Sorry Sage ,but the winning name for the new space station module is not Serenity ,but Colbert. I am still holding out for Death Star;(
By Irene Klotz Irene Klotz – Mon Mar 30, 2:35 pm ET
CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) – NASA's outreach to the public to drum up interest in the International Space Station started innocently enough with an online contest to name the station's new living quarters.
But Stephen Colbert, a comedian who poses as an ultra right-wing news commentator on cable television's Comedy Central, nosed into the act with a grass-roots appeal that has backed the staid U.S. space agency into a corner.
The comedian's supporters cast 230,539 write-in votes to name the new module at the $100-billion space outpost "Colbert." The top NASA-suggested name, "Serenity," finished a distant second, more than 40,000 votes behind.
Contest rules stipulate that the agency retains the right to basically do whatever it wants, but it may not be that easy.
Last week, U.S. Representative Chaka Fattah, a Pennsylvania Democrat, called on NASA to do the democratic thing and use the name that drew the most votes.
"NASA decided to hold an election to name its new room at the International Space Station and the clear winner is Stephen Colbert," Fattah said in a statement. "The people have spoken, and Stephen Colbert won it fair and square -- even if his campaign was a bit over the top."
NASA is taking some time to ponder its next move.
"We have a plan and we're working with some folks and in a couple of weeks you'll know what the answer is," NASA's associate administrator Bill Gerstenmaier said.
(Editing by Jim Loney and Vicki Allen)
Aprils issue of National Geographic contains an accurate article of the reemergence of the Orthodox Christian faith in the country that was the home of atheist communism. For more than 70 years the atheist communist persecuted Orthodoxy and other faiths different from theirs. Now the communist have been swept into histories dust bin and the Orthodox Faith has reblossumed to face a new threat to the Russian people. The threat of materialistic consumerism has replaced atheistic communism as the main threat to the lives of the people.
+All Glory to God+
http://ngm.nationalgeograph...
A while back I posted an article that showed how Richard Dawkins and some Intelligent Design proponets share a few common errors in thinking.
http://people.bakersfield.c...
Today I have an article that shows how Bill Maher in his attacks on religiouse fundementalism displays his own fundementalest thinking. Futhermore his attacks on other faiths commit the error of "Strawman" which is a common mistake in logic. Strawman is were an argurer ignores a strong argument and sets up a weak argument as the issue; he then destroys the weak argument and claims victory over the strong argument which he failed to address. Maher in his attacks on fundmentalist does not adress the question of genuine Christian spirituality. Read for yourself and think fro yourself;)
Is Bill Maher Literally Wrong?
Jonathan McCormack
The ridiculous wrongheadedness of religulous.
Bill Maher, Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Samuel Harris are stupid, literally speaking; particularly in their simple minded devotion to acknowledging reality only in its most pared down anemic ideology of literal-minded rationality. There are intelligent atheists, many prominent philosophers and cultural critics, who correctly set their claims in the realms of meaning and symbolic knowledge. They dismiss Maher and company's sophomoric atheism because it pushes the same ideological framework as the people on the Christian right who believe in talking snakes.
First off, Maher confuses categories of knowledge. You can say "a flower is a plant" and this belongs to 'positive knowledge' since it is empirical. Another category of knowledge is to say "flowers are beautiful." The fundamentalist Christian, confusing the two modes of knowing, might say it is a scientific FACT that flowers are pretty. Then Bill Maher would come along and say, "We've dissected the flower and have found no 'beauty cells' or 'beauty structures', therefore flowers are not beautiful and furthermore beauty does not exist." Both Maher and religious fundamentalists deny all modalities of knowing except for the scientific one and in so doing diminish what it means to be human.
You don't need philosophy to understand this. I once read about a Christian holy man who spoke about how silly it was to look for God using rationality. It's the wrong tool, he said. It would be just as silly to use a telescope to look for God. If you want to make any statement on God you must first clear your heart of illusions, treachery, and passions, since the heart is the true instrument with which to seek God, only then can you say weather God exists or not.
Many Christians understand this perfectly well. Maher spoke primarily to those Christians most easy to mock in order to push his own point. Here, however, are two quotes from typical priests of the third largest Christian denomination, Orthodox Christianity, Fr. Andrew Anglorus and Fr. Stephen Freeman:
[Lacking]…a Patristic understanding of the Scriptures…they do not understand the Scriptures spiritually, ascetically, allegorically, poetically, but only literally. We call such an understanding “fundamentalist.”1
Genesis, properly read, is not a science text book. It is about Christ and reveals Him as the very meaning and purpose of creation — as well as explicating His Pascha. If you don't see that when you read the first chapter of Genesis, then no one ever taught you how to read Scripture as the primitive Church read Scripture…Scripture functions as a verbal icon - and like an icon requires an understanding of its spiritual grammar to see it correctly.2
Nor is this simply a way for modern Christians to excuse obviously unscientific biblical passages. St. Maximus the Confessor, living in 500-600 A.D. wrote, "Ignorance, in other words, Hades, dominates those who understand Scripture in a fleshly (literal) way."3 Maher purposefully avoids this type of true Christian faith because it does not fit in with his simplified one-dimensional view of black and white reality.
Finally, here are some words from Slavoj Žižek, a modern philosopher/cultural critic who is a die-hard atheist. He has written many books on Christianity, including one recently where he debates with Christian theologian John Milbank who has firm grasp of postmodern philosophy, unlike the people Maher approaches who are either uninformed or incapable of defending themselves intellectually or dismissed out of hand (emphasis added):
Both liberal-skeptical cynics and fundamentalists share a basic underlying feature: the loss of the ability to believe, in the proper sense of the term. What is unthinkable for them is the groundless decision which installs every authentic belief, a decision which cannot be grounded in the chain of reasons, in positive knowledge…the status of universal human rights is that of a pure belief: they cannot be grounded in our knowledge of human nature, they are an axiom posited by our decision. (The moment one tries to ground universal human rights in our knowledge of humanity, the inevitable conclusion will be that men are fundamentally different, that some have more dignity and wisdom than others.) At its most fundamental, authentic belief does not concern facts, but gives expression to an unconditional ethical commitment.
For both liberal cynics and religious fundamentalists, religious statements are quasi-empirical statements of direct knowledge: fundamentalists accept them as such, while skeptical cynics mock them…its [religious fundamentalism's] true danger does not reside in the fact that it poses a threat to secular scientific knowledge, but in the fact that it poses a threat to authentic belief itself."4
In other words, by disregarding any symbolic mediation between humanity and a reality transcendent of logical apprehension both Maher and the Christian right are on the same team, since both equally undermine true belief and reject those more rarified modalities of understanding and being.
REFERENCES
- Anglorus, Fr. Andrew, "Towards an Orthodox View of Creation And Evolution." [Weblog entry.] Orthodox England on the 'Net. Aug 2006. http://www.orthodoxengland.... 03 March 2009.
- Freeman, Fr. Stephen, "The Meaning of Scripture." [Weblog entry.] Glory to God for All Things. 26 Oct. 2008. http://fatherstephen.wordpr... 03 March 2009.
- Berthold, George, Maximus Confessor: Selected Writings (Classics of Western Spirituality). Paulist Press, 1985.
- Zizek, Slavoj. How to Read Lacan. W. W. Norton, 2007.
Jonathan McCormack is a 30 yr old Orthodox Christian, professional artist, and substance abuse professional. Theology and postmodern theory are his interests. He attends St. Gregory's Church in Wappingers Falls, New York.
HOW TO INSTALL A HOME SECURITY SYSTEM WHEN ON A BUDGET :
1. Go to a second-hand store and buy a pair of men's used size 14-16 work boots.
2. Place them on your front porch, along with several empty beer cans, a copy of Guns & Ammo magazine and several NRA magazines.
3. Put a few giant dog dishes next to the boots and magazines.
4. Leave a note on your door that reads: 'Hey Bubba, Big Jim, Duke and Slim, I went to the gun shop for more ammunition. Back in an hour. Don't mess with the pit bulls -- they attacked the mailman this morning and messed him up real bad. I don't think Killer took part in it but it was hard to tell from all the blood.
P S - I locked all four of 'em in the house. Better wait outside.' INSTALLATION COMPLETE!!!!
Redneck Security Company
The Russian President is leading a committee whose goal is to educate the youth in traditional religious values in a effort to correct the social ills caused by matirealism/consumerism. This is quite a change from the Russia of the 20th century were the dominant atheist/communist religion persecuted and murdered billions who would not follow their faith. +Glory to God+
Medvedev steers religions toward young people
Posted on Tue Mar 17 2009
Moscow (AsiaNews/Agencies) - In order to instill moral and religious values in young people, President Medvedev will personally lead the Council on Cooperation with Religious Associations.
It will be attended by the president of the Council of Muftis, Ravil’ Gajnutdin, chief rabbi Berl Lazar, and the president of the traditional Buddhists, Damba Ajušeev. The Orthodox delegation will have the most extensive representation, and will even include Patriarch Kirill himself, metropolitan archbishops Juvenalij and Kliment, Archbishop Aleksandr, head of the youth department, the rector of the Moscow Theological Academy, Evgenij, and Bishop Feofilakt, head of cooperation with the religious associations of Moscow.
The head of the Kremlin has affirmed that the young generations must rediscover their religious roots after the vacuum of values generated by the Soviet era, and reinforced during the 1990's. For the president, the lack of moral points of reference especially affects the age group between 14 and 30, which represents about a fourth of the overall population. In the Year of Youth, which is being celebrated in 2009, the state wants to develop a more effective youth policy, taking advantage of the collaboration of religious associations on both the federal and regional level, and continuing the cooperation already established in the area of the family.
For various commentators and experts, Medvedev's statements on the importance of religion in the life of the country and his direct involvement with various representatives of the traditional confessions document the intention of the Kremlin to take a step forward in relations between the state and the Orthodox Church, to confirm the Patriarch of Moscow as a point of reference for all the religions in the Federation, and to attribute a strong political value to his position. Deacon Andrej Kuraev, a famous and very influential theologian, has called the intensification of relations between the state and the Orthodox Church a "resumption of the Byzantine harmony."
Here is something interesting. Reuters reports that a French physicist was awarded a prize for his work in quantum physics and postulating the existence of a spiritual dimension. Something that mankind has known through out the ages ,but so far has resisted exploration in a solely intellectual manner. It will be interesting to do more investigation into his work to see if he is on to something or just indulging in new age/occult fantasies.
French physicist d'Espagnat wins prestigious Templeton Prize
By Tom Heneghan, Religion Editor Tom Heneghan, Religion Editor – Mon Mar 16, 6:58 am ET
PARIS (Reuters) – French physicist and philosopher Bernard d'Espagnat has won the 2009 Templeton Prize, billed as the world's largest annual award to an individual, for his work affirming the spiritual dimension of life.
The Templeton Foundation announced the $1.42 million prize at the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in Paris on Monday.
Award organizers said his work in quantum physics revealed a reality beyond science that spirituality and art could help to partly grasp.
John Templeton Jr, president of the foundation launched by his late father, said at the ceremony that d'Espagnat, 87, had "explored the unlimited, the openings that new scientific discoveries offer in pure knowledge and in questions that go to the very heart of our existence and humanity."
Previous winners include Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, United States evangelist Billy Graham and Albanian-born Mother Teresa.
D'Espagnat, a former senior physicist at the CERN particle physics laboratory in Geneva and professor at French and United States universities, argues in his books that modern quantum physics shows that ultimate reality cannot be described.
Classical physics developed by Isaac Newton believes it can describe the world through laws of nature that it knows or will discover. But quantum physics shows that tiny particles defy this logic and can act in indeterminate ways.
D'Espagnat says this points toward a reality beyond the reach of empirical science. The human intuitions in art, music and spirituality can bring us closer to this ultimate reality, but it is so mysterious we cannot know or even imagine it.
"Mystery is not something negative that has to be eliminated," he said. "On the contrary, it is one of the constitutive elements of being."
ON PHYSICS AND PHILOSOPHY
In an interview on Friday, d'Espagnat told Reuters he was brought up a Roman Catholic but did not practice any religion and considered himself a spiritualist.
Some baffling discoveries of quantum physics led him to believe all creation has a wholeness and interrelatedness that many scientists miss by trying to break problems down into their component parts rather than understand them in larger contexts.
One of these is entanglement, the way that paired subatomic particles remain linked even if they move far apart, so that experimenting with one automatically effects the other without any apparent communication between them.
This view clashes with the materialist outlook widespread among scientists.
"Materialists consider that we are explained entirely by combinations of small uninteresting things like atoms or quarks," said d'Espagnat, whose latest book in English -- "On Physics and Philosophy" -- was published in 2006.
"I believe we ultimately come from a superior entity to which awe and respect is due and which we shouldn't try to approach by trying to conceptualize too much," he said. "It's more a question of feeling."
Although they cannot be tested, the intuitions people have when they are moved by great art or by spiritual beliefs help them grasp a bit more of ultimate reality, d'Espagnat said.
"When they hear very good music, people who like classical music have the impression they get at some reality that way. Why not?" he asked.
The question is what is Obama achieving by lifting the stem cell band? New technologies have demonstrated that the ban was correct as we can now produce usable stem cells with out killing children. So does Obama's action have any real impact or is it just smoke and mirrors to mislead the gullible. This article from a scientist employed in the field provides some insight;)
Pardon me, your ideology is showing
Not all barriers to stem cell science are bad, Mr President. And the biggest ones, like greed, one-upmanship, exploitation and hype, cannot be removed by executive order.
"Removing Barriers To Responsible Scientific Research Involving Human Stem Cells" is the title of the Executive Order signed on Monday by President Obama. The alleged barriers are "Presidential actions" that limited the authority of the Department of Health and Human Services over the past eight years. As a stem cell scientist and an American citizen, several things about Obama’s order and his accompanying remarks disturb me.
Let’s start with the title. It implies that after Monday there will be fewer barriers to responsible scientific research involving human stem cells. Is this true?
First of all, let’s distinguish between barriers to scientific research and barriers to responsible scientific research. Barriers to scientific research include the inherent limits of human creativity and intelligence, and the external limits imposed by laws and limited resources (eg, funding and personnel).
Barriers to responsible scientific research are myriad -- and much harder to control. They include, above all, human ambition, which spurs us on to achieve great things, not only for the good of mankind but also for national and personal recognition. When this is combined with sloth and a lack of stiff penalties for the publication of fabricated data, it constitutes a serious barrier to responsible scientific research.
Another barrier is the diminishment of the dignity of a particular class of people. A barbaric example of this occurred not so long ago (with Federal funding!), when government researchers studied syphilis amongst African American men in Tuskegee, Alabama, from 1932-1972 -- all in the name of finding cures (for Caucasians).
Yet another barrier to responsible research is pressure on scientists from media hype, special interest groups, lobbyists and a poorly informed but well-meaning public to pursue dead-end research.
Barriers to responsible research
Which of these barriers to responsible scientific research did Obama remove?
You could argue that he decreased scientific competition in the field of human embryonic stem cells by increasing funding. Fewer sharp elbows in frantic races for results should produce more responsible research, right? In theory, maybe. But in practice, we scientists love to study what’s most exciting -- partly for the buzz, partly for the glory, and partly for the media coverage that will ensure continued funding. We have to eat, too, you know.
Maybe the barriers Obama removed were those which inhibited scientific research in general, not responsible scientific research. After all, everyone "knows" that Bush was an anti-science ideologue. His record must be full of barriers to science. Yet, when we focus on what he did for medical research, we see nothing of the sort.
Take National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding. In President Clinton’s last year in office, the NIH budget was US$20.3 billion. Over the next two years, Bush increased that by more than 15 percent each year. His final budget proposal granted NIH $28.3 billion. More like Santa Claus than an anti-science ideologue, I think. Obama himself only asked for a 4 percent increase over that.
Were those barriers inherent in Bush’s science policy? According to Obama, Bush’s 2001 decision "limited federal funding" of ESC research. The fact is, Bush provided federal funding for ESC research where before there was none. In 1996 Congress passed the Dickey Amendment which prohibited both the creation of human embryos for research purposes and research in which human embryos are destroyed or discarded. Two years later, in 1998, human embryonic stem cells (ESCs) were first isolated. This created a "need" to destroy human embryos. As Clinton left office, he proposed guidelines, which, had they been enacted, would have allowed federal funding of all human ESC research as long as federal funds were not actually used to destroy the embryos.
Did Bush ban this ESC research? From the media reports you might think so. In fact, Bush liberalised the law. He opened the door to research on already-created embryonic stem cell lines. Like a true politician, he struck a compromise between squelching ESC research entirely and taxpayer-funded destruction of embryos.
Bush's record
According to Obama, Bush’s decision was based on ideology, not scientific facts. Obama promises to support ESC research only when it is both "scientifically worthy and responsibly conducted". But just think for a minute. Wouldn’t it have been irresponsible for Bush to throw billions of taxpayer dollars at a three-year-old technology? In 2001 no one had any idea whether or not ESC research was "scientifically worthy". Full support at that stage would have been equivalent to parents beginning to pay Harvard tuition fees when their child was only three years old. No one responsible invests their family’s money in wildcat schemes; why should a president do so with taxpayers’ money?
But at least it’s clear now that ESC research is scientifically worthy, right? Actually, no.
ESCs may have the potential to cure many diseases. But after ten years and billions of dollars, they still have not realised their potential. In the meantime, stem cells isolated from adults have proven to be quite effective in relieving human suffering. Even better, if you’re on the ESC bandwagon, are "induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells", which behave almost exactly like ESCs but do not involve embryo destruction. These iPS cells do not involve costly embryo manipulation and can be made from a patient’s own cells, avoiding immune rejection.
Safety and efficiency issues with iPS cells will most likely be resolved in a few more years. Remember, they were first created in 2006, so they are still toddlers. Even so, just as Bush gave federal funding to the promising toddler ESCs in 2001, he also encouraged the study of iPS cells, just a year after they were discovered, with Executive Order #13435.
Oddly enough, Obama revoked Executive Order #13435 on Monday. Why? Perhaps because it contains inconvenient Bush ideologies like Sec 2 (c): "the destruction of nascent life for research violates the principle that no life should be used as a mere means for achieving the medical benefit of another".
Why is cloning "profoundly wrong"
President Obama, like President Bush, is a hard-nosed politician and makes decisions based on a mix of prejudices, ideologies and facts. Consider these sentences from his address: "And we will ensure that our government never opens the door to the use of cloning for human reproduction. It is dangerous, profoundly wrong, and has no place in our society, or any society."
Why, Mr Obama? Surely science does not tell you that it is profoundly wrong. On the contrary, science would suggest that if the technical challenges of reproductive cloning can be overcome by scientists in the United States, it could help to "ensure America’s continued global leadership in scientific discoveries and technological breakthroughs... [which] is essential not only for our economic prosperity, but for the progress of all humanity".
If you’re from another country, I apologise. It has become synonymous with patriotism here to believe that the world will always be better off with America at its helm. I love my country; but unless we can curb our thirst for power over life, we will continue to seek cures for the wealthy, the educated and those with a voice at the expense of the poor, the ignorant, and those without a voice. We will continue to find ways of living "longer, healthier lives" until one day the words "terminal" and "incurable" really are gone from our vocabulary and we have arrived at a Brave New World.
Michaela Kingston is the nom de plume of an American stem cell researcher.
 This article is published by Michaela Kingston, and MercatorNet.com under a Creative Commons licence. You may republish it or translate it free of charge with attribution for non-commercial purposes following these guidelines. If you teach at a university we ask that your department make a donation. Commercial media must contact us for permission and fees. Some articles on this site are published under different terms.
Here is interesting perspective in the Created vs Accidental Origin of Life Debate. Enjoy;)
Where Intelligent Design and Dawkins meet
Surprisingly, the fans of intelligent design and the militant atheist share some key ideas.
 How about this for a headline? "Intelligent Design Proponents and Richard Dawkins Reach Out to Each Other for Darwin’s Bicentennial." Well, actually, I made that up. However, for better and for worse, there is more similarity between the ideas of the proponents of intelligent design and those of Dawkins that either would like to admit.
For the worse: Members of the intelligent design (ID) movement have a penchant for arguing that since natural causes cannot produce a given feature or system, it must therefore be the product of some intelligence. Michael Behe argues this way based on the idea of "irreducible complexity." Irreducible complexity is the notion that complex functional wholes have to have all their essential parts in place or they won’t work.
Behe’s classic example is a mousetrap: remove one piece from a mousetrap and it won’t catch mice. Irreducibly complex things cannot arise in the stepwise fashion from simpler systems that the Darwinian theory of random variation and natural selection seems to require; they thus require an intelligent agent to assemble them. Behe goes from there to delineate the irreducible complexity of the flagellum and the clotting system—if one component isn’t there, the system won’t work. Whence he concludes an intelligent designer is needed to put the parts in place.
In some places Behe acknowledges that if Darwinian stepwise evolution cannot explain the assembly of such systems, perhaps some other form of natural causality is responsible for it. He regards this as extremely unlikely. While Behe sometimes acknowledges that natural causes could in principle be compatible with the existence of an intelligent designer, the reason he consistently gives for positing an intelligent designer is the inadequacy of natural causes to explain the production of a given effect (see Darwin’s Black Box, 203-04 and The Edge of Evolution, 165-66).
Richard Dawkins is in full agreement with this way of thinking, which pits natural causes against a designer. But Dawkins maintains that natural causes will eventually be found to explain the flagellum and clotting system and this will eliminate the need for a designer. Science has filled in gaps in our understanding of nature that previously were plugged by invoking God, he contends. He is fully confident that science will continue its task of demystifying the world and ridding it of superstitious belief in a divinity.
A false dichotomy
Both parties are at fault for agreeing on a false dichotomy. What both fail to distinguish is that causes which physically produce an object may be other than the cause responsible for the plan according to which the object is made. The mediaeval philosopher Thomas Aquinas pointed this out long ago: It is one thing to be responsible for a plan and another to execute that plan. The architect may never touch the house, but is certainly responsible for its construction; whereas the artisans who actually assemble the house may have no idea of its overall layout, and are simply following instructions.
Let me give another illustration of the mistake the IDers William Dembski and Michael Behe are making. It is like saying that if someone can provide a complete account of the mechanism/program for the feature of a computer that saves documents automatically after a certain period of time, then there is no need to bring in an intelligent being to explain it. But of course someone had to design the mechanism. Dembski acknowledges that it is possible that nature, similar to a computer, could be programmed to produce living things, but still insists that if natural causes responsible for the assembly of the flagellum were discovered, ID would "pass into oblivion" (The Design Revolution, 113).
To attempt to establish that an effect is the product of an intelligent being on the grounds that natural causes could not be immediately responsible for its production is to set oneself up for defeat. Therefore, one might ask whether there isn’t some better way of arguing to an intelligence behind nature.
What about the older tradition of "natural theology" that is associated with figures like Thomas Aquinas and the 18th century English writer William Paley? Natural theology is generally understood to be a philosophical endeavour to establish the existence of God and his attributes by arguments that take as their starting point what we know about natural things. Generally speaking, ID proponents partially or entirely distance themselves from this tradition, and especially from Paley. Some maintain that his argument is irredeemably defunct, others claim that ID arguments put Paley’s argument on more solid footing, and yet others claim that ID is science and not philosophy. Yet, as Cardinal Christoph Schönborn suggested in a provocative 2005 New York Times article, perhaps there is more substance to philosophical design arguments than either IDer or Dawkins care to acknowledge.
Aquinas and Paley do not look to gaps in our knowledge about how complex parts and systems in living things came to be assembled. They look rather to what we know, namely, there is an ordering to an end in natural things, and especially in living things. They maintain that non-intelligent beings are not capable of accounting for this known order. Aquinas says things which lack cognition do not tend to an end unless directed by someone knowing and intelligent, as the arrow by an archer. Paley says that a thing having multiplicity of parts ordered and adjusted to achieve a goal is necessarily the work of an intelligent being. Aquinas also says that the ancient philosophers were led to posit that nature was a work of intelligence from observing the members in the animal body being ordered in such a way that the nature of the animal was preserved.
Now one might ask, isn’t this what Behe and company are saying? The answer is no. Paley has no problem with blind intermediaries being immediately responsible for an effect. It is the disposition of the parts, their arrangement in view of serving an end that can only be explained by reference to an intelligent being. Assembly workers ignorant of the plan and purpose of what they are making can be responsible for the assembly of the product. But the directions for the assembly line workers have to come from an intelligent being. This is what the ID people should be saying, instead of harping on biology’s current inability to offer explanations in terms of natural causes for the origin of complex feature or systems.
Dawkins’s unwitting argument for design
Whether or not they come out and say so, IDers, like Paley, have in their sights the atheism promoted by scientists like Dawkins. However, because they do not adopt the natural theologian’s approach, not only do they end up uniting forces with Dawkins, they typically overlook the support that Dawkins offers for a philosophical argument from design.
In The Blind Watchmaker Dawkins seeks to convince us that the God that Paley argues to, starting from his example of a watch, is superfluous for explaining organs such as the eye or molecules such as haemoglobin. He begins by informing us of the statistical improbability of the haemoglobin molecule arising by pure chance (one chance in 10190). Then, in order to show us how something like a haemoglobin molecule could be arrived at by blind causes, he presents an analogy with a computer. Mind you, he is trying to show how one can get something of "irreducible complexity" or a determinate complex order without any input from intelligence.
He takes a target sentence from Hamlet, "methinks it is like a weasel," and he admits that if he had his computer randomly generate a string of letters, that the chances of coming up with even such a short sentence are astronomical. He then asks, what if the computer retained those of the randomly generated letters that happened to fall in the right places, and then generated random letters only for the remaining places? He programs his computer thus, and indeed in a very short period of time his computer arrives at the target sentence. Voilà, complex order without any input of intelligence, just random letter generation and the automatic retention of the correct letters. Dawkins goes on to say that blind forces in nature have set up a similar process, whence the haemoglobin molecules, eyes, etc.
But wait a minute. How was the computer able to retain the correct letters that were randomly generated? Dawkins programmed it. The whole point of his analogy was to show that natural causes can produce haemoglobin and the eye without the input of intelligence. But what has his analogy in fact indicated? That intelligence is required in order to generate complex forms of order. Intelligent beings do programming; non-intelligent ones do not.
I think it is self-evident that where non-intelligent causes are coordinated to achieve an end, this must be the work of intelligence, and that all one can do is try to show the absurdities that follow from saying otherwise. The 18th century Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid concurs, noting that the typical defence for reasoning from ordering to an end in nature to an intelligence behind nature is by reduction to the absurd. Dawkins’ argument against design ends up defeating him.
Ultimately I think that people cannot fail to see that if it is unbelievable that a computer arose by the action of blind forces that a fortiori the human body could not have so arisen. One can show the absurdity of the various scenarios concocted to get around this. One cannot, however, give an argument or proof for what is obvious, since there is nothing better known to start from. And so, for example, people point out that if a set of instructions for a machine that was comparable to the DNA instructions for an organism were to arrive from outer space, everyone would acknowledge that it was the work of an intelligent extra-terrestrial. Whence the absurdity of denying that the ordering to an end in DNA must ultimately be traced back to some intelligent being. And this is true, even if DNA did arise by some natural process, stepwise or other.
IDers should re-examine whether they want to remain in the same camp as Dawkins when it comes to pitting natural causes against a designer. They should also welcome the ammunition Dawkins provides for those arguing from the ordering to an end in nature to an intelligence behind nature. Thereby lies a more promising path for justifying Darwin’s insertion of the words "by the Creator" in his famous affirmation: "There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved."
Marie I. George is Professor of Philosophy at St. John’s University, New York. An Aristotelian-Thomist, she holds a PhD from Laval University, and a MA in biology from Queens College, NY. She has received a number of awards from the Templeton Foundation for her work in science and religion.
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