1. Sextuplet parents take B.C. to court over baby seizures

Comment #20442 by jeff_n on February 2, 2007 at 1:36 pm

We will not, however, consent to blood transfusions. We firmly believe that our creator commands us in scriptures, such as Acts 15:28-29 to abstain from blood products.

Here's Acts 15:28-29 (King James Bible):

28. For it seemed good to the Holy Ghost, and to us, to lay upon you no greater burden than these necessary things;

29. That ye abstain from meats offered to idols, and from blood, and from things strangled, and from fornication: from which if ye keep yourselves, ye shall do well. Fare ye well.

Can't see anything about life-saving blood transfusions here. The mention of blood seems to be a staightforward injunction to refrain from eating black pudding. Perhaps that's why there are so few Jehova's Witnesses in the north of England.

2. Does Evolution Select For Faster Evolvers? Horizontal Gene Transfer Adds To Complexity, Speed Of Evolution

Comment #20105 by jeff_n on January 31, 2007 at 12:14 pm

Aussie says:

A much simpler and more elegant explanation is provided by an ingenious theory known as Intelligent Design. Seems like nobody here has even heard of it.

Considering such design anomalies as Evangelical Christians, tree kangaroos, and the bizarre insistence on building everything with folded-up chain molecules, the "Design by Committee" hypothesis looks promising.

3. Atheists in Jail

Comment #19826 by jeff_n on January 30, 2007 at 4:54 am

God is just as lazy, he didn't even finish his creation and made a pretty botched job of it as well.

And when designing the male body he left the testicles on the outside! Surely any designer worth his salt could have found a bit of room near the kidneys? Sheer lackadaisicalness.

4. Young, British Muslims 'getting more radical'

Comment #19687 by jeff_n on January 29, 2007 at 9:28 am

Mango says:

Religious schools, however, are a little different and the gov't forcing all children to attend secular schools will surely do much to integrate theist children (esp. Muslims) and perhaps soften their militancy.

I'm not sure that's true. When I was at a mixed state school, the kids of muslim parents were often isolated and bullied and verbally abused. No doubt they only felt they "belonged" to anything at all when they attended Islamic classes in the evenings. Maybe their radicalism actually originated in state school playgrounds.

Don't get me wrong, I don't like the idea of faith schools either, but if Catholic schools are anything to go by, they might actually work in our favour. A lot of people who went to Catholic schools remember more about the cruelty of nuns (etc.) than anything else, and they notice the complete mismatch between "the world as presented by the church" and the world they actually live in. Many of these people grow up to despise Catholicism. So, perhaps muslim schools in a secular society might actually be helpful.

I also think the best way to stop kids taking drugs is to make it compulsory. :o)

5. CNN Sylvia Browne Fraud

Comment #19550 by jeff_n on January 28, 2007 at 8:32 am

If the brilliant scientists throughout history had a James Randi negating every aspect of their work, I doubt we would have progressed very far in medicine or in any technology.

In fact they go through up to ten gruelling years of tertiary education, dozens of very difficult examinations, and an uphill struggle to get tenure. And anything they wish to publish in scientific journals is peer reviewed before it ever sees the light of day and is then subjected to intense criticism by some of the smartest people on Earth, many of whom are rivals. A scientist's life would be a lot easier if he or she only had to convince James Randi!

6. Durham Council Votes To Continue Saying Lord's Prayer

Comment #19473 by jeff_n on January 27, 2007 at 2:01 pm

NoLongerHaveBelief says:

"The Father, the Son and Into the Hole he goes!"

Malachy McCourt tells the story of how he misunderstood Mary's prayer as a child. It should be,

Hail Mary, full of grace.
The Lord is with thee.
Blessed art thou amongst women ...

but he heard it as,

Hail Mary, full of grace.
The Lord is with thee.
Blessed art thou a monk swimming ...

I expect he thought a Benedictine doing the breaststroke was one of the central mysteries of the faith. Shame he was wrong - a freestyle friar would be a much more positive image than someone being tortured to death on a cross.

7. 'God Is Not a Moderate'

Comment #19037 by jeff_n on January 24, 2007 at 1:03 pm

ridelo says:

Perhaps somebody can make new words for "This is he dawning of the age of ..."

Sounds like fun. How about "The New Enlightenment" or "The Maturation" or "The Coming of Age" (of humankind).

8. Intelligent design to feature in school RE lessons

Comment #18991 by jeff_n on January 24, 2007 at 7:51 am

Vigilant Watcher says:
... it is certainly an advance to have ID, if it has to be acknowledged at all, included in RE.

Hopefully it won't be too long before RE is included in History!

9. The Only One in Step

Comment #18249 by jeff_n on January 19, 2007 at 5:59 am

Hi Simon,

I'm not a zoologist either but I'm interested in the subject. I agree that there is a great deal that we don't understand about biology, but I'm sure we'll understand a lot more in the future. We're only just beginning to unravel the mysteries of how genes cause cells to differentiate but we already know about several classes of genes (eg. "Hox" genes) that control the expression of other genes, and we know that these mechanisms are governed by chemical gradients, but we've clearly got a lot to learn.

I agree that consciusness is absolutely astounding and I have no answers there. I do, however, hope that we will understand how the brain produces consciousness at some time in the future. We know a great deal more about the brain than we did twenty years ago and the rate of discoveries appears to be accelerating, due to more refined observational techniques and more researchers taking an interest. There are a number of research projects under way that are attempting to reverse engineer specific regions of the brain, and some of these are at a very advanced stage. Within 30 years or so we may well have machines that pass the Turing test to everyone's satisfaction, and if such a machine tells us it's conscious, who are we to argue? That will surely tell us a great deal about the nature of consciousness and the innate capacity of the universe to evolve consciousness of itself (through us and our technology). We may well merge with our technology in the coming decades to the point where death will cease to have any meaning (because when your biological body is destroyed you'll have a fully functional back-up of your mind on the network).

Of course, a complete understanding of consciousness will not explain why the universe has the capacity to evolve consciousness, but some variation of the anthropic principle might be the explanation here. For example, David Deutsch of Oxford University enthusiastically supports the "many worlds" interpretation of quantum mechanics, for which he argues very coherently in his book The Fabric of Reality. In his understanding there are infinite parallel universes, each slightly different from all the rest, and anything that is physically possible will happen somewhere in this limitless "multiverse". Because we're able to think about this, we must therefore be in one of the tiny minority of universes that have evolved consciousness. Given that we have no reason to believe that our spacetime continuum is the only one, ideas like this are not self-evidently silly.

'God said, 'Let there be light' and there was light.' 'Lay hands on the sick and they shall recover.' I know an African Pastor whom I am inclined to believe who became a Christian, read the bit about disciples raising the dead and naively went looking for a dead person to pray for. He did this 3 times and each time the person was raised. He also did it once for a chicken belonging to a Moslem woman who was crying, which got up and laid an egg! There are accounts of the British evangelist Smith Wigglesworth having raised the dead last century.

As I'm sure you know, anecdotal evidence counts for nothing in science. Hundreds of thousands of Americans claim to have been abducted by aliens, but that tells us more about social psychology than it does about extraterrestrial life. Of course, if your pastor friend could resurrect dead chickens under controlled conditions, that would be a different matter.

Regarding the Bible, the opinions you state are minority. The Bible has good error checking through large numbers of manuscripts translated early into several languages.

Yes, there are thousands of manuscript copies of the New Testament books and they differ from one another in a huge number of ways. Bart Ehman, an eminent textual critic at Harvard, says there are more variations in the textual tradition than there are words in the New Testament! Reconstructing the originals is not a trivial task and well-meaning experts often reach different conclusions using the same evidence. And the conclusions they reach can and do affect the interpretation of whole books. Ehman's book "Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why" is an excellent introduction to the field of textual criticism which I would thoroughly recommend to anyone. In the book, Ehman describes his journey from "born again" evangelical Christian, through two strict Bible colleges and his PhD at Harvard to the agnostic position he holds today. He slowly realised that the New Testament texts are very human books.

10. Beyond the Believers

Comment #18147 by jeff_n on January 18, 2007 at 3:23 pm

iamb_spartacus says:

"In addition to being not very logically rigorous, the case against religion that I have seen made, to date, seems severely blinkered by a lack of understanding of social theory, and of recent philosophy."

Unfortunately, Dawkins rejects much of the most relevant theoritcal work as "haute francophoneyism" (at the beginning of Ch. 10 of TGD).

11. Wash. school board restricts Gore's global-warming film

Comment #18125 by jeff_n on January 18, 2007 at 12:57 pm

I don't know if anyone has mentioned this so far. Apparently some evangelicals are joining scientists in calling for changes in public policy to avert global warming:

"The Rev. Rich Cizik, public policy director for the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE), and Nobel-laureate Eric Chivian, director of the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School, were among 28 signers of a statement that demands urgent changes in values, lifestyles and public policies to avert disastrous changes in climate."

(from TechNewsWorld)

You can read more here.

12. The Only One in Step

Comment #18095 by jeff_n on January 18, 2007 at 9:31 am

Comment #18088 by Simon Packer says:
It [The Koran] does not show the historical, doctrinal and internal cohesion shown by the Bible.

If the Bible does show doctrinal and internal cohesion (and this is highly debatable), a simple explanation would be that generations of scribes changed ("corrected") what they thought to be mistakes made by earlier scribes in order to reconcile conflicting statements. This demonstably happened many times in the copying of the New Testament (see Bart Ehman's "Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why").

Tolstoy's "War and Peace" contains much that is historically accurate and some of the events described really happened, but no one thinks Tolstoy's characters were real people (although they might be based on real people). Similarly, the Jesus story might have started as an allegorical tale with a bit of historical detail to make it more interesting or believable. We just don't know. We do, however, know that much of the historical detail is inaccurate.

13. The Only One in Step

Comment #18093 by jeff_n on January 18, 2007 at 9:11 am

Comment #17892 by Simon Packer says:

Perhaps McIntosh is taking his cue from Dawkins, who I believe postulated the gene as the driving factor behind evolution by natural selection, as if it were a motivated entity.

The title of Dawkin's book, The Selfish Gene, might seem to suggest that he regards the gene as a motivated entity, but he never tires of repeating that this is just a metaphor. I think it's an instructive metaphor because it focuses attention on Dawkin's argument that genes are the entities that are selected by natural selection, rather than the individual organism that carries the gene, or the group the individual belongs to, or the species. Genes that are good at getting themselves copied tend to persist within the gene pool, but the reason they are good at getting themselves copied is not necessarily because they tend to contribute to the specification of fit and healthy organisms. Some genes apparently contribute nothing to the specification of the organism and are never "expressed", they're just good at "hitching a ride" on successful genomes. Some are good at getting themselves copied over and over again within a genome. In Dawkin's anthropomorphic metaphor, genes don't "know" or "care" about the proteins or indeed the organisms they encode. They only "survive" within the gene pool if their molecular structure is such that they prove to be good at getting themselves copied over time. He's not postulating a "survival instinct" or consciousness of any kind at the molecular level.

Comment #17892 by Simon Packer says:

We do indeed look at life through different disciplines, of necessity, for the creation is extremely complex and we are usually using a high level simplification (biology) or else observing a very simple situation (physics).

I think we need to think of biology as an emergent phenomenon that cannot (easily) be explained at a lower level. In that sense, biology is not a high-level simplification, it's simply the appropriate level of explanation for the phenomena in question. Another example of emergent phenomena is weather patterns. No one would even think of trying to explain weather in terms of the motions and interactions of individual molecules. The appropriate level of explanation is in terms of high and low pressure systems which are emergent phenomena. Incidentally, even in something as wild and unpredictable as the weather (finely dependent as it is on initial conditions) we get remarkable self-organising complexity in semi-stable structures such as the Azores high. It doesn't seem unlikely that similar self-organisation might happen in a complex "primordial soup", given millions of years for it to occur (and it only needs to happen once). Wikipedia has an article on self-organisation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-organisation.

I think McIntosh accepts that evolution by natural selection is an observable fact that can explain adaptation to the environment within species, but he seems to think that it cannot explain the development of new species. This seems to be what he's arguing when he says,

Comment #17676 by Simon Packer (quoting Professor Andrew McIntosh of Leeds university):

"If anyone was to take an existing chemical machine and produce a different chemical machine which was not there before (either as a sub-part or latently coded for in the DNA template) then this argument would have been falsified."

(Of course, you don't need to create a new species to falsify this argument. Every time a mutation occurs you get a "chemical machine which was not there before".)

It also seems to be your view when you say,

Comment #17676 by Simon Packer

"I believe in evolution by natural selection within a God-ordained and designed 'type'.

The problem here is that the designation "species" is nowhere near so clear cut as you seem to think. The distinction between one species and another is very often blurred. For example, some species can and do mate with apparently separate species and sometimes the resulting hybrids are fertile. "Species" is just a concept we use to make sense of the natural world but nature is not really arranged so neatly (in fact, for single cell organisms that reproduce by division and can share DNA with other unrelated organisms, it's not clear what "species" means at all).

Often the distinction between species, like humans and chimpanzees, appears clear cut but this is only because the ancestors of humans and chimpanzees between now and our last common ancestor are all dead. If you could follow the family tree of humans back to the last common ancestor of both humans and chimpanzees and then follow the family tree of chimpanzees from the last common ancestor all the way to modern chimps you would never notice a difference from one generation to the next. You wouldn't even notice a difference if you jumped a thousand generations because evolution works at a snails pace. For a very clear explanation of this, including examples where the intermediate organisms between two separate species are all alive now, I urge you to read The Salamander's Tale in Dawkins' The Ancestor's Tale.

Many mechanisms of speciation are, in fact, well understood. Just search for "speciation" on the Web and you'll find lots of info and I'm sure you'll find none of it stretches credulity. There are also very easily understood mechanisms whereby the number of chromosomes in the genome of a population can change over time without ever having a situation where organisms of one generation cannot interbreed with earlier or later generations. The evolution of new "chemical machines" happens in exactly the same way as the "microevolution" that you accept.

Your idea that God is guiding all this appears to unnecessarily complicate the issue, which is why most scientists reject the idea. For example, if I propose that mutations (which might be caused by anything from cosmic rays to radioactivity to quantum tunnelling) are guided by angels, I create even more questions than I started with, eg. "What, exactly, are angels?", "How do they influence cosmic rays, quantum fluctuations, etc.?", "How do they know what to do?", "Why do they do it?", and so on. In science, simple explanations are always preferred to unnecessarily complicated ones.

Comment ##17904 by Simon Packer says:

Reading back through the posts it is clear how effectively indoctrinated most of the posters are with this 'IDers and creationists are naive, thick, senile, liars etc.'

Yes, I agree. But sometimes it can seem that creationists are wilfully ignoring vast bodies of evidence or that they are simply ignorant of it. There are all sorts of lines of evidence that lead us to conclude that the universe, the Earth and life itself are immensely ancient, but people who know little and understand even less about all this insist that the Earth is less than 10,000 years old, basing their evidence for this solely on a Bronze Age Middle Eastern creation myth that was edited and re-edited by an untold number of anonymous scribes (often with conflicting agendas) for hundreds of years before it was fixed in the form we have today. If you look at the situation clearly I'm sure you'll agree that such an idea does seem pretty ludicrous.

Bible scholars tell us that we don't even have the original texts of the various Bible books and that there is all sorts of evidence of intentional and unintentional changes to whatever the original texts said, including lengthy interpolations and even entirely faked books. We don't know what the original texts said, but even the ones we have disagree with one another in many ways. The New Testament is largely the result of infighting amongst different factions who had very different ideas and it seems safe to assume the Old Testament reflects similar disagreements (Isaiah, for example, is clearly a polemic arguing for the hegemony of a particular faction or tribe). There isn't any reliable evidence of the Earthly existence of Jesus outside the New Testament, and what we have is clearly based largely on a single extant source (Mark). It is possible, with scholarship, to argue that Rabbi Yeshua bin Yosef never existed at all (see this page, for example). Consequently, it would seem ill-advised to base our entire world-view and our entire understanding of the universe on this very human and very flawed set of texts.

I do, however, agree with you that we should approach life as a little child. I regard the universe with child-like wonder and my experiences in meditation have taught me that all my knowledge is relative and contingent (but nonetheless useful in the appropriate context). We might even be talking about the same thing in different words, but where you say we should approach God as a little child, I say we should approach the Absolute as a little child who has no concepts at all, not even the very human concept of "God".

14. Christian Shrine Needs Two Exits, Israel Says

Comment #17886 by jeff_n on January 17, 2007 at 9:17 am

epeeist says:

You mean a bit like the Abbot of Citeaux and the inhabitants of Beziers - "Caedite eos! Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius"

Interestingly, Blitz Latin translation tool (availble here) reports that "caedite" can be translated as "sodomise" (as well as "chop", "strike" or "slaughter"). So if any Christians out there wish to deny the massacre took place ...

:o)

15. The Only One in Step

Comment #17695 by jeff_n on January 15, 2007 at 2:55 pm

Simon Packer says (quoting Professor Andrew McIntosh of Leeds university):
"The principles of thermodynamics even in open systems do not allow a new function using raised free energy levels to be achieved without new machinery. And new machines are not made by simply adding energy to existing machines.
And this thesis is falsifiable. If anyone was to take an existing chemical machine and produce a different chemical machine which was not there before (either as a sub-part or latently coded for in the DNA template) then this argument would have been falsified."

Come to think of it, this argument is not applicable to evolution. No one has ever suggested that organisms produce other organisms in the way McIntosh says. Organisms only ever produce other organisms either by dividing themselves (as in single-cell organisms - this is presumably what he means by "sub-part") or via "the DNA template". If McIntosh agrees that neither of these methods of reproduction contravene the second law, his thermodynamic argument simply doesn't apply.

16. The Only One in Step

Comment #17683 by jeff_n on January 15, 2007 at 1:24 pm

Simon Packer says:
"To produce a condition of reduced entropy in the thermodynamic sense takes a machine. Raised free energy levels equals reduced entropy. This is always true in Physics and Engineering, whether your system is open or closed."

Surely it depends on what you mean by a "machine". Do you regard the biosphere as a machine, for example?

I don't think natural selection got life started either. It could have been sheer luck or perhaps there's some mechanism involving self-organising complexity that we haven't figured out yet, but either way I can't see how a self-replicating molecule and its subsequent evolution contravenes the second law.

I think, perhaps, you're seeing design principles where an engineering approach is not applicable. "Chemical machines" are governed by growth from the bottom up rather than top-down design. The information encapsulated in DNA is information about the environment and comes from the environment itself. None of this needs any help from a designer and the overall entropy budget is always what the second law says it should be.

I don't think you're alone in seeing the principles of your specialist subject wherever you look. Dawkins does it too. He often tries to explain complex human social behaviour in Darwinian terms which I think is wholly inappropriate.

I can't agree with what you say about the Bible. I think the Bible is a fascinating cultural artifact (or, rather, artifacts as the various texts reflect the concerns of people from many ancient cultures) but I can't even begin to see why any intelligent person would even think of taking it literally.

17. The Only One in Step

Comment #17649 by jeff_n on January 15, 2007 at 9:39 am

Simon Packer says:
The late SJ Gould I believe acknowledged the discontinuities in the fossil record and postulated hopeful mutations which were major step changes in an organism in one generation. Besides stretching credulity to the limit in the sense of expecting a mutation to suddenly result in a meaningful and viable substantially different species, it raises the question of where Mrs Hopeful Mutation came from and how they met.

Which is why Gould's ideas about macroevolution were regarded as ludicrous by almost all evolutionary biologists. Richard Dawkin's was his most vociferous opponent. If you're basing your opposition to evolution on Gould's work, you're missing the point: the overwhelming consensus among evolutionary biologists is that all evolution is microevolution.

Simon Packer says:
Natural Selection requires certain conditions before it can operate. It requires a reproduction/birth/death cycle, it requires a survival instinct, and arguably a discrimonatory environment. Which came first, natural selection requiring an organism which could fight for survival or the organism capable of fighting for survival? If the second, how did it get here?

Natural selection is not a "thing" that can sensibly be said to exist independently of competing organisms. It's just a name given to the process whereby organisms that are in some way better able to survive an environment than competing organisms are more likely to leave more offspring.

Simon Packer says:
The issue behind MacIntosh's postulate (stated on the Truth in Science website)is that many Laws of Physics are universal as far as we know, and if we are using the scientific method we must postulate a mechanism for an observed departure from them.

But life doesn't depart from any known laws of physics. MacIntosh is pretty much alone in arguing that life contravenes the second law of thermodynamics.

In fact, all you're really doing is looking for weaknesses in the theory of evolution in order to find "gaps" where divine intervention might sound plausible to those who don't understand science. This is simply cynical and dishonest. If you really believe engineers know more about evolutionary biology than specialists in that field, let's see you get your ideas published in a respected peer-reviewed journal. Otherwise it's just another in a long line of "God-of-the-gaps" arguments.

18. Conservative Atheists

Comment #17533 by jeff_n on January 14, 2007 at 2:52 pm

"cynical bonds of mutual deception"

What a superb phrase! I love it! Thanks for another excellent post JohnC.

19. The Only One in Step

Comment #17531 by jeff_n on January 14, 2007 at 2:43 pm

gimlibengloin says:
All experiments with fruitflies have failed to produce anything put a fruit fly.

So what would you expect? An elephant? Of course you'll get another fruit fly! The test of whether speciation has occurred is whether you can breed two or more populations of fruit flies that can't or won't interbreed. This has been done many times (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speciation).

The currently accepted biological explanations of speciation are complex and difficult for laymen to follow. I don't know a great deal about it but if I ever feel a pressing need to understand it I'll study the subject with an open mind, or I'll ask an evolutionary biologist, whose job it is to study such things. I certainly wouldn't ask someone who's only read ill-informed criticisms of it and who thinks that anything difficult to understand can be explained by invoking a magic sky fairy.

If you're really interested in the subject there's a FAQ about it at http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-speciation.html

20. Send a Message to God: He has gone too far this time

Comment #17514 by jeff_n on January 14, 2007 at 10:56 am

condorfree says:
"God is Love ..."

Or possibly a security blanket, a skirt to cling to ...

21. Federal Way schools restrict Gore film

Comment #17492 by jeff_n on January 14, 2007 at 4:40 am

Dreamer's Dilemma says:
Apparently, unless one is in lockstep agreement with "the only sensible conclusion", one is being unhelpful to a measured discussion. The point is, legitimate scientists (discounting the fundamentalists) remain on both sides of the global warming debate.

Agreed. But your use of "The Oregon Report" shows that we need to be careful about where we get our information. There is an awful lot of misinformation about this issue out there.

22. Federal Way schools restrict Gore film

Comment #17420 by jeff_n on January 13, 2007 at 2:21 pm

Dreamer's Dilemma says:
The preceding was taken from a column by Mark M. Alexander, Friday June 23, 2006.

The quote comes from "The Oregon Petition", a thoroughly discredited fundamentalist scam. You can read about it here and here.

23. Federal Way schools restrict Gore film

Comment #17365 by jeff_n on January 13, 2007 at 3:21 am

BracesForImpact says:
Too many people seem to think education should be a democratic process. Shall we teach flat-earth theory because teaching the earth is round could be termed to be "controversial"?

Of course. If an intelligent and well-informed perspective is presented it should always be balanced by a stupid and ignorant one. :o)

24. The God of the Bible is No Delusion!

Comment #17183 by jeff_n on January 11, 2007 at 2:16 pm

gimlibengloin says:
Why would satan write a book that identifies him as a deceiver? Your point makes no sense. You point to all the human misery in history allegedly caused by Christianity and you say isn't this better explained as being caused by the devil. But if the devil wants to perpetrate human suffering why would he inspire a book that says "love your enemies" "do good to those who persecute you" "don't take revenge" etc.

Because he's a very clever deceiver and knows that planting ideas like these in our minds will inevitably produce the opposite results. ;o)

25. The God of the Bible is No Delusion!

Comment #17171 by jeff_n on January 11, 2007 at 12:08 pm

gimlibengloin says:
"I'd like to suggest that the above structure of Gen 3 demonstrates the correspondence between the serpent and the cherubim and suggests that the serpent or the nachash was in fact simply satan. In other words the nachash wasn't satan as a snake but snake is a figure of speech or a homonym. The word nachash is actually used of bronze because it glitters or shines. This is why it is used of satan for as Paul says satan can disguise himself as an angel of light."

If Satan is such a consummate deceiver, how do you know he didn't write or inspire the entire Bible? If you're prepared to accept the notion of supernatural agency in the production of these texts, isn't it just as likely that they're the product of some evil force? Considering the human misery caused by Christianity over the last 2,000 years, the authorship of Satan looks like a better bet to me.

Or maybe they were just written by people just like us who were trying to understand their world in a pre-scientific age. People with prejudices and political ideas. People with hopes and dreams.

26. Intelligent Design packets

Comment #17002 by jeff_n on January 10, 2007 at 3:41 am

masterbuilder says:
"For this three components have to evolve at the same time in one being: light sensitive spot on his skin, the area in the brain that processes sight and a nerve that passes the information from the skin to the brain."

I'm not an evolutionary biologist, but I can easily imagine how these three components could evolve in parallel. Photosynthesising bacteria will swim towards light and they are single-cell organisms, so here we have an example of all three functions happening in the same cell. With the advent of mutlti-cell organisms where individual cells develop specialised functions (and communicate with one another through chemical and/or electrical signalling), the functions you describe simply become distributed among a group of cells. Furthermore, there is not really a distinction between "nerve cells" and "brain cells" at this stage. "Nerve cells" are neurons and a primitive brain is just a cluster of neurons.

27. Intelligent Design packets

Comment #16912 by jeff_n on January 9, 2007 at 3:08 pm

(If you scroll up, you'll notice I gave you that link in my post on the subject and the stuff I copied and pasted from that site is in quotes.)

If you've already decided it's impossible then there's not much more to say.

28. Intelligent Design packets

Comment #16908 by jeff_n on January 9, 2007 at 2:48 pm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_the_eye

29. Intelligent Design packets

Comment #16904 by jeff_n on January 9, 2007 at 2:38 pm

Dylan Dog says:
"I am just waiting for the "half-evolved feathers/eyes/lungs etc etc" to make an apperance..."

Scroll up a bit, we did eyes a few posts ago. Apparently, "The eye is just too complex to be evolved". :o)

30. Intelligent Design packets

Comment #16901 by jeff_n on January 9, 2007 at 2:25 pm

Actually, I live in England and I've never met a fundamentalist Christian. In fact I can't think of anyone I know who would describe themselves as a Christian. I know a couple of fundamentalist muslims though. Scary people.

31. Intelligent Design packets

Comment #16879 by jeff_n on January 9, 2007 at 11:09 am

masterbuilder says:
"I am enriched by the idea, that there is a loving God, who has created me, and I have a purpose and destiniy in life an eternity. Sorry I do not want to change places with you."

And I wouldn't deny you your consoling fantasy if you really need it. But I do object when you allow your churches to be taken over by right-wing bigots who want to impose their will on the rest of us.

32. Intelligent Design packets

Comment #16863 by jeff_n on January 9, 2007 at 9:12 am

masterbuilder says:

"Is the complexity of the human eyeball unordered information?"

No, of course not. The environment and the mechanism of natural selection provide the order. I know it's difficult to grasp, but the evolution of the human eyeball is readily explained by natural selection. Here's how:

"The simple light-sensitive spot on the skin of some ancestral creature gave it some tiny survival advantage, perhaps allowing it to evade a predator. Random changes then created a depression in the light-sensitive patch, a deepening pit that made "vision" a little sharper. At the same time, the pit's opening gradually narrowed, so light entered through a small aperture, like a pinhole camera.

Every change had to confer a survival advantage, no matter how slight. Eventually, the light-sensitive spot evolved into a retina, the layer of cells and pigment at the back of the human eye. Over time a lens formed at the front of the eye. It could have arisen as a double-layered transparent tissue containing increasing amounts of liquid that gave it the convex curvature of the human eye.

In fact, eyes corresponding to every stage in this sequence have been found in existing living species. The existence of this range of less complex light-sensitive structures supports scientists' hypotheses about how complex eyes like ours could evolve. The first animals with anything resembling an eye lived about 550 million years ago. And, according to one scientist's calculations, only 364,000 years would have been needed for a camera-like eye to evolve from a light-sensitive patch."

(From http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/01/1/l_011_01.html)

If you want further information, all you have to do is Google for it.

33. Intelligent Design packets

Comment #16860 by jeff_n on January 9, 2007 at 8:58 am

masterbuilder says:

"There you go! This is your beautiful creed!"

It's not a beautiful "creed", it's a beautiful explanation - like a beautiful mathematical theorem that explains a great deal in a single equation. I hope one day you'll see it. It will enrich your life far more than the consolation of Iron Age superstition.

I don't know how the universe came into existence or how life originated and nor does anyone else, but we do know a great deal about the universe and and about life itself - far more than you might think possible if you don't appreciate the cumulative nature of scientific enquiry. We may never have a full understanding of these things but that doesn't mean we should give up and try to convince ourselves that some ancient Middle Eastern creation myth is literally true or that a disparate set of contadictory texts from a variety of ancient cultures is the inerrant word of the ultimate reality of the universe. Why do you feel the need for such certainty?

Lastly, I must say I find the notion of being "cleansed by the blood" of anyone incredibly chilling, and so, I'm sure, would you if you weren't locked in the psychological feedback loop fostered by fudamentalism of any kind. Most Christians are not fundamentalists and are just as bemused by your beliefs as I am.

34. Intelligent Design packets

Comment #16844 by jeff_n on January 9, 2007 at 6:46 am

Masterbuilder says:
"Its' like the two men standing in front of Mount Rushmore and the christian said to the atheist: Isn't that great, how the wind carved these faces out of the rock? No way did the wind do this, the atheist answered. The christian went further and said: How long, do you think it took the wind to do it? There is absolute no way, the wind could do it, no matter how much time he had, the atheist replied. So why then do you believe, that the much more complex systems of this earth have been created by less than the wind in a long time?"

The particular shapes on Mount Rushmore represent ordered information - ordered according to the criteria of a human designer. The particular shapes of the Norwegian fjords also represent a vast amount of information - but it's not ordered information (much like the pattern of fallen leaves on a forest floor). The fjords were not produced by a designer, they were produced by the immense power of glaciers during a succession of ice ages, the last of which ended about 10,000 years before the world began according to your reckoning!

35. Intelligent Design packets

Comment #16842 by jeff_n on January 9, 2007 at 6:28 am

Dear masterbuilder,

The theory of evolution is a staggeringly simple and devastatingly parsimonious explanation of the diversity of life. Its truth should be blindingly obvious to anyone who takes the trouble to understand it. It is simply one of the most beautiful things we have. It works like this:

1. In any population, all individuals are different and some will therefore be better equipped to survive than others in the particular ecological niche the population occupies.

2. Those better equipped to survive will tend to leave more offspring than those that are less well equipped (because the less fit individuals will be less likely to survive long enough to breed).

3. An individuals offspring tend to be similar to their parents because they inherit the genetic information that shaped their parents. This means that, over time, the population will tend to become dominated by individuals who are very well equipped to survive in the ecological niche they occupy.

4. Occasionally, populations become split into two or more isolated groups for one reason or another. The environments the different groups find themselves in are unlikely to be identical (think: different food sources, different predators, taller trees, longer grass, etc.) so the different groups will face different selection pressures.

5. These different selection pressures will tend to produce populations that are good at surviving under those pressures so the populations will tend to drift apart.

6. Eventually, the different populations become so different from one another that they can no longer interbreed. They have become different species.

7. These processes have been going on for hundreds of millions of years so we now see millions of different species superbly adapted to survive in a myriad of ecological niches.

On this view, all life on Earth is related (not just humans and apes). You share common ancestors with every living thing, from chimpanzees to mushrooms to the bacteria living in your intestines. That is a truly awe-inspiring thought.

Christianity is also, of course, a theory. The theory goes like this:

1. A supernatural being called God created the universe in six days and created man in his own image.

2. Man sinned against God (of course, God knew this would happen all along because he's omniscient).

3. According to God's rules, man cannot be forgiven without the shedding of blood. Nevertheless, God can be appeased by piling all the sins of man onto one individual (in the manner of the ancient Greek notion of a "scapegoat") and then killing him.

4. God feels compassion for man so he becomes human and has himself executed in order to appease himself!

This is a half-baked idea and should be rejected as such by anyone who thinks about it.

Just drop it. Free your mind.

36. Consciousness Without Faith

Comment #16748 by jeff_n on January 8, 2007 at 12:36 pm

The master said, "You can hear the sound of two hands when they clap together. Now show me the sound of one hand."

Sam Harris said, "A neuronal firing rate of 40 hertz in the prefrontal cortex and reduced activity in the superior parietal lobe ..."

(At this point, the master kicked Sam down the stairs.)

:o)

37. Consciousness Without Faith

Comment #16575 by jeff_n on January 7, 2007 at 12:30 pm

Great stuff Sam! So few people in the West are aware of the existence of contemplative traditions, having been fed the palliative of "magical" solutions to very real existential problems all their lives. I hope one day we'll all see the continued existence of theistic religion as the cultural catastrophe it really is.

38. Without God, Gall Is Permitted

Comment #16385 by jeff_n on January 6, 2007 at 12:01 pm

Hamlet1950 says:

"The fact that a sense of gratitude or reverence toward a creator, or towards being, is merely an adaptation (which I know you acknowledge) does not mean that it is wrong ..."

Actually, I wouldn't acknowledge that, although Richard clearly does. In fact, I have a big problem with Richard and some of his colleagues' attempts to explain complex social behaviour in Darwinian terms. Religious and other supernatural ideas exist within language (and the wider collective meaning system) which has its own dynamics. Many evolutionary biologists and almost all social scientists are very much at odds with Richard on this one.

Hamlet1950 says:

"Sam Harris, by the way, does not speak only of extremists - he's madder at the "moderates," as those of us in SDS used to hate liberals more than conservatives in the sixties."

I haven't read either of Sam's books but from the stuff I've seen of his on this site he seems a paragon of reason. I must get round to reading them.

39. Secular fundamentalists are the new totalitarians

Comment #16382 by jeff_n on January 6, 2007 at 11:27 am

So, Richard is a postmodernist and Jesus invented secularism - and despite all evidence to the contrary, I am, in fact, a teapot.

40. Without God, Gall Is Permitted

Comment #16372 by jeff_n on January 6, 2007 at 10:07 am

Hi Hamlet1950,

I agree that Richard that Richard doesn't seem to be aware of the profundity of some religious experiences, however, in my (albeit limited) experience of Christianity, Judaism and Islam, mystic experiences of the kind you describe play little or no role in the lives of most believers. For most, I suspect, fear is of much greater concern. Fear of being apart from God (if he exists), fear of the unknown, fear of other supernatural entities that might exist, fear of losing the love and support of friends and family, and (the big one) fear of death and what might happen after death.

Another factor, I think, is the willingness of many people to ascribe supernatural agency to things they don't understand or that appear spookily coincidental to them.

A sense of community, I would suggest, is also a big factor for many believers. If you're lonely, all you need to do is join a church and you'll suddenly have dozens or even hundreds of people being inordinately nice to you - an instant circle of very solicitous "friends" who can't do enough for you. The church, and the community that comes with it, is a safe haven in a frightening world.

I don't think anyone on this site would want to deny people their collective fantasies, but when they allow their communities to be highjacked by right-wing bigots who want to impose their ill-considered ideas on the rest of us, the situation becomes political. Richard's main targets are the extremists in these religions and he points out, rightly in my view, that extremists can only operate within the atmosphere of woolly thinking that characterises these communities.

As far as mystic experiences go, Christianity and especially Islam have consistently deterred or even persecuted their mystics. The great Sufi masters, for example, knew perfectly well that the concept of "God" is a barrier to such experiences but they also knew that they would have been executed for saying so. In my opinion, these theistic religions have been and remain the main reason why the West has never developed systems of spititual training like Zen or Vedanta. Their insistance on supernatural beliefs, long after they became untenable and unnecessary, has left a spiritual vaccuum in most of the world.

41. Let's Hope It's A Lasting Vogue

Comment #16188 by jeff_n on January 5, 2007 at 12:02 pm

When talking about theistic religions, I suggest we should try to use the term "mythology" as often as possible, as in "Christian mythology", "Judaic mythology" and "Islamic mythology". Perhaps that would go some way towards shifting the way these religions are perceived and help those who have never given it much thought to see that Christian, Judaic and Islamic stories of the supernatural are no different from similar stories found in Greek mythology, Norse mythology, etc. These are, of course, fascinating and worthwhile areas of study in their own right, but no one would even think of taking them literally because they are always associated with the term "mythology". We might even get some fundamentalists thinking... Maybe! :o)

42. If they preach the cause of the poor, they're my people

Comment #15856 by jeff_n on January 3, 2007 at 11:04 am

One of the main reasons why Constantine adopted Christianity in the first place was because it taught the poor and down-trodden to suffer in silence and look forward to their reward in heaven. Just the sort of thing you need if you're trying to run a despotic empire. All these theistic religions have been in the service of the powerful since their very beginnings.

43. Beliefwatch: Blasphemy (Challenge)

Comment #15606 by jeff_n on January 1, 2007 at 3:00 pm

Here's a challenge for believers. The following comes from Mark Chapter 16 (New American Bible):

17. These signs will accompany those who believe: in my name they will drive out demons, they will speak new languages.

18. They will pick up serpents (with their hands), and if they drink any deadly thing, it will not harm them. They will lay hands on the sick, and they will recover."

I've seen these people claiming to do most of these things but I've never seen a televangilist drinking a deadly poison under controlled conditions, which ought to be a doddle if what they say is true and they really believe it. So I suggest the "Cyanide Challenge" (especially for those disgusting con men selling "The Rapture").

You could offer them a get-out clause: most serious textual critics are convinced that the last twelve verses of Mark (including these) are not original (i.e. they were added by a scribe at some point in the text's history). However, if our Rapture-merchant admits these verses are part of a textual addition, he automatically admits that the Bible is not the inerrant word of God. Either way you've got him.

(Just kidding - these people annoy the hell out of me but I don't want to kill them!)

44. Let's Hope It's A Lasting Vogue

Comment #15552 by jeff_n on January 1, 2007 at 8:31 am

It seems incredible from here in the UK that so many people in "The Land of the Free" are still shackled by life-denying Iron Age superstitions. Thank God for the Washington Post! :o)

Keep up the good work Richard (and Daniel, Sam, et al.)

45. How Old is the Grand Canyon? Park Service Won't Say

Comment #15450 by jeff_n on December 31, 2006 at 12:02 pm

Roy_H says:

"Some of the site is quite funny actually."

Here's another one you might like:

http://www.theonion.com/content/node/55807

Cheers,

Jeff

46. How Old is the Grand Canyon? Park Service Won't Say

Comment #15426 by jeff_n on December 31, 2006 at 7:50 am

Roy_H says:
Intelligent falling... let's clutch at another straw! Note the pseudoscientific equation behind the "scientist" complete with Michelangelo's god doing all the work.

It's a joke Roy, have a look at some of the other stuff on that site. The Onion is a satirical magazine. It's interesting though that a lampoon by The Onion can be all but indistinguishable from the pronouncments of creationist "scientists"!