New Year's Eve

The past was sad , and the future looks dark and gloomy.

Absinthe

“After the first glass you see things as you wish they were. After the second, you see things as they are not. Finally you see things as they really are, and that’s the most horrible thing in the world.”

Oscar Wilde. [ Absinthe ]

It’s God or Darwin

Tuesday's ruling by a federal judge in Pennsylvania, disparaging intelligent design as a religion-based and therefore false science, raises an important question: If ID is bogus because many of its theorists have religious beliefs to which the controversial critique of Darwinism lends support, then what should we say about Darwinism itself? After all, many proponents of Darwinian evolution have philosophical beliefs to which Darwin lends support.

"We conclude that the religious nature of Intelligent Design would be readily apparent to an objective observer, adult or child," wrote Judge John E. Jones III in his decision, Kitzmiller v. Dover, which rules that disparaging Darwin's theory in biology class is unconstitutional. Is it really true that only Darwinism, in contrast to ID, represents a disinterested search for the truth, unmotivated by ideology?

Judge Jones was especially impressed by the testimony of philosophy professor Barbara Forrest of Southeastern Louisiana University, author of Creationism's Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design. Professor Forrest has definite beliefs about religion, evident from the fact that she serves on the board of directors of the New Orleans Secular Humanist Association, which is "an affiliate of American Atheists, and [a] member of the Atheist Alliance International," according to the group's website. Of course, she's entitled to believe what she likes, but it's worth noting...more here

Do You Love Me?

A lover asked his beloved,
Do you love yourself more
than you love me?



The beloved replied,
I have died to myself
and I live for you.



I’ve disappeared from myself
and my attributes.
I am present only for you.



I have forgotten all my learning,
but from knowing you
I have become a scholar.



I have lost all my strength,
but from your power
I am able.



If I love myself
I love you.
If I love you
I love myself.

by Rumi

Looking In The Wrong Place.

He who quotes others lacks the ability to think for himself.
That is an apt and fair description of me and my blog. I have no original thoughts. This blog is a commonplace book in which I write down quotations that struck my fancy. Anyone who looks for more here is looking in the wrong place.I enjoy reading authors who quote a lot, such as Montaigne and Burton in his Anatomy of Melancholy.

The devil may not be as bad as he’s been painted

Of course few of us accept the literal truth of hell and, according to the survey conducted by Dr Eric Stoddart of St Andrews University, the majority of ministers feel the same way, although a third take refuge in the belief that the netherworld has taken on a new and appropriately modern image in which the agony of separation from God manifests itself as permanent mental anguish as opposed to corporeal pain...more here

The Problem with God

Interview with Richard Dawkins

The renowned biologist talks about intelligent design, dishonest Christians, and why God is no better than an imaginary friend...more here

Questions of faith

What can anyone tell us about God?" asks Sir Ludovic Kennedy, perhaps Britain's most distinguished atheist. "Nothing. The Church says God is Love but that is pure speculation. Jesus is the son of God? To me that's absolutely meaningless. God is a projection of the human imagination, a fictitious character who does not exist."...more here

An interview with Don Wise, creator of "incompetent design"

Don Wise, professor emeritus of geosciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, is the nation's foremost proponent of ID. No, Wise isn't getting ready to testify on behalf of the school board in Dover, PA. Rather, he advocates for a different version of the acronym: "incompetent design."

Wise cites serious flaws in the systems of the human body as evidence that design in the universe exhibits not an obvious source of, but a sore lack of, intelligence. Seed asked him to chat about his theory, reactions he's received to it, and the anthem he penned to rally people to his cause...more here

Intelligent Design or Natural Design

I'm going to begin by taking you on a personal tour of my own thinking about intelligent design over the past 60 years.

It began in 1945 when I was a 14 year old at Mt Albert Grammar. Our Fourth Form English teacher decided we should learn the skills of debating. The topic chosen was "Creation versus Evolution". And I, as an ardent young Baptist, volunteered, along with a Seventh Day Adventist, to take up the cudgels on behalf of Creation.

But even before the debate began, I found myself cast in the role of devil's advocate.

While preparing, it dawned on me that the case against evolution foundered on an ambiguity between two meanings of the simple word "creation": the concept of general creation, and the concept of special creation.

To believe in the theological doctrine of general creation is merely to believe in a God who created the universe. Clearly, I could, without inconsistency, believe in general creation and also believe in the Theory of Evolution. I simply had to regard Darwinian natural selection as one of the laws of nature that God built into his creation...more here

My Refuge

Sadness and languor along the oak tables
Steady the minds of the sitters and readers;
Sleep and despair, and the stealth of hunters,
And (in the man at the end of the row) anger.

Books are the door of escape from the forest,
Books are the wilderness, too, for the scholar;
Walled in the past, drowning in fables,
Out of the weather we sit, steady in languor.

Which are the ones that belong, properly?
Which are the hunters, which the harried?
Break not the hush that surrounds this miracle --
Mind against mind, coupling in splendor --
Step on no twig, disturbing the forest.
Enter the aisles of despair. Sit down and be quiet.

E.B. White, Reading Room

[Robert Frost said, "Home is the place where, when you have to go there, They have to take you in." I'd say that the reading room of the public library is that place. The reading room is my refuge.]

George Constanza's Words of Wisdom

The most unfair thing about life is the way it ends.
I mean, life is tough.
It takes up a lot of your time. What do you get at the end of it?
A death.
What's that, a bonus?!?
I Think the life cycle is backwards.
You should die first, get it out of the way.
Then you go live in an old age home. You get kicked out for being too healthy, go collect your pension, then, when you start work, you get a gold watch on your first day.
You work 40 years until you're young enough to enjoy your retirement. You drink alcohol, you party, and you get ready for High School. You go to primary school, you become a kid, you play, you have no responsibilities, you become little baby, you go back, you spend your last 9 months floating with luxuries like central heating, spa, room service on tap, then you finish off as an orgasm!!

Amen.

Without A Scalpel

For many people of different faiths, cutting up a corpse to figure out how a person died is an invasive, even offensive, procedure.

In some cases, as with Muslims and Jews, autopsies may violate their religious laws.

But technology companies are stepping in with a more acceptable alternative to traditional autopsies, using sophisticated scanning and three-dimensional computer systems.

Silicon Graphics Inc. manager Afshad Mistri demonstrated one such system on a recent morning in Mountain View, standing in front of a theater screen displaying the fuzzy image of a woman who was killed in a car accident in Sweden.

Another SGI engineer moved the cursor across the corpse, revealing the next layer, an image of the woman's skeleton clearly showing her broken bones...more here

Fascism then. Fascism now?

Observing political and economic discourse in North America since the 1970s leads to an inescapable conclusion: The vast bulk of legislative activity favours the interests of large commercial enterprises. Big business is very well off, and successive Canadian and U.S. governments, of whatever political stripe, have made this their primary objective for at least the past 25 years.

Digging deeper into 20th century history, one finds the exaltation of big business at the expense of the citizen was a central characteristic of government policy in Germany and Italy in the years before those countries were chewed to bits and spat out by fascism. Fascist dictatorships were borne to power in each of these countries by big business, and they served the interests of big business with remarkable ferocity.

These facts have been lost to the popular consciousness in North America. Fascism could therefore return to us, and we will not even recognize it. Indeed, Huey Long, one of America's most brilliant and most corrupt politicians, was once asked if America would ever see fascism. "Yes," he replied, "but we will call it anti-fascism."

By exploring the disturbing parallels between our own time and the era of overt fascism, we can avoid the same hideous mistakes. At present, we live in a constitutional democracy. The tools necessary to protect us from fascism remain in the hands of the citizen. All the same, North America is on a fascist trajectory. We must recognize this threat for what it is, and we must change course...more here

Is God is Nothing

Is God is nothing more than an attempt to explain order and good fortune by those who do not understand the mathematics of chance, the principles of self-organizing systems, or the psychology of the human mind? When the study I just described was accepted for publication, I recall asking one of my collaborators, who is a deeply religious man, how he felt about having demonstrated that people can misattribute the products of their own minds to powerful external agents. He said, "I feel fine. After all, God doesn't want us to confuse our miracles with his."

That's fair enough. Science rules out the most cartoonish versions of God by debunking specific claims about ancient civilizations in North America or the creatio ex nihilo of human life. But it cannot tell us whether there is a force or entity or idea beyond our ken that deserves to be known as God. What we can say is that the universe is a complex place, that events within it often seem to turn out for the best, and that neither of these facts requires an explanation beyond our own skins...more here

The Problem of Evil

Some claim that only the intellectually defective can fail to be impressed by the inconsistency between belief in the existence of the theistic God and the recognition of suffering in our world – especially given the quantity and intensity of human suffering. An omniscient, omnipotent, omni-benevolent God would not allow his beloved children to suffer, and certainly not as often or as intensely as they do. A good God would not permit evils to relentlessly afflict human life within His creation. The ubiquity of suffering renders belief in the perfect God of theism irrational. So say anti-theistic proponents of the problem of evil...more here

The Second Space

-The Soul Hovering Over the Body-

The heavenly halls are so spacious!
Ascend to them on stairs of air.
Above white clouds the hanging celestial gardens.

A soul tears away from the body and soars.
It remembers that there's up and down.

Have we really lost faith in a second space?
They've dissolved, disappeared, both Heaven and Hell?

Without unearthly meadows how will one meet salvation?
Where will the gathering of the damned find its abode?

Let us weep, lament the enormous loss.
Let us smear our faces with coal, disarrange our hair.

Let us implore, so that it is returned to us,
The second space.

Czeslaw Milosz

Intelligent design fight demeans religion

WASHINGTON - Because every few years this country, in its infinite tolerance, insists on hearing yet another appeal of the Scopes monkey trial, I feel obliged to point out what would otherwise be superfluous - that the two greatest scientists in the history of our species were Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein, and they were both religious.

Newton's religiosity was traditional. He was a staunch believer in Christianity and member of the Church of England. Einstein's was a more diffuse belief in a deity who set the rules for everything that occurs in the universe.

Neither saw science as an enemy of religion. On the contrary. "He believed he was doing God's work," wrote James Gleick in his recent biography of Newton. Einstein saw his entire vocation - understanding the workings of the universe - as an attempt to understand the mind of God.

Not a crude and willful God who pushes and pulls and does things according to whim. Newton was trying to supplant the view that first believed the sun's motion around the earth was the work of Apollo and his chariot, and later believed it was a complicated system of cycles and epicycles, one tacked on upon the other every time some wobble in the orbit of a planet was found. Newton's God was not at all so crude. The laws of his universe were so simple, so elegant, so economical, and therefore so beautiful that they could only be divine.

Which brings us to Dover (Pa.), Pat Robertson, the Kansas State Board of Education and a fight over evolution that is so anachronistic and retrograde as to be a national embarrassment.

Dover distinguished itself this Election Day by throwing out all eight members of its school board who tried to impose "intelligent design" - today's tarted-up version of creationism - on the biology curriculum. Pat Robertson then called down the wrath of God upon the good people of Dover for voting "God out of your city." Meanwhile in Kansas, the school board did a reverse Dover, mandating the teaching of skepticism about evolution and forcing intelligent design into the statewide biology curriculum.

Let's be clear. "Intelligent design" may be interesting as theology, but as science it is a fraud. It is a self-enclosed, tautological "theory" whose only holding is that when there are gaps in some area of scientific knowledge - in this case, evolution - they are to be filled by God. It is a "theory" that admits that evolution and natural selection explain such things as the development of drug resistance in bacteria and other such evolutionary changes within species, but that every once in a while God steps into this world of constant and accumulating change and says, "I think I'll make me a lemur today." A "theory" that violates the most basic requirement of anything pretending to be science - that it be empirically disprovable. How does one empirically disprove the proposition that God was behind the lemur, or evolution - or behind the motion of the tides or the "strong force" that holds the atom together?

In order to justify the farce that intelligent design is science, Kansas had to corrupt the very definition of science, dropping the phrase " - natural explanations for what we observe in the world around us," thus unmistakably implying that the supernatural is an integral part of science. This is an insult both to religion and to science.

The school board thinks it is indicting evolution by branding it an "unguided process" with no "discernable direction or goal." This is as ridiculous as indicting Newtonian mechanics for positing an "unguided process" by which the Earth is pulled around the sun every year without discernible purpose. What is chemistry if not an "unguided process" of molecular interactions without "purpose"?

He may be, of course. But that discussion is the province of religion, not science. The relentless attempt to confuse the two by teaching warmed-over creationism as science can only bring ridicule to religion, gratuitously discrediting a great human endeavor and our deepest source of wisdom precisely about those questions that lie beyond the material.

How ridiculous to make evolution the enemy of God. What could be more elegant, more brilliant, more creative, indeed more divine than a planet with millions of life forms, distinct and yet interactive, all ultimately derived from accumulated variations in a single double-stranded molecule, pliable and fecund enough to give us mollusks and mice, Newton and Einstein? Even if it did give us the Kansas State Board of Education too.

Charles Krauthammer writes for the Washington Post Writers Group, 1150 Fifteenth St. N.W., Washington, D.C. 20071. His e-mail address is letters@charleskrauthammer.

Is atheism dying?

Science & Theology News asked some leading thinkers to share their views about the future of atheism...more here

Science needs God. Or does it?

Do you believe in God?

Some leading thinkers have strong opinions about God, while others are reserving judgment ...more here