Friday, July 08, 2005

For Matthew:

Now at the beginning of the 21st century, faced with scientific claims like neo-Darwinism and the multiverse hypothesis in cosmology invented to avoid the overwhelming evidence for purpose and design found in modern science, the Catholic Church will again defend human reason by proclaiming that the immanent design evident in nature is real. Scientific theories that try to explain away the appearance of design as the result of "chance and necessity" are not scientific at all, but, as John Paul put it, an abdication of human intelligence.

Okay, what *is* neo-Darwinism anyway, and are these scientific claims really invented to avoid evidence of purpose and design? This whole argument would be okay assuming that science really is trying to explain away the appearance of design. I don't know; I'm not a scientist; maybe it is. Hank will surely agree with me that inventing outrageous claims of your opponents and then arguing how wrong they are is really fun, but Hank and I don't then go around publishing op-ed pieces in the New York Times.

3 Comments:

Blogger Hank said...

Hank agrees. And no, nothing has been "invented" or hypothesized in order to explain "intelligent design" because that is not needed. Occam's Razor and all that.

Let's be frank: Creationists are idiots.

Here's a math analogy for you: Imagine that you flip a coin 50 times and record the percentage of times heads comes up. You do this 50 trial test 1000 times. After plotting results, you notice, whaddayaknow, it forms a nifty bell-like curve. Now, dammit, that curve is just too perfect and thus *must* be the result of intelligent design, right?

Morons.

10:55 AM  
Blogger Hank said...

Oh bother. I only used the math/stats example as a nod to Kate's area of interest. If she'd been a home ec major I'd probably have come up with an example using dust bunnies under the bed.

I simply don't have patience for Creationists any longer and thus have no compunction in slinging around terms like "moron." I'm a bit tired of Sunday School teachers pointing to a complex theory like Gould's punctuated equilibrium and simplifying it in order to somehow show that even evolutionary biologists think evolution in general and classical Darwinism in particular are so much unproven "theories" that are thus no better than their dim-witted view of a Big Daddy who blinked his eyes and made slime and ignasious rock and beavers and sclera and strata filled with fossils and an intentionally misleading decay rate of carbon.

No. I won't go that route anymore. They're simply dolts. 'Nuf said.

4:21 PM  
Blogger Hank said...

How do you spell "ignacious", anyway?

I knew I should have just said "basalt".

7:44 PM  

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