing [one of] the huge difference[s]--that while evidence has shown time and again that observable phenomena are the result of natural law, no evidence has ever shown observable phenomena to be the result of "supernatural" activity. In fact, it is just this line of reasoning that leads me to conclude that life on earth is the result of chemistry and physics. Obviously, god can still fit in the picture as the maker/guider of chemistry and physics, but that doesn't appeal to most theists. And usually they conclude that naturalistic philosophy leads one to dismiss "evidence" that purportedly supports a supernatural cause, yet they acknowledge that rational naturalistic scenarios always fit the bill, and that Occam's razor slices god right out of the picture.

I recently compiled some really good articles on my website in list fashion regarding abiogenesis. I specifically focused on publications reviewing homochirality and other frequently-touted “problems” for abiogenesis (mostly Bonner pubs). For those of you without the access or time to look them up, this could prove a valuable resource. Also, in one of the listed pubs, Lindahl, from TA&M, put together a very good review (2004) that takes us from organic chemistry to extant metabolism via “Quasi-steady state systems”…worth your read. Keep in mind that copyright laws apply to these full-text PDFs.
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Technorati tags: abiogenesis, Faith, God, Religion, Philosophy

Shawshank Sunday IV: Jake's Anthro

Brooks Hatlen was an important part of the redemption story of Andy Dufresne. Brooks was, in many ways, Andy's antithesis. Brooks provided for us the contrast of what is was like to lose hope. It has been said that Brooks' crow, Jake, was meant to provide symbolism and possibly even link Hatlen to "the Birdman of Alcatraz." If one only watched the movie, and did not read the book, a deeper sort of symbolism would largely be lost on them.

When Brooks receives his parole, and tries to find a way to stay at Shawshank by threatening to kill Heywood, readers of Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption will have noted the departure from the King novella. A further departure from the source is found in the part that Jake plays in this movie.

While in the novella, Brooks finds the baby crow, nurses it back to health, releases it, and we find out what happened to Jake...this does not happen in the movie.

In both movie and novella, Jake could serve as an obvious symbol of freedom after captivity. But the consequence of captivity upon Jake can only be inferred from the book form of the story. In the book, Jake is found within the prison yard after his release...dead.

This is a realistic depiction of what would likely happen to a bird which was hand-fed and raised with no knowledge of predators or how to find food. It is also a realistic depiction of what happens to men who are institutionalized to the point that they do not know how to handle freedom. Prison can take away the ability to make a decision, to independently choose action without supervision or assistance.

The role that Brooks plays, as Andy's antithesis, is to show a man who lost his hope. Brooks does not believe that it can get better for him, and is "tired of being afraid".

Where Andy is the hero and Brooks his antithesis, Red's part falls between these two characters. Red will choose whether or not to hope, whether or not to go on after his institutionalization. But his choice is inextricably linked to our hero and to Brooks. The impact of both men is apparent in Red. Those familiar with the story know that Red chooses to hope largely due to a promise made to Andy--to go find the rock that he promised Andy he would find.

Red is almost the personification of Jake, but he "belongs to" Andy while Jake belonged to Brooks. While Brooks failed to instill the values Jake needed to survive before releasing him, Andy infused his own strength, character, and hope into Red. Just as what we nurture becomes dependent on us, Red came to a place where he realized the truth of Andy's words, and he needed to see his friend:

Red: I don't think you ought to be doing this to yourself, Andy. This is just shitty pipedreams. I mean, Mexico is way the hell down there and you're in here, and that's the way it is.

Andy: Yeah, right. That's the way it is. It's down there and I'm in here. I guess it comes down to a simple choice, really. Get busy livin' or get busy dyin'...Promise me, Red. If you ever get out, find that spot. In the base of that wall, you'll find a rock that has no earthly business in a Maine hayfield. A piece of black, volcanic glass. There's something buried under it I want you to have.

Red: [after Andy's escape and his own parole] All I do anymore is think of ways to break my parole so maybe they'd send me back. Terrible thing to live in fear. Brooks Hatlen knew it. Knew it all too well. All I want is to be back where things make sense. Where I won't have to be afraid all the time. Only one thing stops me. A promise I made to Andy...
Get busy livin', or get busy dyin'. That's god-damn right.

Red was able to choose to live because Andy gave him something that allowed it--hope.

Jake died because Brooks, codependent, made Jake just like himself--without the ability to make it on his own.

In that way, Red is like Andy's Jake. And when Andy released Red, he flew away free and lived.
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Technorati tags:
Hope, Faith, Shawshank

Shawshank Sunday III: Psychogeolothermodynamics

Andy is depicted as an isotherm. I am usually an adiabat. Let me explain...

Long before Andy received his rock pick to shape the rocks that he was collecting from the ground of the Shawshank yard, he was an isotherm. Red commented on how Andy appeared to the others as he collected his rocks:

He had a quiet way about him, a walk and a talk that just wasn't normal around here. He strolled. like a man in a park without a care or worry. Like he had on an invisible coat that would shield him from this place.

Red narrated, after the escape:

In 1966, Andy Dufresne escaped from Shawshank prison. All they found of him was a muddy set of prison clothes, a bar of soap, and an old rock hammer, damn near worn down to the nub. I used to think it would take six-hundred years to tunnel under the wall with it. Old Andy did it in less than twenty. Oh, Andy loved Geology, I guess it appealed to his meticulous nature. An ice age here, million years of mountain building there. Geology is the study of pressure and time. That's all it takes really, pressure, and time. That, and a big god-damned poster.

Prison is like a pressure cooker. And from the ideal gas law, pV = nRT, we know that when pressure is increased, if the volume of the container does not change, and if the amount of substance inside the container does not change (n), the temperature must increase.

Under pressure, I suppose we can all learn to expand our minds a bit, or give our souls room to grow. That takes some of the pressure off. Some containers expand more easily than others. But inside a prison for a crime you didn't commit, being raped by grown men, abused by officials...those things cause the mind and soul to atrophy.

So how did poor Andy not just break, like the other men? How is it he didn't meltdown? How is it he retained hope? Well, it is evident from his "invisible coat," and his insistence upon retaining hope (see Shawshank Sunday I or II), and identifying with his previous life through chess and teaching others...that Andy did not melt down. Further, the "invisible coat" he had on long before he knew he planned to escape the pressure cooker. He wanted the rock hammer to make chess pieces with, and it was fortuitous for him that the walls of his prison were old and cheap, and fortuitous for him that he was on an end unit of a cell block, and that he was a "pet prisoner" who avoided surprise inspections, and got to keep his poster up to cover his escape. He wanted the rock hammer just to keep his mind sane, in other words, but he got a lot more, and a lot of luck.

Take an airtight container with some fixed moles of gas at a given pressure, volume, and temperature. Put this container in a hydraulic press. Push the button to begin increasing pressure. Put your hand on the side of the container. It is warmer than it was before. If the container is an adiabat, it will exchange no heat with the surroundings. If the container is an isotherm, it will exchange the maximum heat with the surroundings, and reachieve the pre-work temperature.

Andy is depicted as an isotherm. I am usually an adiabat. Put us both under pressure, and we both feel the heat immediately. It is whether or not the heat dissipates that determines whether we have isotherms or adiabats.

Andy is like a scuba tank, placed into the water beside the boat, to be refilled with gas. If you don't put scuba tanks in the water to refill them, they will not exchange as much heat with the air as they would with the water. If you don't allow a container to exchange heat with the surroundings, it will be limited by the pressure it can withstand, (like a scuba tank, which has a given psi rating and gauge) and will not be able to hold as much substance as a container under the same pressure which is losing heat to the surroundings. So, tanks filled while immersed in water end up giving divers more air, and more time to dive.

Andy was put under great stress at Shawshank. He never lost hope. He never lost his identity. They never broke him.

Andy is just as susceptible to the pressure as all the other men. He is supposed to be human, as they are. The human container is of a universal material, and its contents may change in quality, but not in quantity.

Andy was able to release the heat generated from the pressure of prison. Red surmised, later on, that if things had continued as they started for Andy, working in the laundry and fighting off "The Sisters" all the time, that Andy would have eventually broken. But the warden learned of Andy's prior occupation, and put him in the library to put his gifts to use. Andy then had some lucky things going for him. But if his state of mind was not one which was open, and willing to hope, and bold, he would never have escaped. It is not enough that the luck happened. He was already an isotherm.

We are all adiabats at times, and isotherms at others. A container which is covered in Styrofoam is naturally adiabatic. A thin-walled container (or a container with a low heat capacity) immersed in a fluid is isothermal. Andy is fictional. We are not. In reality, no isothermal system can be thought of that is both well-insulated and able to exchange maximum heat. At times we need our insulation to protect us from the influences of our environment. Containers put under pressure, and with a simultaneously-raised surroundings temperature, do not last very long at all. The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics tells us that heat exchange always proceeds downhill--if the container is not warmer than its environment, it needs to be insulated when put under pressure, or it will likely explode.

An interesting property of adiabats and isotherms can be seen in the density state plot versus temperature (see here)--it is the actualization of what Nernst said about the 3rd Law in 1906:

The entropy change of a system during a reversible isothermal process tends towards zero when the thermodynamic temperature of the system tends towards zero [Nernst 'principle'].

The ability to perform an adiabatic, gas compression-type process approaches zero as temperature approaches absolute zero. All processes become isothermal near 0K. Why? The 2nd Law. Heat will flow from the system outward to the surroundings when the surroundings are near 0K. It is impossible to do work upon a cylinder of gas (compress it) without raising the surroundings temperature near 0K.

Sometimes we need to prevent the surroundings from cracking us. Times of solitude and quiet, meditation and rest. Sometimes we need to get away from the high temperature of the surroundings, and insulation is the only way to protect ourselves.

Sometimes we need to remove this insulation, remove the thick walls that separate us from one another, immerse ourselves in others, and allow energy to freely exchange. If the surroundings are so damn cold, without energy, and we have some to spare...let Nernst's principle rule.
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Technorati tags:
Hope, Faith, Shawshank, Philosophy

Angels and Flakes (On My Shoulder)

Inspiration sometimes comes from the most unlikely of places. Those people we all know who seem to bounce from one religious persuasion to another, seemingly week to week, happened to serve as today’s inspiration. That’s right, religious flakes…they inspired me today.

The thought that hit me was this: those people are genuinely seeking something. Sure, my ultra-conservative friends might claim that what those people are seeking is really just a religion that suits them, that they are in some way running from the “absolute truth”, but when all is said and done, it cannot be denied that these people are seeking some way to worship and/or understand God. So why is this worth mentioning? Well, the premise that a God exists who genuinely wants to be found requires a bit of inspection in the face of the fact of these people’s existence.

Reading the Bible, there were a whole lot of people that really weren’t in the process of “seeking” God who were nonetheless apprehended by Him. I think of Moses, of Saul of Tarsus, of Peter fishing and Matthew collecting taxes. I think of so many people portrayed in the Bible as just going about their daily business, people interrupted by God. I won’t delve into how the God’s presence and revelation in the lives of people who didn’t seem to be inviting it seems to contradict the tenets of free will. What I want to focus on, though, is that this same appearance doesn’t seem to occur for so many “God chasers”.

My dad kept Tommy Tenney’s famous, “The God Chasers” in a little basket in the WC for convenient reading times. In it, the author’s major premise is that there are certain people who love to chase after God Himself, who turns around and allows Himself to be “caught” at times just as a dad playing with his child would. The picture Pastor Tenney paints is one of a loving God who loves to interact with His children.

This whole picture bothers me, as I think of the flakes in the world. I see so many of them praying with passion to their crystal, or through hands clasped on some icon/relic, and I see in them an authentic desperation to hear back from the One to whom they pray. They aren’t asking for a new Lexus, or for a miracle healing…they just want some validation that they are finally using the right method to talk to Him. But by the very fact that they bounce from place to place, and from the fact that such people exist at all, we can ascertain that God is not easily “caught”.

Ask for a little interaction from the Big Guy, and you’ll be told you are “tempting” (testing) God. Forget that God let Himself be tested by Gideon and Elijah and a bunch of other folks…those were the days “before the Holy Spirit”. Quite odd, isn’t it, that the HS doesn’t seem to suffice like a nice clear sign from the heavens for most folks?

Why is it that God freely offered Himself to people who were going along their daily lives without Him, but supposedly people who are asking God just to talk to them don’t get an answer because they are “tempting the Lord [thy] God”…? Does that make sense to anyone else?

Sooo…that is the angel speaking from my shoulder today, a little flake with a lot to say.

[Originally posted 10-13-2005 on my website.]
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Technorati tags: Faith, God

Of Claws and Clauses: I

This was originally published 10/21/2005 on my old UF plaza website.

Of Claws and Clauses: I

All of us readers of Jurassic Park know a thing or two about nonlinear dynamics. The character Ian, played by Jeff Goldblum, describes Chaos theory, using the eloquent example of the “butterfly effect” to articulate its application: initial conditions that slightly change in nonlinear dynamical systems lead to an incredibly unpredictable, yet still nonrandom, outcome. Specifically, ‘a butterfly flaps its wings in Peking, and you get rain instead of sunshine in Central Park.

The Big Bang is one such nonlinear system. Even knowing ALL the initial conditions would not allow one to accurately predict the outcome of the system, even though there are no “floating parameters” in the model, per se. I was recently reading on the ramifications of the Big Bang for theology in a various number of sources, and was unsurprised at the “spin” that each side applies: the theists use the unknown as proof of the unknowable (epitome of “God of the gaps”-type logic)−God’s intervention/creation, while the atheists use the unknown as an example of scientific horizon−yet undiscovered, but soon to be discovered (i.e. man is able to know everything, eventually).

At t = 0, spacetime itself does not yet exist, and all the matter and energy of the universe converge into a point of infinite density and temperature. This “unknown” is dubbed a singularity. This is a mathematical term, often used for nonlinear dynamical systems. Simply put, we conclude that the laws of physics as we know them today evolved out of this singularity, and so it is quite illogical to attempt to apply those same laws to the singularity itself. Even cause and effect is a Newtonian principle which quantum uncertainty and quantum fluctuations do not appear to obey now. Considering this, is it logical to apply causation to the Big Bang itself?

Some of the old-school cosmologists were so bothered by the presence of the singularity they attempted to present evidence for a “steady state” universe, one in which there was no t = 0, but rather an actual infinity. They failed. Some of the new-school cosmologists (Hawking, Turok, et al) have used other hypotheses (supergravity and string theory, respectively) to circumvent, or to at least explain in some logical way, the singularity itself.

I find myself falling somewhere in between those who attach a label of “hopeless” to such efforts and those who have full faith in human progress to the extreme that they feel everything will one day be known. I think of myself like Alan from Jurassic Park, who held on to a dinosaur claw until he felt it became irrelevant and ridiculous. I want to hold on to my skepticism that mankind will ever know with any degree of certainty the physical mechanisms that brought our current universe into being…and only cast it aside when I am sitting in the presence of this knowledge. Just as the velociraptor claw served as both a relic and evidence of a past we used to be 100% ignorant of, I am sure that my skepticism is a relic of the “Schoolmaster”/modernist clash, and the necessity to hold on to a reminder will not last forever.

I don’t think we will forever need to remind ourselves to reject pure faith (without reason), but for the time being, my nihilistic tendencies keep me clinging to a philosophy best described as original (authentic) Sophism, something that may now be best described in Ayn Rand’s Objectivism, as I am highly skeptical, cynical and in some ways postmodern (mostly towards logical positivists, and towards general idealists) regarding the potential of human knowledge and discovery.

In physics, if you walk into a room and find a ball laying on an impressionable floor, you may be able to reconstruct where the ball was thrown from, and with what initial force (F = ma). However, if the ball is one of those blasted “Super Bouncy Balls”, and if the floor is concrete…good luck.

I am skeptical enough to still consider it rational to believe that our universe may indeed be a super bouncy ball that hit concrete (imperfect surface, of course, to maintain nonlinear dynamics) an unknowable amount of times before coming to rest.

For us to come along and find the ball and proclaim that our current laws of physics applied to the singularity is ridiculous (yet this is what “Kalam” arguments do−insisiting on “cause and effect” instead of giving way to quantum indeterminacy), and yet to proclaim that the quantum cosmologies hold a satisfying solution is…well…to me…aptly labeled “sophistry” in the colloquial sense of the word.

I like to think of myself as one of those guys who approaches the “elastic clause” of the Constitution with the same caution that I approach the “elastic laws” of the singularity, holding onto something tangiable for the time being, until evidence arises to convince me that my stance is outmoded, superceded, and unreasonable. Sort of writing a clause into my own scientific constitution, allowing myself the pleasure of maintaining skepticism and full rationality, with no hint of dichotomy.

[part 2]
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Technorati tags: God, Big Bang, Cosmology

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