Category: IDiots

If you read my blog, you will see posts about Intelligent Design and its crazy way of making life very interesting.

However, occasionally something comes along that is truly ticklish. Try this article out of The Panda’s Thumb on for size.

It makes me wonder if the researcher, Brian Alter, didn’t do it on purpose.

The intelligent design movement has it’s moments, and this is one of them.

A Scientist from the University of Texas, Eric Pianka, who spoke about a possible “crash” in human population due to many reasons, has been reported to the Department of Homeland Security and is receiving death threats and unfriendly looks.

For better coverage see Pharyngula, Austringer, or just Google.

Well! What exciting news out of Ohio! The state school board removed language from the curriculum requiring “critical analysis” of evolution. I won’t get into the details, as they are better covered at The Panda’s Thumb, but there was a quote in the NY Times that floored me. Here it is.

“It’s an outrageous slap in the face to the citizens of Ohio,” said John G. West, associate director of the Center for Science and Culture at the [Discovery] institute, referring to several polls that show public support for criticism of evolution in science classes.

“The effort to try to suppress ideas that you dislike, to use the government to suppress ideas you dislike, has a failed history,” Mr. West said. “Do they really want to be on the side of the people who didn’t want to let John Scopes talk or who tried to censor Galileo?”

The Discovery Instutitue using Galileo and Scopes as an example of their ideology’s persecution? That is truly spinning my head. If I could hook it up to a generator, I’m sure I could power this computer with it. Let’s review, shall we:

• The Scopes trial focused on a man be prosecuted for violating state law by teaching evolutionary theory in the classroom.
• Galileo was censored by the Church not because the Church didn’t believe the science, but because the Copernican worldview conflicted with the Aristotelian dogma that the heavens were perfect and unchanging. In another word: Politics.

Of these two examples, only the second has any applicability to today’s situation, and that is only if you ignore all of the cultural developments made since the 17th century. Today, we are not in the habit of ignoring scientific evidence just because somebody told us to. We’ve had nearly 400 years to separate (sometimes successfully, sometimes not) the scientific process from the political process.

Suffice to say, that quote amuses me.

A British philosopher was quoted in the Atlanta Journal Constitution today saying, “A super-intelligence is the only good explanation for the origin of life and the complexity of nature.” This philosopher, Antony Flew, has been a devout atheist (if that is not an oxymoron) for a good while now. Check out his wikipedia entry for more information.

Deeper in the article comes what makes me wonder what the heck this guy is doing? If he is as respectable and educated as he apparently is, why is he making this “Argument from Incredulity” as quoted here? “‘It has become inordinately difficult even to begin to think about constructing a naturalistic theory of the evolution of that first reproducing organism.”

The Argument from Incredulity is defined is several locations: Talk Origins, EvoWiki, and others. The one I like the best is from Richard Dawkins’ The Blind Watchmaker, which I will briefly paraphrase.

The example of the polar bear being white has been used as an argument against natural selection. The argument goes, “Polar bears have no need to be white because they don’t need to hide from anything. I find it hard to believe they evolved that way therefore they must have been designed.” Whereas what they really mean is, “I, sitting here in my chair, with no experience concerning polar bears or the arctic, can think of no reason off the top of my head for polar bears to be white.” Mr. Dawkins uses one example of a selective pressure on polar bears to indicate there are perfectly good reasons for polar bears to be able to blend into the arctic landscape: the prey they hunt will run if they see a big ravenous bear coming, so it makes good sense for polar bears to be white.

I won’t get deeper into the quote, particularly concerning “…evolution of that first reproducing organism,” because I’m not qualified to discuss it, but a renowned philospher who says he has “scientific” reasons for acknowledging the existence of a divine designer should know better than to use this argument.