Woohoo! Brad Bird gets the Oscar for Best Animated Film.

Here's a great interview, he tells it like it is.. check it out here.

One Skeptic's Argument Against Intelligent Design

Since we stayed around after the Oscars and discussed evolution and intelligent design; here's an interesting article from the New York Times on "intelligent design" being introduced into schools in addition to Evolution as a theory.

NYTimes

THE WAY WE LIVE NOW

Unintelligent Design
By JIM HOLT

Recently a school district in rural Pennsylvania officially recognized a supposed alternative to Darwinism. In a one-minute statement read by an administrator, ninth-grade biology students were told that evolution was not a fact and were encouraged to explore a different explanation of life called intelligent design.


What is intelligent design?

Its proponents maintain that living creatures are just too intricate to have arisen by evolution. Throughout the natural world, they say, there is evidence of deliberate design. Is it not reasonable, then, to infer the existence of an intelligent designer?

To evade the charge that intelligent design is a religious theory -- creationism dressed up as science -- its advocates make no explicit claims about who or what this designer might be. But students will presumably get the desired point.

As one Pennsylvania teacher observed:

''The first question they will ask is:
'Well, who's the designer? Do you mean God?'''

.


From a scientific perspective, one of the most frustrating things about intelligent design is that (unlike Darwinism) it is virtually impossible to test.

Old-fashioned biblical creationism at least risked making some hard factual claims -- that the earth was created before the sun, for example. Intelligent design, by contrast, leaves the purposes of the designer wholly mysterious. Presumably any pattern of data in the natural world is consistent with his/her/its existence.

But if we can't infer anything about the design from the designer, maybe we can go the other way.

What can we tell about the designer from the design? While there is much that is marvelous in nature, there is also much that is flawed, sloppy and downright bizarre. Some nonfunctional oddities, like the peacock's tail or the human male's nipples, might be attributed to a sense of whimsy on the part of the designer.

Others just seem grossly inefficient. In mammals,for instance, the recurrent laryngeal nerve does not go directly from the cranium to the larynx, the way any competent engineer would have arranged it. Instead, it extends down the neck to the chest, loops around a lung ligament and then runs back up the neck to the larynx.

In a giraffe, that means a 20-foot length of nerve where 1 foot would have done. If this is evidence of design, it it would seem to be of the unintelligent variety.




Such disregard for economy can be found throughout the natural order. Perhaps 99 percent of the species that have existed have died out. Darwinism has no problem with this, because random variation will inevitably produce both fit and unfit individuals. But what sort of designer would have fashioned creatures so out of sync with their environments that they were doomed to extinction?


The gravest imperfections in nature, though, are moral ones. Consider how humans and other animals are intermittently tortured by pain throughout their lives, especially near the end.

Our pain mechanism may have been designed to serve as a warning signal to protect our bodies from damage, but in the majority of diseases -- cancer, for instance, or coronary thrombosis -- the signal comes too late to do much good, and the horrible suffering that ensues is completely useless.

And why should the human reproductive system be so shoddily designed? Fewer than one third of conceptions culminate in live births. The rest end prematurely, either in early gestation or by miscarriage.

Nature appears to be an avid abortionist, which ought to trouble Christians who believe in both original sin and the doctrine that a human being equipped with a soul comes into existence at conception.

Souls bearing the stain of original sin, we are told, do not merit salvation. That is why, according to traditional theology, unbaptized babies have to languish in limbo for all eternity.

Owing to faulty reproductive design, it would seem that the population of limbo must be at least twice that of heaven and hell combined.





It is hard to avoid the inference that a designer responsible for such imperfections must have been lacking some divine trait -- benevolence or omnipotence or omniscience, or perhaps all three.

But what if the designer did not style each species individually? What if he/she/it merely fashioned the primal cell and then let evolution produce the rest, kinks and all? That is what the biologist and intelligent-design proponent Michael J. Behe has suggested.

Behe says that the little protein machines in the cell are too sophisticated to have arisen by mutation -- an opinion that his scientific peers overwhelmingly do not share. Whether or not he is correct, his version of intelligent design implies a curious sort of designer, one who seeded the earth with elaborately contrived protein structures and then absconded, leaving the rest to blind chance.

One beauty of Darwinism is the intellectual freedom it allows. As the arch-evolutionist Richard Dawkins has observed,

''Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.''

But Darwinism permits you to be an intellectually fulfilled theist, too. That is why Pope John Paul II was comfortable declaring that evolution has been ''proven true'' and that ''truth cannot contradict truth.''

If God created the universe wholesale rather than retail -- endowing it from the start with an evolutionary algorithm thatprogressively teased complexity out of chaos -- then imperfections in nature would be a necessary part of a beautiful process.



Of course proponents of intelligent design are careful not to use the G-word, because, as they claim, theirs is not a religiously based theory. Sobiology students can be forgiven for wondering whether the mysterious designer they're told about might not be the biblical God after all, but rather some very advanced yet mischievous or blundering intelligence -- extraterrestrial scientists, say. The important thing, as the Pennsylvania school administrator reminded them, is ''to keep an open mind.''

Jim Holt is a frequent contributor to the magazine.


Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

Evolutionists are jumping on the comic book wagon, check it out.

Holy Evolution, Darwin! Comics Take On Science

Quick note from previous blog about Michael Shermer

Here's a transcript for a debate with noted creationist Dr. Hugh Ross


And here's a debate to hear, in real audio that was held Boise State University, Idaho between Dr. Hugh Ross and Michael Shermer,that you can listen to by clicking here.

Last week (Wednesday), 7 of us went to see Michael Shermer speak on his new book "Science Friction"at the Los Angeles Public Library, I found some interesting closing remarks about a debate he had with a Professor at Talbot Seminary,on "Does God Exist? Where Does the Evidence Point?" It was held at the Church of the Rocky Peak in Chatsworth, CA, in the northwestern end of the San Fernando Valley

Finding Meaning in a Pointless Universe

"I am often asked by believers why I abandoned Christianity and how I found meaning in the meaningless universe presented by science. The implication is that the scientific worldview is an existentially depressing one. Without God, I am bluntly told, what's the point? If this is all there is, there is no use. To the contrary. For me, and for many of my colleagues, quite the opposite is true. The conjuncture of losing my religion, finding science, and discovering contingency was remarkably empowering and liberating. It gave me a sense of joy and freedom. Freedom to think for myself. Freedom to take responsibility for my own actions. Freedom to construct my own meanings. With the knowledge that this may be all there is, I was free to live life to the fullest extent possible.

For me, and not just for me, a world absent monsters, ghosts, demons, and gods unfetters the mind to soar to new heights, to think unthinkable thoughts, to imagine the unimaginable, to contemplate infinity and eternity knowing that no one is looking back. The universe takes on a whole new meaning when you know that your place in it was not foreordained, that it was not designed for us, indeed, that it was not designed at all. If we are nothing more than star stuff, how special life becomes. How inspiring it is to share in the sublimity of knowledge generated by other human minds, and perhaps to even make a tiny contribution toward that body of knowledge that will be passed down through the ages, part of the cumulative wisdom of a single species on a tiny planet orbiting an ordinary star on the remote edge of a not-so-unusual galaxy, itself a member of a cluster of galaxies millions of light years from nowhere. For me, the Hubble Telescope Deep Field photograph WFPC2, revealing as never before the rich density of galaxies in our neck of the universe (and reprinted in countless magazines, including the cover of Skeptic, Vol. 4, No.2), is as grand a statement about the sacred as any medieval cathedral.

Skeptics and scientists cannot experience the numinous? Nonsense. You do not need a spiritual power to experience the spiritual. You do not need to be mystical to appreciate the mystery. When I stood in Chartres cathedral with my soul mate, lit candles, and promised each other our eternal love, it was a more sacred moment than any I ever experienced. My unencumbered soul was free to love without constraint, free to use my senses to enjoy all the pleasures and endure all the pains that come with such love. I was enfranchised for life, emancipated from the bonds of restricting tradition, and unyoked from the rules written for another time in another place for another people. I was now free to try to live up to that exalted moniker--Homo sapiens--wise man."

To read more of this transcript check out. http://www.baptistwatch.org/content/shermer.html

Recently, Arthur Miller, the great playright died.


Last week they had several past interviews shown on Charlie Rose that proved to be really quite interesting...

One particular question that Arthur Miller answered proved to be really telling.

Charlie Rose asked

"If all of the famous writers, playrights, like Chekov, Tennessee Williams, Eugene O'Neil, Shakespeare and other greats from other times and nationalities were put on a pedestal, what would they share in common?"

Arthur Miller replied,

"I personally think that what the big ones have in common is a fierce moral sensibility, which is unquenchable and they are all burning with the same anger at the way the world is.

The little ones have made a peace with it, and the bigger ones can't make any peace. "

Gman's edit: NPR's got a series of Arthur Miller stories.

I find this site fantastic...

Renewing my faith in Public Radio, Last week they had a great segment on Moral Man and Immoral Society. Its about 20th century theologian Reinhold Niebuhr.

Reinhold Niebuhr wrote the famous Serenity Prayer that is recited today by millions, but in his time he was one of America's most influential thinkers and activists.

His ideas about history, war and politics were heeded by religious and atheist Americans alike.

In our time, there are calls on the left and the right for a "Niebuhr of our day".

Check it out. He was a friend of Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

http://speakingoffaith.publicradio.org/programs/niebuhr/

Here's a interesting quote for you to ponder over by Niebuhr.

"Religions grow out of the real experience in which tragedy mingles with beauty and man learns that the moral values which dignify his life are embattled in his own soul and imperiled in the world."

Heh. Proving conclusively, once-and-for-all which is mightier, the pen, or the sword?

"GoogleFIGHT!"

This is a site that pits the search returns on Google against one another. And in Google land, the one with the most search results wins!

-G-