Thoughts in a Haystack

... post a recommendation of 5 new blogs. This way, all blog readers will find themselves leaping around and discovering new, previously unknown blogs.

Religion and science are in different families on different tracks: science deals with is vs. isn’t and religion, to the extent that it relates to daily life, deals with should vs. shouldn’t.

The contrapuntal force to religion, that force which is in the same family, if a different genus, speaks the same language in different patterns regarding the same issues. It is not science, it is philosophy. That is what our teachers need to understand, and this distinction is the one in which education colleges should train them.

The shoulds and shouldn’ts that are most important to the future of our society need to be discussed in colleges, schools and homes, and the way to accomplish this is to bring religions and philosophies back to life as the yin and yang of right and wrong. That is the great conversation that we are not having.

It is true that a portion of religious hooting has to do with is vs. isn’t questions, in the arena of creationism and its ancillary arguments. However, this set of arguments, important as it might be for some religious people, is not important to a great many (especially outside certain Protestant variants), while the moral goals and effects of religious belief are a far more common and widespread concern among many faiths.

... 125 participants were asked to unscramble sentences. After the task, they were given $10 and had to decide what to keep and what to give away to a stranger.

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Sixty-eight per cent of those who unscrambled sentences with religious words gave about half the money away. Meanwhile, most members of the control group who worked on non-religious sentences kept nearly all the money.

"I was quite surprised that something that subtle would have this big of an impact," said Shariff, 26. "This is a twist on an age old question -- does a belief in God influence moral behaviour?" ...

"I thought there would be some effect," said Shariff. "I didn't think it would be double."

Some Canadian pro-family advocates suggest that the legal case against polygamy was fatally compromised when Canada’s Parliament legalized same-sex "marriage" in 2005.

"During the debate on same-sex 'marriage,' when Liberal Minister of Justice Irwin Cotler adamantly testified that polygamy would not be an issue, everyone knew very well that it would be," Canadian lawyer Gwen Landolt, national director of REAL Women of Canada, told Lifesite News Service Aug. 2.

"If you can break down the laws guarding heterosexual marriage between a man and a woman, then anything can happen," said Landolt. "If you can have a partner of the same sex, then logically you can have two or three of the opposite sex."

[National Review Online Editor Stanley] Kurtz said that if the debate over polygamy in Canada were limited to the actions of the Bountiful community — or pressure from Canadian Muslims, whose religion formally allows men to have multiple wives — there would be little chance of its legalization. ...

Said Kurtz, "Canada's socially liberal legal elites are just using the 'gay marriage' movement, fundamentalist Mormons, and Muslim immigrants to get what they’re truly after: the slow-motion abolition of marriage."

"If polygamy is upheld in Canada, how long will it take to be upheld around the world?" she said. "As the same-sex 'marriage' has turned out to be, it’s an international problem."

One co-authored, edited book, Michigan State University Press (2003).

Campbell insists he isn't hiding anything. He says he hasn't mentioned his work on intelligent design because "it hasn't come up as an issue" and "it's not part of my motive in running."

I believe that the full and free expression of different opinions is central to clear public thinking and that opposed arguments conducted with mutual respect can reveal common ground.

Sky Angel ... has begun airing a series of Answers in Genesis programs on the company's owned and operated special events channel, Angel Two.

Answers in Genesis, builder of the Creation Science Museum located near Cincinnati, Ohio, is a Christ-centered ministry dedicated to upholding the authority of the Bible from the very first verse. Upcoming programs scheduled to air on Angel Two/Sky Angel Channel 9702 include "Creation Astronomy," "Origin of the Species," "The Relevance of Genesis," "Fearfully and Wonderfully Made," and "The Intelligent Design Movement: How Intelligent Is It?"

"We are excited to work with Sky Angel to air several of our most popular videos. This is just another blessing the Lord has given us to support the Church in fulfilling its commission," said Dale Mason, vice president of marketing and media for Answers in Genesis.

A former ballroom dance instructor, Kennedy retained a dancer's regal posture and dressed in elegant suits.

His outspoken views have put him at the center of controversies too. Last year, the Anti-Defamation League and others denounced Kennedy for producing "Darwin's Deadly Legacy," a documentary that linked Charles Darwin's theory of evolution to Adolf Hitler.

The conclusion they draw deprives religious people of what they have taken to be their birthright. In its place, they offer a vision of a world without providence or purpose, and, however much they may celebrate the grand human adventure of understanding nature, that can only appear, by comparison, to be a mess of pottage. Often, the voices of reason I hear in contemporary discussions of religion are hectoring, almost exultant that comfort is being stripped away and faith undermined; frequently they are without charity. And they are always without hope. (p. 154-55)

Hume faced his painful death stoically persisting in his skepticism to the end. T. H. Huxley Darwin's tireless champion, wracked with grief at the death of his four-year-old son refused Charles Kingsley's proffered hope of a reunion in the hereafter. (p. 155)

It is crushingly obvious, however, that those most excited by the secular vision -- those who celebrate the honesty of spurning false comfort -- are people who can feel themselves part of the process of discovery and disclosure that has shown the reality behind old illusions. Celebrations of the human accomplishment in fathoming nature's secrets are less likely to thrill those who have only a partial understanding of what has been accomplished, and who recognize that they will not contribute, even in the humblest way, to the continued progress of knowledge. Hume's and Huxley's heirs, like Richard Dawkins for example, preach eloquently to the choir, but thoughtful religious people will find their bracing message harsh and insensitive. How can these celebrants of secularism understand what many other people stand to lose if their arguments are correct? How can they expect those people to be grateful for the mess of pottage they offer? (p. 155-56)

They know that the case launched against their cherished beliefs is clever, but they are also tempted by the thought that the cleverness is flawed. If others, recognizably more sympathetic to their faith, can point however vaguely to potential faults, they will be grateful -- and they will be disinclined to inspect too closely the gifts they are offered. (p. 156)

There are different kinds of truths for different kinds of people. There are truths appropriate for children; truths that are appropriate for students; truths that are appropriate for educated adults; and truths that are appropriate for highly educated adults, and the notion that there should be one set of truths available to everyone is a modern democratic fallacy.

Christian resistance to Darwin rests on the genuine insight that life without God, in the sense of a Darwinian account of the natural world, really does mean life without God in a far more literal and unnerving sense. Even those who understand, and contribute to, the enlightenment case can find the resultant picture of the world, and our place in it, unbearable. William James' arresting image of the high cliffs that surround a frozen lake, on which the ice is slowly melting, testifies to his own yearnings for some way of enlarging, or enriching, the scientific worldview he felt compelled to accept. (p. 156-57)

Standing in the back of that church, I recognized, uncomfortably, that I needed to be there. Here was a place to weep without imposing tears upon a child; and here was a heterogeneous community that had gathered to sing, to celebrate, to acknowledge common needs, and to deal with what we cannot control or imagine. Yet the celebration in progress spoke of hope; perhaps that is what made the presence of death bearable. Before that time, I could only ward off what I had heard and felt the day before. (p. 157-58)

There is a tendency for those who can accept life without God to pride themselves on their intellectual integrity. They, unlike the ostriches of the "booboisie," can face the facts with out flinching. It is easy to think that the dominance of secular perspectives within universities, and in other places where highly educated people are found, is readily explained in terms of clear-headedness and tough-mindedness. These are people who can appreciate the force of the arguments, and who will not allow reason to be clouded by weak emotions. I doubt however, that that is a complete account. Academics and scientists, as well as other professionals, can more easily sustain a sense of their lives as amounting to something, even in the absence of faithful service to God. Their lives are centered on work that is frequently significant and challenging, exciting and rewarding. Typically they belong to communities in which serious issues can be openly discussed, in which there are readily available opportunities for the sharing of troubles and concerns. Even so, when unanticipated personal trouble strikes, the mechanisms for providing comfort may be quite inadequate.

Pagels' moving testimony ... opens a window into the lives of the people who most vehemently resist Darwin. They are typically not as lucky as the fortunate secularists who can affirm the enlightenment case, embrace life without God, and get on with their interesting work, their comfortable leisure pursuits, and their rewarding discussions with friends and colleagues. For many Americans, their churches, overwhelmingly supernaturalist, providentialist churches, not only provide a sense of hope, illusory to be sure, but also offer other mechanisms of comfort. They are places in which hearts can be opened, serious issues can be discussed, common ground with others can be explored, places in which there is real community, places in which people come to matter to one another -- and thus come to matter to themselves. Without such places, what is left? (p. 158-60)

To resist Darwin, or the enlightenment case that looms behind him, is hardly unreasonable if what you would be left with is a drab, painful, and impoverished life. For people who are buffeted by the vicissitudes of the economy, ... victimized by injustice, ... scorned and vilified by the successful members of their societies, ... whose work is tedious and unrewarding, ... for whom material rewards are scanty ... who can unburden themselves most readily in religious settings and who find in their church a supportive community, above all for people who hope that their lives mean something, that their lives matter, the secular onslaught threatens to demolish almost everything. That is why the voices of reason are as sounding brass or as tinkling cymbals. (p. 160)

"Creationism and intelligent design don't belong in our science classes," said Board of Education Chairman Don McLeroy, who described himself as a creationist. "Anything taught in science has to have consensus in the science community – and intelligent design does not." ...

"When it comes to evolution, I am totally content with the current standard," he said, adding that his dissatisfaction with current biology textbooks is that they don't cover the weaknesses of the theory of evolution.

I want to tell you all the arguments made by all the intelligent design group, all the creationist intelligent design people, I can guarantee the other side heard exactly nothing. They did not hear one single fact, they were not swayed by one argument. It was just amazing. I mean all the, my fellow board members who were really not even the scientists in the group, they were not impressed by any of this. They said, "Oh well, it's just two opinions. And there were only the four really conservative, orthodox Christians on the board were the only ones who were willing to stand up to the textbooks and say that they don't present the weaknesses of evolution. Amazing.

... selects a collection of evolutionary changes, discusses them in detail, then endeavors to show that there's no conceivable process of natural selection that could have started from the original group of organisms and culminated in the finally modified group.

Darwin's own consideration of the concrete case argument focused on some complex organs and structures that he rightly believed to be hard to understand in terms of natural selection. Two examples are prominent in the Origin, the eye and the electric organs found in some fish. ...

Darwin himself offered a tentative proposal about the evolution of the eye. He supposed that sensitivity to light might come in degrees, and that it might be possible to find, among existing organisms, some with a crude ability to respond to light, others with a more refined capacity and so on in something like a series. Perhaps, he speculated, research oh these creatures might expose reasons why the different levels of sensitivity provided an advantage over rival organisms who had less, thus providing a way of answering (or sidestepping) the creationist quip, "What use is half an eye?" ...

One feature of the story deserves emphasis. Darwin didn't start with a comparison between the fully formed eye -- in a human being or an octopus, say -- and then think of the component parts as being introduced, one at a time. He resisted the challenge to explain first the advantage of an eighth of an eye, then the advantage of a quarter of an eye, and so on, and focused instead on a function, light sensitivity, that might have been refined from an initial state of absence. To put it more bluntly, he didn't allow his envisaged challengers to define the sequence of "intermediates" for him.

We are beguiled by the simple story line Behe rehearses. He invites us to consider the situation by supposing that the flagellum requires the introduction of some number -- 20, say -- of proteins that the ancestral bacterium doesn't originally have. So Darwinians have to produce a sequence of 21 organisms, the first having none of the proteins, and each subsequent organism having one more than its predecessor. ...

The story is fantasy, and Darwinians should disavow any commitment to it. First, there is no good reason for supposing that the ancestral bacterium lacked all, or even any, of the proteins needed to build the flagellum. It's a common theme of evolutionary biology that constituents of a cell, a tissue, or an organism are put to new uses because of a modification of the genome. Perhaps the immediate precursor of the bacterium with the flagellum is an organism in which all the protein constituents are already present, but are employed in different ways. Then, at the very last step there's a change in the genome that removes whatever chemical barrier previously prevented the building of the flagellum. ... So it goes, back down a sequence of ancestors, all quite capable of functioning in their environments but all at a selective disadvantage to the bacteria that succeeded them.

Isn't this all fantasy too? Of course -- but it is no more the product of speculative imagination than Behe's seemingly plausible assumption that the components of the flagellum would have had to be added one by one, and would have sat around idly (at best) until the culminating moment when all were present. Moreover, we were supposed to be offered a proof of impossibility and that won't be complete until Behe and his allies have shown that all the conceivable scenarios through which bacteria might acquire flagella are flawed. Really demonstrating impossibility -- or even improbability -- here and in kindred instances, is extremely difficult, precisely because it would require a much more systematic survey of the molecular differences among bacteria.

Bespectacled, in his thirties, he was tall and large and peered down at you with a look of beleaguered doubt, as if to say, 'You're asking me this question about science, but you know and I know that you're not going to understand my answer, so, although I find this stuff fascinating, wouldn't you really rather go for a beer?

• (1) existence of a valid contract;
• (2) defendant's knowledge of that contract;
• (3) defendant's intentional procuring of an actual breach of that contract; and
• (4) damages.

It sure would be a shame if someone echoed all those urls, and these anti-creationist blogs got more publicity and attention because of a stunt by Adnan Oktar, now wouldn't it?

Here's a way to get around the block — you can still read and post to Wordpress blogs in Turkey if you use OpenDNS. Spread the word.

[T]hough I am a strong advocate for free thought on all subjects, yet it appears to me (whether rightly or wrongly) that direct arguments against Christianity and theism produce hardly any effect on the public; & freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men's minds, which follow from the advance of science. It has, therefore, always been my object to avoid writing on religion, & I have confined myself to science. I may, however, have been unduly biased by the pain which it would give some members of my family , if I aided in any way direct attacks on religion.

Dr. Aveling has published an account of a conversation with my father. I think that the readers of this pamphlet ('The Religious Views of Charles Darwin,' Free Thought Publishing Company, 1883) may be misled into seeing more resemblance than really existed between the positions of my father and Dr. Aveling: and I say this in spite of my conviction that Dr. Aveling gives quite fairly his impressions of my father's views. Dr. Aveling tried to show that the terms "Agnostic" and "Atheist" were practically equivalent -- that an atheist is one who, without denying the existence of God, is without God, inasmuch as he is unconvinced of the existence of a Deity. My father's replies implied his preference for the unaggressive attitude of an Agnostic. Dr. Aveling seems (p. 5) to regard the absence of aggressiveness in my father's views as distinguishing them in an unessential manner from his own. But, in my judgment, it is precisely differences of this kind which distinguish him so completely from the class of thinkers to which Dr. Aveling belongs. - Darwin, Francis ed. 1887. The life and letters of Charles Darwin, including an autobiographical chapter. London: John Murray. Volume 1, p. 317.

(a) a systematic and disciplined enterprise aimed at finding out truth about our world, and
(b) has significant empirical involvement."

... argued that there is no intrinsic conflict between religion and science. Conflicts arise when spokespersons for one or the other make claims on behalf of science or religion that are exaggerated. For example, said the professor, it is perfectly appropriate that scientific work proceed without religious assumptions or references. Plantinga called that "secularism with respect to science."

What a noble privelege is it of human reason to attain the knowledge of the supreme Being; and, from the visible works of nature, be enabled to infer so sublime a principle as its supreme Creator? But turn the reverse of the medal. Survey most nations and most ages. Examine the religious principles, which have, in fact, prevailed in the world. You will scarcely be persuaded, that they are anything but sick men’s dreams: Or perhaps will regard them more as the playsome whimsies of monkeys in human shape, than the serious, positive, dogmatical asseverations of a being, who dignifies himself with the name of rational. . . .

The whole is a riddle, an enigma, an inexplicable mystery. Doubt, uncertainty, suspense of judgement appear the only result of our most accurate scrutiny, concerning this subject. But such is the frailty of human reason, and such the irresistible contagion of opinion, that even this deliberate doubt could scarcely be upheld; did we not enlarge our view, and opposing one species of superstition to another, set them a quarrelling; while we ourselves, during their fury and contention, happily make our escape into the calm, though obscure, regions of philosophy.

Our text-books on astronomy will have to be revised again, as there is no longer any doubt about the existence of a planet between Mercury and the sun.

Felicia Teske of Boothwyn [Pennsylvania] says she was preparing fried eggplant for dinner Sunday evening and noticed that the seeds in one slice seemed to spell out the word "GOD".

Felicia says she bought the eggplant at a roadside produce stand a while back, and also says the discovery has really given her food for thought. Felicia told Action News that she recently had family members pass away and it is comforting that "GOD" appeared.

The Teskes are now considering selling the eggplant on ebay.

As long as one believed in God, and these plans could be interpreted literally as thoughts in the mind of the creator, then such explanations had some explanatory force, but if reference to God is left out of the explanatory picture, then all that is left are the plans. Rather than being explanations, the existence of such "plans" calls for explanation.

[I]n Darwin's day ... [m]any philosophers and some scientists still looked upon miracles and ideas in the mind of the creator as acceptable elements in a scientific explanation, though most scientists were loath to discuss the issue. These "explanations" were not so much refuted by Darwin as discounted. Similarly, the theological and metaphysical objections to evolutionary theory gradually subsided, not because their authors had been converted, but because no one whose opinion mattered was listening any more. The change can be seen in the difference between the aggressive confidence of Agassiz's first review of the Origin of Species in 1860 and the petulant timidity of his final comments in 1874 ... [when] he hardly dared mention his pet theory of creation by repeated acts of divine cognition. Owen went so far as to assert that the leading naturalists of the day, referred to by Darwin as special creationists, had never maintained the view that species were specially created by divine action. Rather, he along with the other so-called special creationists had always maintained that some unknown law governed the introduction and extinction of species. Lyell, to the contrary, had the candor to admit that he "formerly advocated the doctrine that species were primordial creations, and not derivation." He differed from the catastrophists only in his belief that species were created and extinguished serially, rather than in wholesale lots.