Just quickly--Rae at Subversive Muse has written a seriesofposts "from a critical left-wing perspective" on atheism, science and religion. I've expressed my objections to Rae's arguments--I think they basically misrepresent science (it is taken as axiomatic in this series of posts that science is "an ideology," whereas I think this needs to be argued for/demonstrated) and critique a strawman definition of atheism--and I know Bruce (who is more well-versed on this topic than I am) is preparing a response at his blog. Brian at Primordial Blog has written a thoughtful response as well.
Just to make it worth your while (and Rae, I'm not lumping you in with these guys!), here are some Youtube dispatches from the war on science:
. . . so here's a picture of an extinct giant sea scorpion. From Science Daily:
The discovery of a giant fossilised claw from an ancient sea scorpion indicates that when alive it would have been about two and a half meters long, much taller than the average man.
This find, from rocks 390 million years old, suggests that spiders, insects, crabs and similar creatures were much larger in the past than previously thought.
Dr Simon Braddy from the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Bristol, co-author of an article about the find, said, 'This is an amazing discovery. We have known for some time that the fossil record yields monster millipedes, super-sized scorpions, colossal cockroaches, and jumbo dragonflies, but we never realised, until now, just how big some of these ancient creepy-crawlies were.'
The claw was discovered by one of Dr Braddy's co-authors*, Markus Poschmann, in a quarry near Prüm in Germany.
Apparently gigantism in ancient insects and other creatures that tend to the bite-sized nowadays has something to do with a richer oxygen supply in those times.
Here's Meganura monyi, the largest insect that ever lived:
A US man has been discovered dead in his girlfriend's cat door, leaving authorities confused about his exact manner of death.
The man, Charles Tucker Junior, was using the animal entry to gain access to his girlfriend's home on Sunday morning when he became stuck, News4Jax reported.
Officials said his girlfriend made the bizarre discovery only hours after she ordered him out of her house.
Worth listening to is a collection of audio clips from a range of scientists and philosophers explaining what does and does not count as science.Read more!
Null presents us with an interesting graphic today:
Discuss.
The graph was produced by NoBeliefs.com, in a (rather ranty) article challenging the claim advanced by some apologists that "without Christianity, we would not have modern science, medicine or hospitals."
The Christian Dark Ages represents the only time in the history of Europe where scientific advancement not only halted but went backwards. The hole left by the Dark Ages bears the imprint of scientific intolerance. Imagine where scientific advancement would stand today if not for the scars left by Christianity.
During the Age of Enlightenment, people began to wake up. Many freethinkers and scientists rejected orthodox religion and replaced it with unitarianism, deism, or non-theistic philosophy. During the 1800s and after, scientists no longer had to fear religious persecution in any form. As never before in the history of mankind, scientists began to reject theocracy entirely. And what happened as a result of the freedom from Christian influence? Science literally exploded with new discoveries! Since the early 1900s, the majority of the world's productive scientists held no theological beliefs, and the percentage of nonbelievers continued to rise every decade.
The idea that Christianity founded modern science and medicine comes from pure arrogant myth. Christianity, by its very biblical nature, represents the antithesis of science.
There are a set of questions below that are all of the form, "The best [subgenre][medium] in [genre] is…". Copy the questions, and before answering them, you may modify them in a limited way, carrying out no more than two of these operations:
You can leave them exactly as is.
You can delete any one question.
You can mutate either the genre, medium, or subgenre of any one question. For instance, you could change "The best time travelnovel in SF/Fantasy is…" to "The best time travelnovel in Westerns is…", or "The best time travelmovie in SF/Fantasy is…", or "The best romancenovel in SF/Fantasy is…".
You can add a completely new question of your choice to the end of the list, as long as it is still in the form "The best [subgenre][medium] in [genre] is…".
You must have at least one question in your set, or you've gone extinct, and you must be able to answer it yourself, or you're not viable.
Then answer your possibly mutant set of questions. Please do include a link back to the blog you got them from, to simplify tracing the ancestry, and include these instructions.
Finally, pass it along to any number of your fellow bloggers. Remember, though, your success as a Darwinian replicator is going to be measured by the propagation of your variants, which is going to be a function of both the interest your well-honed questions generate and the number of successful attempts at reproducing them.
Star Wars nerds everywhere, be prepared to cream your Ewok boxer shorts. A Californian team has built, and flown (well, gotten airborne would be more precise) a working X-Wing!!
The latest Bill Muehlenberg gong is awarded to Cyrus Brooks, vice-president of the Australian Church of Scientology, for taking advantage of a recent double-murder, involving a Sydney woman who stabbed her father and sister to death, to proselytise to the nation his faith-based objections to psychiatry, arguing on ABC radio that "modern psychiatry used many methods that were largely 'unproven' and psychiatric assumptions - such as chemical imbalances in the brain - simply did not exist." The murder suspect is a woman suffering psychosis who was denied psychiatric treatment because of her parents' Scientologist beliefs. Brooks' claims were immediately rebutted by Sydney University psychiatrist Chris Tennant:
It's so sad to hear the Flat-Earthers getting on the radio. The amount of research in terms of both treatment of depression and psychosis is as strong as any other medical of treatment--be it cancer, be it heart disease, be it whatever--it's the same methods, the same technologies are used in these sorts of studies. There are hundreds of studies that show the effectiveness of these drugs not only in curing symptoms, [. . .] but also in reducing the social impact including, dare I say it, issues of violence and things like assault and homicide when patients with psychosis are treated.
And yet again we have a clear demonstration of the dangers of magical thinking--of what can go wrong when one checks one's brains at the door of the "Free Personality Test" booth and embraces religious dogma at the expense of reason and evidence.
What is even more disconcerting is the fact that Scientology appears to be giving the Christian Right a run for its money regarding its theocratic ambitions. A 2005 Salon article documents the church's attempts to get anti-psychiatry legislation passed in various US states, and its anti-medication dogma taught in US public schools (see also this San Francisco Chronicle article). According to Salon,
you don't have to rely on critics to show that Scientology's attack on psychiatry is part of the church's crusade to rule society. In 1995, David Miscavige, the church's current leader, addressed the International Association of Scientologists in Copenhagen. He told the faithful that the church had two goals as the new millennium approached, dutifully noted by International Scientology News: "Objective one - place Scientology at the absolute center of society. Objective two - eliminate psychiatry in all its forms."
It's time for a round of "Spot the Logical Fallacy." Today's passage comes from the latest article by Dinesh D'Souza, in which he purports to smackdown Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris on the question "If God created the Universe, who created God?"--thereby proving that there is still room in his mouth to accommodate his other foot. Here's the passage:
Given that nothing in the universe is the cause of its own existence, the universe cannot be explained by an infinite regress of causation. If there were infinite regress then the series would not have gotten started in the first place. The universe is here, just like the fellow who has gotten his driver’s license. And just as there had to be a first number at the DMV that got the sequence going, so too there must be a first cause for the universe that accounts for the chain of causation that we see everywhere in the world. We may not be able to say much about what this first cause is like, but we have established the need for it and the existence of it. Without a first cause, none of its effects—including the world, including us—would be here.
The real force of Aquinas’ argument is not that every series must have a temporal beginning but that every series, in order to have being or existence, must depend on something outside the series. It is no rebuttal to say that since everything must have a cause, therefore God Himself requires a cause. Aquinas’ argument does not use the premise that everything needs a cause. Everything that exists in the universe needs a cause. God is not part of the series and therefore the rules of the series, including the rules of causation, do not apply to Him.
And remember, folks:
Aquinas can rest easy. It seems evident that Dawkins and Harris have not answered the theistic argument. Yet amusingly they think they have. What’s up with these self-styled paragons of reason? Dawkins and Harris are experts in laboratory science. One is a zoologist, the other a student of neuroscience. Here is the classic case of people who are experts in one field trying to issue authoritative pronouncements in another. When this happens the results are not hard to predict.
Researchers have found that Buddhists are indeed happier and calmer than other people, including happy-clappers! From the BBC:
Tests carried out in the United States reveal that areas of their brain associated with good mood and positive feelings are more active.
The findings come as another study suggests that Buddhist meditation can help to calm people.
Researchers at University of California San Francisco Medical Centre have found the practise can tame the amygdala, an area of the brain which is the hub of fear memory.
They found that experienced Buddhists, who meditate regularly, were less likely to be shocked, flustered, surprised or as angry compared to other people.
Paul Ekman, who carried out the study, said: "The most reasonable hypothesis is that there is something about conscientious Buddhist practice that results in the kind of happiness we all seek."
[. . .]
In a separate study, scientists at the University of Wisconsin at Madison used new scanning techniques to examine brain activity in a group of Buddhists.
Their tests revealed activity in the left prefrontal lobes of experienced Buddhist practitioners.
This area is linked to positive emotions, self-control and temperament.
Their tests showed this area of the Buddhists' brains are constantly lit up and not just when they are meditating.
This, the scientists said, suggests they are more likely to experience positive emotions and be in good mood.
"We can now hypothesise with some confidence that those apparently happy, calm Buddhist souls one regularly comes across in places such as Dharamsala, India, really are happy," said Professor Owen Flanagan, of Duke University in North Carolina.
Dharamsala is the home base of exiled Tibetan leader the Dalai Lama.
The studies are published in New Scientist magazine.
Found this via a discussion about minds and brains at Pharyngula (note--the post is truncated. Click "Read More!" to, well, read more):
A dialogue by Terry Bisson. From a series of stories entitled "Alien/Nation" in the April [1991?] issue of Omni.
"They're made out of meat."
"Meat?"
"Meat. They're made out of meat."
"Meat?"
"There's no doubt about it. We picked several from different parts of the planet, took them aboard our recon vessels, probed them all the way through. They're completely meat."
"That's impossible. What about the radio signals? The messages to the stars."
"They use the raido waves to talk, but the signals don't come from them. The signals come from machines."
"So who made the machines? That's who we want to contact."
"They made the machines. That's what I'm trying to tell you. Meat made the machines."
"That's ridiculous. How can meat make a machine? You're asking me to believe in sentient meat."
"I'm not asking you, I 'm telling you. These creatures are the only sentient race in the sector and they're made out of meat."
"Maybe they're like the Orfolei. You know, a carbon-based intelligence that goes through a meat stage."
"Nope. They're born meat and they die meat. We studied them for several of their life spans, which didn't take too long. Do you have any idea the life span of meat?"
"Spare me. Okay, maybe they're only part meat. You know, like the Weddilei. A meat head with an electron plamsa brain inside."
"Nope. We thought of that, since they do have meat heads like the Weddilei. But I told you, we probed them. They're meat all the way through."
"No brain?"
"Oh, there is a brain all right. It's just that the brain is made out of meat!"
"So... what does the thinking?"
"You're not understanding, are you? The brain does the thinking. The meat."
"Thinking meat! You're asking me to believe in thinking meat!"
"Yes, thinking meat! Conscious meat! Loving meat. Dreaming meat. The meat is the whole deal! Are you getting the picture?"
"Omigod. You're serious then. They're made out of meat."
"Finally, Yes. They are indeed made out meat. And they've been trying to get in touch with us for almost a hundred of their years."
"So what does the meat have in mind."
"First it wants to talk to us. Then I imagine it wants to explore the universe, contact other sentients, swap ideas and information. The usual."
"We're supposed to talk to meat?"
"That's the idea. That's the message they're sending out by radio. 'Hello. Anyone out there? Anyone home?' That sort of thing."
"They actually do talk, then. They use words, ideas, concepts?"
"Oh, yes. Except they do it with meat."
"I thought you just told me they used radio."
"They do, but what do you think is on the radio? Meat sounds. You know how when you slap or flap meat it makes a noise? They talk by flapping their meat at each other. They can even sing by squirting air through their meat."
"Omigod. Singing meat. This is altogether too much. So what do you advise?"
"Officially or unofficially?"
"Both."
"Officially, we are required to contact, welcome, and log in any and all sentient races or multibeings in the quadrant, without prejudice, fear, or favor. Unofficially, I advise that we erase the reconds and forget the whole thing."
"I was hoping you would say that."
"It seems harsh, but there is a limit. Do we really want to make contact with meat?"
"I agree one hundred percent. What's there to say?" `Hello, meat. How's it going?' But will this work? How many planets are we dealing with here?"
"Just one. They can travel to other planets in special meat containers, but they can't live on them. And being meat, they only travel theough C space. which limits them to the speed of light and makes the possibility of their ever making contact pretty slim. Infinitesimal, in fact."
"So we just pretend there's no one home in the universe."
"That's it."
"Cruel. But you sid it yourself, who want to meet meat? And the ones who have been aboard our vessels, the ones you have probed? You're sure they won't remember?"
"They'll be considered crackpots if they do. We went into their heads and smoothed out their meat so that we're just a dream to them."
"A dream to meat! How strangely appropiate, that we should be meat's dream."
"And we can marked this sector unoccupied."
"Good. Agreed, officially and unofficially. Case closed. Any others? Anyone interesting on that side of the galaxy?"
"Yes, a rather shy but sweet hydrogen core cluster intelligence in a class nine star in G445 zone. Was in contact two galactic rotation ago, wants to be friendly again."
"They always come around."
"And why not? Imagine how unbearably, how unutterably cold the universe would be if one were all alone.
Homophobic street preacher whines about hypocrisy because he has been refused permission to march in a gay pride parade. (Via Dispatches from the Culture Wars. Incidentally, the WorldNetDaily article detailing the poor oppressed anti-gay activist's plight refers to said gay pride parade as a "gay" pride parade. Why the scare quotes? Are the participants not gay? Are they only pretending to be gay? Why do wingnuts do this? Are they stupid or something?)
And if you happen to be gay--or even if you're accused of being gay--in post-Saddam Iraq, it significantly increases your chances of being shot, burned and/or beheaded by Shi'a fundamentalist death squads. (Via uruknet) (Warning: follow the links at your own risk--they contain images that are definitely NSFW.) Isn't faith a wonderful thing?
Confused by "NOMA?" US Republican Presidential candidate Sam Brownback unpacks it for you in an op-ed for the New York Times. The way to balance science and faith is to cherry-pick those elements of science which are consonant with your religious ideology (or could be interpreted to be so); if it doesn't agree with your religious presuppositions, you simply write it off as "atheistic theology posing as science." Simple, no? (Richard Dawkins.net) (More info. on the science-friendly Brownback campaign in this post)
Eighth-grade student proves creationism with Epsom salts and wins Christian school science fair. It need not be pointed out to my intelligent readers, surely, that the real idiot in this tale is not the kid but the "science teacher" who bestowed the award. (via Pharyngula)
This morning my girlfriend, who teaches in an Anglican high school, received an email being passed around the offices of several religious schools in the Perth metro area entitled "Antidote to Root of All Evil."
Kohn takes issue with the comparison Dawkins apparently draws between Ted Haggard's Pentecostal megachurch brand of worship and Nazi rallies.
To the scientist Dawkins, a room full of people waving their hands and singing "Praise Jesus" is evil because it is irrational. By definition, believers obedient to a God which cannot be proved to exist, and whose dictums are based on mythical stories that have no basis in fact, are as dangerous as the Brownshirts.
Dawkins is not accusing Haggard and his followers of being Brownshirts, of course. What he is doing is pointing out what megachurch Christianity and Nazi rallies have in common: unquestioning dogmatism--the sheer absence of critical and reflective thinking that is the hallmark of every kind of fundamentalism--be it religious or ideological.
So when Kohn argues that "what Dawkins failed to acknowledge in his encounter with Haggard is that the Nazi program of eugenics and extermination was not dictated by an unseen god," she is missing Dawkins' point entirely.
But there is more in this that should put the scientist masquerading as a moral philosopher on guard. Nazism's propaganda was written with the help of a legion of scholars from the hard and soft sciences, from anthropologists, philologists, psychologists and economists to biologists, zoologists and doctors.
So what? No-one is claiming that scientists are incapable of folly, ignorance or despicable behaviour; nor is anyone suggesting that the fruits of scientific research cannot be put to heinous uses. Certainly Dawkins is advancing neither proposition in Root of All Evil. The important distinction for him is not between scientists and believers (how could it be--many scientists are believers), but rather between science and faith. He is pitting the fallibilism and skepticism of science against the parochialism and dogmatism of faith, and what he's suggesting is that Nazism and megachurch fundamentalism both exhibit the latter characteristics. Hence, the comparison holds.
The Nazi example is not unique but was repeated elsewhere, such as in Stalinist Eastern Europe and Mao's China. It is no doubt occurring in Iran, where dissidence is virtually impossible. The point is not the political ideology, but the readiness of "rational" scientific types to help mad regimes to deliver untold suffering to millions.
Kohn is contradicting herself here. If dissidence is virtually impossible in these regimes--it will be as impossible for "rational scientific types" as for anyone else--whether we're talking about China, Eastern Europe or Iran. In any case, the point is the political ideology--and the fact that the Stalinism and Maoism that held sway in Eastern Europe and China respectively have far more in common with religious fundamentalism (of both the Islamic and the Christian kind) than they do with the tradition of freethinking and skepticism embraced by many atheists.
But no rant is complete without a strawman argument:
The trouble with the present flight from religion to the welcoming embrace of atheistic scientists and philosophers is that they offer precious little more than a new conviction that religion is the cause of evil in the world. In other words, these scientists deliver a message akin to that of the fire-and-brimstone preachers who bellowed about the dangers of sin, only they warn from their secular pulpits of the dangers of religion.
No, Rachael: if atheists and scientists (who may or may not be atheists, but don't let that stop Kohn throwing us all into the same box) have a message to deliver, it is that the benefits to humankind of reason and critical-reflective (as opposed to dogmatic and parochial) thinking are manifold and demonstrable. Every advance we have made towards liberty and democracy--be it racial equality, gay rights, women's rights, etc.--has been made in spite of the vehement opposition religious traditionalists. It is the latter, and not freethinkers, who have held us back every time--and Kohn may want to take a few minutes out from her thoughtless science-bashing to give that some thought.
Kohn closes with an attack on Michael Onfray's The Atheist Manifesto. I haven't read the book myself, but apparently it entails a Marxist critique of religion. Why this should in and of itself be a problem Kohn doesn't deign to inform us--I guess the sheer mention of Marx is supposed to set off a big red flashing light in our heads and send our critical faculties into meltdown as we search under our beds with a flashlight. (Lazy argument being another hallmark of the rant.) She complains that Onfray presents a "comic-book" view of religion--in a piece that itself presents a comic-book view of science and nonbelief. She complains that "Onfray does not accept the sociological truth that religion has not only accommodated the laws and ethos of a democratic state but in a pervasive way supports it." Supports it? In what sense? It is the religious who oppose the full enfranchisement of the gay and lesbian community. It is the religious who want to dictate to women what they should do with their own bodies. It is the religious who (as this article demonstrates) regularly attack science when its discoveries come into conflict with theological presuppositions. It is the religious who want tear down the wall of separation between church and state--even though, ironically, it is the existence of such a wall that guarantees religious freedom. How exactly does any of this support democracy?
Kohn's closing line is priceless:
If Germany in 1933 had been invaded by people in prayer singing "Praise Jesus" instead of Nazis in jackboots it would not have presided over the worst mass killing in history.
Bullshit. People in prayer singing "Praise Jesus" lynched African-Americans in their thousands in the Deep South. People in prayer singing "Praise Jesus" have blown up abortion clinics and murdered their staff. People in prayer singing "Praise Jesus" abused children under their power while other people in prayer singing "Praise Jesus" covered for them. And Rachael: people in prayer singing "Praise Jesus" were complicit in the Nazi extermination of millions of undesirables.
First up, I'm hoping this shill for geocentrism is just taking the piss, because if he isn't, he may well be the dumbererest person on the Interwebs. Dumberer even than Idiot Pete. Bag-of-hammers-for-brains dumb. Look-ma-I-can-Interweb-all-by-my-selfs dumb.
Poland hosts the World Congress of Families, a homophobic hate-in hosted by skinhead leader and Education Minister Roman Giertych, and bringing together fundies from across the nations to discuss "ways to counteract what has been called the 'demographics winter.'" (Translation: if the Muzzies don't outbreed us, the gays will.) Delegates maintained that the demographic crisis was being exacerbated by evil women attending university and postponing having children until it is too late. (Bartholomew's Notes on Religion)
As a teacher, and as someone who from time to time has said unkind things about "bogans," I feel chastened by PZ Myers' latest post--a response to an editorial by SF writer Ben Bova extolling the virtues of a 50s SF tale called "The Marching Morons," predicting a world overrun by "dummies."
Myers takes issue with the obvious elitism of the story, as well as its attempt to ground the intellectual class distinction in biology. He retorts: "People, they are us."
That's where the Kornbluth story fails. It assumes the morons are unchangeably moronic, and treats the elite as unchangeably special. The only solution to their problem is to get rid of the morons, launching them into space to die. Bova's editorial, while not as cynically eliminationist, still pretends that the only answer is perpetuation of a distinction that doesn't exist biologically.
Here's the real solution to the "marching moron" problem: teach them. Give them fair opportunities. Open the door to education for all. They have just as much potential as you do. Bova complains that people aren't willing to work for change, but this is exactly where we can work to improve minds — but we won't if we assume the mob is hopeless.
Kelly Tripplehorn, president of the i53 Network (which describes itself as an evangelical (though not Christian) network whose mission is "to produce quality media content, all to the glory of God’s Word"), has thrown down the gauntlet to us heathens. His organisation will pay $1000 to anyone who can offer a non-theistic justification for their belief that the Sun will rise tomorrow.
All you need to do in order to collect your $1,000 is get your non-theistic answer published (concerning your epistemological warrant for your inductive inference) in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, under its heading The Problem of Induction.
The point I am interested in is to show that all the knowledge non-Christians have, whether as simple folk by common sense, or as scientists exploring the hidden depths of the created universe- they have because Christianity is true. It is because the world is not what the non-Christians assume that it is, a world of Chance, and is what the Christian says that it is, a world run by the council of God, that even non-Christians have knowledge… Now the question is not whether the non-Christian can weigh, measure, or do a thousand other things. No one denies that he can. But the question is whether on his principle the non-Christian can account for his own or any knowledge.
Tripplehorn elaborates in the video below:
Tripplehorn maintains that the problem of induction is not a problem for Christians like him, because "the first two passages of Genesis inform me that God created the world with order and uniformity, and I as a Christian can assume that the past laws of nature will be the same as the future laws of nature, because God has implicitly told me so, in his Word." This, my friends, is your standard Argument from Biblical Authority, with a twist of Argument from Design.
Bottom line: insofar as the problem of induction is a problem for non-theists, it is a problem for theists like Tripplehorn also. The only difference is that Tripplehorn has given his non-solution to the problem of induction a label: "God." As PZ Myers points out, in the process of tearing Tripplehorn a new one:
It's a cheat. He has absolutely no logical, philosophical justification for this divine precondition he has pulled out of his butt, but then he turns around and thinks that he's got atheists over a barrel and demands that they justify the use of induction without Jesus. What? Why can't I just invent an accidentally linear seam in the fabric of the 18th dimension that imposes regularity in our dimension by subspace resonance? It's total nonsense, but it's a justification that's on a par with waving your hands over an ancient Hebrew sky-god. How about if I pretend there is a subatomic particle (or maybe a sub-quantum force; does it matter?) called the Regulon that compels lawful behavior in other particles/forces. Again, it's pseudoscientific magical BS, but it's as good as Snottypunk's excuse.
Another YouTuber, responding to Snottypunk's--erm--I mean Tripplehorn's video, suggests that miracles pose a whole other set of problems for his supposedly neat Christian solution to the problem of induction.
*Mordechai Eliyahu: the Pat Robertson/Jerry Falwell/Dinesh D'Souza of Judaism. (Jewish Telegraphic Agency)
*The Festival of Magical Thinking: Among the speakers at this year's "Reclaiming America for Christ" conference, Ann Coulter repeated her "faggot" remark (admittedly to stunned silence), called for the leaders of Muslim countries to be forcibly converted to Christianity, and sought to justify the murders of abortion clinic workers; while Family Research Council president Tony Perkins, who once paid former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke over $80,000 for his mailing list, recounted a Bible story vindicating the criminalisation of miscegenation. In that story, Moses' great-nephew Phineas "was rewarded by God with an 'everlasting priesthood' for killing an Israelite and his Midian lover because God had forbidden the mixing of the men of Israel with the women of that tribe." Not that Perkins was suggesting that Christians take up their pitchforks and barge into their neighbours' houses, of course: "Phineas, the Bible tells us, used a javelin." Meanwhile, Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission warned that in an America run by secularists, "there would be clone farms and polygamy." (Alternet)
*It turns out that Perth Catholic Archbishop Barry Hickey has articulated his support for teaching ID in schools on a previous occasion. In October 2005 he declared: "Intelligent design is a far more elegant description of historical changes than an entirely evolutionary approach, and it therefore should not be ignored in the classroom. "Intelligent design, while it does not demand belief in a creator, sits very comfortably with Catholics who believe that whatever came first came from God who has a clear design for the universe and for each human being in it." (AD2000)
Santamaria's attitude to so many of these issues was perhaps summed up in his statement in 1952 that one of the great evils of modern history was the birth of the "modern, liberal, democratic, secular state" in Europe in the years between 1750 and 1848. Think of the notions that are rejected in this statement: modern, liberal, democratic, secular.
Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge . . .
-- Charles Darwin
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