Monday, July 07, 2008
Swordplay
For a bit of the ol' "good news, bad news" meme, there is this review by Scott McKeen in the Edmonton Journal of our favorite cinematic speed bag:
It is aptly titled. But only because you have to check your intelligence at the door to buy this one.
Expelled, a propaganda piece by the religious right, fails to argue justly for a place in science for the divine. Instead, it insults the intelligence by blaming Darwin and evolution for Hitler, Nazis, the Holocaust, eugenics and pretty much every other evil concocted by humankind.
Darwin should be ashamed. But only because the asinine creators of this movie were naturally selected ahead of other possible sperm-egg combinations.
The flaw in Charles Darwin's pre-eminent theory is its failure to explain why some humans de-evolve to infant primates when debating the existence of God.
Put atheists in the same room as the devout and, well, it's back to the sandbox. (There is a God; no there isn't -- is/isn't, is/isn't, is/isn't.)
The combatants are so entrenched in their world views that if God were to arrive one day in the town square, two things would happen: The pious would go "Na-Na Na Na-Na," and the atheists would punch them in the face, then go to hell. ...
[U]ber atheist and evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins -- he wrote The God Delusion -- is so dead-set against the idea of a God-soaked universe that he prefers the idea of aliens seeding the Earth with life. ...
Dawkins argues that he's only citing aliens to make a point. But his lack of respect for people of faith is both arrogant and galling.
But, hey! What do I know?
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I don't get it. Don't the ID advocates themselves posit aliens (or time travellers) as potential candidates for The Designer(s)? They don't mean it of course, but they need some way of indicating that ID isn't just another name for God. They have to pretend it needn't necessarily be the Big Kahuna. So why chide Dawkins for taking the very same notion? Besides, unlike Heaven, we at least have empirical evidence that other planets exist.
Or as my dad used to say, you can't talk a feller out of a corner with reason when he didn't talk himself in there using it.
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