Thursday, April 10, 2008

 

Time Passes


Jonathan Amos is in Time tapping his foot impatiently:

There is nothing so tiresome as an argument that no one will ever concede--particularly if the participants don't seem to know it. And there's no place the fighting is growing more pointless than in the ongoing smackdown between evolutionists and advocates of intelligent design--the theory that the emergence of life must have been guided by a sentient planner.
Unsurprisingly, the occasion for his boredom is having to sit through Expectorated:

It's in the film's final third that it runs entirely off the rails as Stein argues that there is a clear line from Darwinism to euthanasia, abortion, eugenics and--wait for it--Nazism. Theories of natural selection, it's claimed, were a necessary if not sufficient condition for Hitler's killing machine to get started. The truth, of course, is that the only necessary and sufficient condition for human beings to murder one another is the simple fact of being human. We've always been a lustily fratricidal species, one that needed no Charles Darwin to goad us into millenniums of self-slaughter.
But what about the other side:

In fairness to Stein, his opponents have hardly covered themselves in glory. Evolutionary biologists and social commentators have lately taken to answering the claims of intelligent-design boosters not with clear-eyed scientific empiricism but with sneering, finger-in-the-eye atheism. Biologist P.Z. Myers, for example, tells Stein that religion ought to be seen as little more than a soothing pastime, a bit like knitting. Books such as Christopher Hitchens' God Is Not Great and Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion often read like pure taunting, as when Hitchens pettily and pointedly types God as lowercase god. Tautology as typography is not the stuff of deep thought. Neither, alas, is Expelled.
I guess there's no glory in atheism as far as Amos is concerned.
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Comments:
Ooh, ooh, ooh!!! I've never seen this one before! Christians are allowed to say all sorts of hateful stuff about non-Christians - such as that we're evil and doomed for eternal torment - while non-believers are obligated to nod quietly and bow politely to their Christian interlocutors. No double standard there.
 
Yeah, sticking your finger in the eye of someone who suggests that you'd support the Holocaust is clearly a bad thing ... in some people's minds.
 
From the story:

Evolutionary biologists and social commentators have lately taken to answering the claims of intelligent-design boosters not with clear-eyed scientific empiricism but with sneering, finger-in-the-eye atheism.

WTF does whatsisname think scientists have been doing for 150 years with no visible effect on the yahoos? We have finally awakened to the fact that "scientific empiricism" is irrelevant to the yahoos, and the only appropriate counter to their anti-scientific blather is ridicule.
 
"I guess there's no glory in atheism as far as Amos is concerned."


No, there's really not. He's just so above us, y'know? But I had enormous fun spanking his bottom on my blog today. Glad you did, too!
 
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