Life in the Atomic Age

Isn’t what you might expect.

The Vatican’s chief astronomer said Friday that “intelligent design” isn’t science and doesn’t belong in science classrooms, the latest high-ranking Roman Catholic official to enter the evolution debate in the United States.

The Rev. George Coyne, the Jesuit director of the Vatican Observatory, said placing intelligent design theory alongside that of evolution in school programs was “wrong” and was akin to mixing apples with oranges.

“Intelligent design isn’t science even though it pretends to be,” the ANSA news agency quoted Coyne as saying on the sidelines of a conference in Florence. “If you want to teach it in schools, intelligent design should be taught when religion or cultural history is taught, not science.”

Define science, you say? Well alrighty then.

Che’s cool, right? Riiiight.

My wife pointed to the Che cards and said “Dont you know who Che Guevara is?”

For all your revolutionary needs.

Heh. Che Mart. Lots of nice merchandise. Cheap.

Perhaps she is asking the wrong person.

There is no doubt that Sheehan has moved from “private, grieving citizen” to “public, anti-war activist”. That happened once she started giving dramatic TV interviews claiming to know President Bush’s conscience, and posting her opinions on michaelmoore.com. She’s been cannonized over at the Huffington Post, and called the anti-war movement’s Rosa Parks. She’s the perfect weapon for the anti-war, anti-America cadre - untouchable because of her shield of grief, and no one will ask about her apparent change in attitude between now and her first meeting with President Bush - at least no one that she will grant an interview to. So, at what point does she go from untouchable to being a legitimate target for criticism? I think that point has long since come and gone, and that it’s time to call her what she is - an anti-war extremist using her dead son as leverage to gain access to the President, access she has already been granted once, the same as any other family member who has lost a child in conflict.

Why should she get special treatment, especially since there is nothing productive that can come from this meeting, except to produce more anti-war friendly soundbites where Sheehan says she “knows” the President doesn’t have a conscience? This is a lose-lose situation for the White House, but I think they lose less by saying that she already got to meet with the President, and he is aware that she disagrees with him on the Iraqi war.

Sheehan is seperated from her husband because of the stress of Casey’s death, the rest of her family has distanced themselves from her comments, and she is aligned with far left compatriots. I’m not saying that she hasn’t suffered a great loss - she has. But she lost an adult son who made his own choices and who died doing something he believed in. She has willfully painted Casey’s death as meaningless - a casualty of an illegal and pointless war. Well, that may be her opinion, but it obviously wasn’t his - but I suppose she doesn’t care about what his opinion was anymore - especially with her new found celebrity and the fact that his death is a potent shield from criticism. Her pain is obviously very real. Her hatred of Bush is obviously very real. It’s a shame she chooses to diminish her son’s sacrifice to advance her political agenda, especially since it’s an agenda he disagreed with when alive. At least there are several million Iraqis who appreciate what Casey fought, and died, for.

UPDATE

John Cole says it much, much better (and to a much bigger audience, I might add).

Update the 2nd

Varifrank says it, perhaps best of all.

“We have total blackness,” a firefighter transmits at the collapse of the North Tower. “We have no way out of here …”

I will never forget how I felt on that morning - sitting in my office at LSU, watching my adopted city, the place where I had spent 15 years of my professional career, come under attack. I will never forget watching the towers come down and thinking “my god, there could be 50,000+ fatalities from this”. Losing 3,000 civilians in a cowardly attack is horrendous, but it could have been much, much worse. And the Islamist world would have rejoiced even more.

I know some people are opposed to the release of the transcripts, feeling that it is a violation of privacy issue. And I know that some argue that the images of people choosing that day to jump to their death rather than die in the horrible flames shouldn’t be shown. I disagree with both points of view. I think Americans need to remember exactly what is at stake here, and to remember exactly why we are in Afghanistan and Iraq. It’s because we were attacked. Attacked by a foe that considers us infidels worthy of slaughter purely because we are not they - and never believe that it is for any other reason.

Many tough and horrible choices had to be made that day. New York City emergency response personnel poured into the twin towers trying to help, and many died. Average people, mostly American but representing all nationalities and religions who just went to work to do their jobs, spent a morning of terror trying to escape. Some made it, some died still trying, while others, like the jumpers, realized there was no escape and chose the best way they could to die.

A firefighter, Timothy Brown, of the Office of Emergency Management describes the awful scene inside an elevator that had plummeted to the ground floor with eight people inside. “The elevator pit was on fire with the jet fuel,” he said. “People were screaming in the elevator. They were getting smoked and cooked.”

Firefighter first grade Maureen McArdle-Schulman, who is assigned to Engine 35 in Manhattan, recounted watching the jumpers fall. “I was getting sick,” she said. “I felt like I was intruding on a sacrament. They were choosing to die, and I was watching them and shouldn’t have been. So me and another guy turned away and looked at the wall and we could still hear them hit.”

Go listen to the tapes - all of them. And then, if you want to give up in the war on terror, start thinking about how you choose to die.

Then go here and read this. Trust me, it’s well worth your time, and one of the more, shall we say, reasoned responses to hit the blogosphere.

My views are here and here and here.

Help link the phrase Intelligent design to the National Center for Science Education website.

Questions about Google bombing?

C’mon - my new little single digit blog isn’t going to make much of a difference, but every little bit helps. And imagine how great it will be to have someone google the words “intelligent design“, and actually end up at a science site!

Vectored

And beware the pirates.

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One of the benefits of starting my blog-life over has been finding new sites to add to the blogroll. One that I have really enjoyed is Ambient Irony - a mu.nu site that has a little bit of everything. A little anime, a little personal diary touch, and today, a little ID commentary. Be sure to read the comments, since that is where a really interesting discussion on the, er, nature of naturalism. One of my favorite essayists from the past, no longer blogging himself, makes an appearance.

Do you see IC as the savior of the Intelligent Design “theory”? Well, then, I would suggest that you don’t go and read this.

Irreducible complexity, intelligent design’s closest brush with biology, is marked by three ironies.

There was supposed to be a special reason why it was impossible or at least very difficult for evolution to arrive at an ‘all parts required’ situation, but there is no such reason. The proposed reason was based on overlooking standard evolutionary processes and making analogies to manufactured items. Comparing Behe’s mousetrap to Venus’ flytrap confirms the reasonable suspicion that analogies and arguments based on manufactured items lead to underestimating nature. Since IC can occur in the ordinary course of events we have a known process, evolution, which is acting in the present and which given time is sufficient to produce the adaptations that Behe finds perplexing. This is like the raising of the Rocky Mountains; a known process acting in the present is sufficient, given time, to produce the result. Of course there is no way to predict all the details in either case, nor is it necessary.

Some people who believe in ID use the irreducible complexity argument like some kind of mantra - “we don’t understand how these complex systems could have developed, therefore they could not have developed, therefore evolution is falsified”.

If you don’t want to read all of the article linked to above, then how about this:

This (irreducible complexity - ed) is the classic argument from design; however, it is based on an incomplete understanding of the mechanisms of evolution. Evolution is not random; adaptations are not produced by “chance.” Mutation does produce random (chance) variation, and if mutation were the only mechanism of evolutionary change, it would be a random process. However, natural selection, a nonrandom process, acts on this random variation to produce adaptations like the eye.

You may also hear probability arguments, in which an astronomically small probability is stated that some trait evolved by natural causes. Again, these arguments are based on the assumption that the trait appeared in its current modern form all at once. Indeed, this would be highly improbable. However, this is not the way evolution works. Evolution by natural selection is a gradual, step-by-step process, with incremental changes occurring through mutations that are then selected for if advantageous.

So, I’ve been commenting a lot in this thread, which deals with JunkYardBlog’s post on how libertarians are a bunch of hypoctrical “intellectual bullies” for expressing disdain for Bush’s support of ID. Most of my thoughts on the subject are contained in the comments of that post, so I won’t reproduce them here. I do read JYB on a regular basis, even though I am one of those atheist libertarians he apparently so despises. I find myself agreeing with him on most political issues, and disagreeing on most social ones that he chooses to address. I thought the first part of his post was pretty aggressive and strident, and painted libertarianism with a pretty broad brush. He’s made a couple of additions to his original post, which tone down the rhetoric a bit (not much, but a bit). Actually, the final addition to the post is the most reasoned, and he makes several good points about how what is scientific dogma today is ridiculed tomorrow - sort of a “how on Earth did we ever believe that” kind of scenario. And this is absolutely correct.

However, while scientific theories get discarded and modified based on new observational evidence all of the time, I’m not aware of any scientific theory that has been discarded for a supernatural explanation. Nothing like “well, we used to think that Old Faithful erupted because of volcanic heating of underground water reservoirs, but now we know that the fire demons do it”, or something similar. Now the converese is certainly true - supernatural theories have been discarded countless times as our knowledge and understanding grows. That’s why we have a Galilean rather than Copernican view of the solar system/universe. No matter how much the church wanted the Earth to be the center of the universe, the observational evidence just didn’t add up.

Anyway, here’s a couple of letters to the Manitoban, on supporting ID, and one rebutting it. The rebuttal is a perfect example of a thoughtful, reasoned, respectful response. Dr. Gingrich, the astronomer arguing for ID, is a very articulate and persuasive speaker. Read for yourself, decide for yourself. Just try not to call me a hypocritical intellectual bully because I don’t think that your faith based version of how the world came into being should be taught in science class.

Theologic truth vs scientific truth. Dare a scientist believe in “design”?

Creation with a purpose? - an argument against universal design

of the relentless pursuit of empire.

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