Just give me that old-time atheism!
[snip]
Intelligent design, an idea designed backward so as to force the antique
idea of a Creator upon the beauty of creation, is so thoroughly rooted in
pseudoscience, so full of false logic, so easy to attack that a little
rudeness seems called for.
Its advocates argue, for example, that the sheer complexity and
perfection of cellular/molecular structures is inexplicable by gradual
evolution.
However, the multiple parts of complex, interlocking biological systems
do evolve together, gradually expanding and adapting — and, as Dawkins
showed in The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a
Universe Without Design, natural selection is active at every step of
this process.
But, as well as scientific arguments, there are others that are more,
well, novelistic. What about bad design, for example? Was it really so
intelligent to come up with the birth canal or the prostate gland?
Then, there's the moral argument against an intelligent designer who
cursed his creations with cancer and AIDS. Is the intelligent designer
also amorally cruel?
To see religion as "a kind of art," as Evans rather sweetly proposes, is
possible only when the religion is dead or when, like the Church of
England, it has become a set of polite rituals.
The old Greek religion lives on as mythology, the old Norse religion has
left us the Norse myths and, yes, now we can read them as literature.
[more: http://tinyurl.com/7ka2y ]
--
Enkidu AA#2165
EAC Chaplin and ordained minister,
ULC, Modesto, CA
And if you believe in that supreme power, you have to believe that *it*
came from nothing? Which is harder: to believe that a super-simple
universe, emergent from nothing, iterating simple algorithms billions of
times, brought about all the wonderful complexity you see around you, or
that a super-complicated and mightily all-powerful God built a simple and
undignified little universe of pain and sorrow, leaving no coherent
explanation whatsoever?
-- Elf M. Sternberg
Now playing: Mark Steel - 05 The Mark Steel Solution - E
.
|
