Category: Religion

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Irreducible Complexity

It’s a red herring.

The main problem with the argument of irreducible complexity, as advanced by Michael Behe, for example, is far simpler than I think most respondents have described.

What Behe and others do is look at a complex organism the way you could look at an arrangement of thousands of marbles on a gym floor. You look at this arrangement, marvel at it, admire the different colours and patterns that are displayed, and then ask yourself, what kind of force could have placed all these marbles in exactly these locations?

It’s unimaginable: the effort, planning, and skill required to have every marble end up in exactly the place it ended up in! How could anyone believe that it was the result of a random process?

Behe implicitly assumes that the marbles were somehow destined to be in exactly the locations they ended up in. The goal of history was to put each marble in exactly that one place and no other. That is because he implicitly assumes there was a “creator” who intended all of the marbles to be exactly where they were. And he assumes that we humans, exactly as we are, are exactly what the end result of creation or evolution was intended to be all along.

But evolution doesn’t hold the view that the process of natural selection was designed or destined to produce a human being with all the characteristics we now have. The marbles ended up where they were through the process of being spilled onto the floor, hitting each other, bouncing a certain height, rolling and colliding with each other. Evolution holds that innumerable factors under extremely diverse conditions with almost infinite combinations of effects influenced the development of species in ways that may not have been consciously “designed” in a human sense.

Or might have been. Evolution does not claim to know why the marbles rolled onto the floor. They might have been rolled there by God, after all. Evolution doesn’t and couldn’t claim to know that. That is the purview of religion.

I said “human sense” because I don’t believe there is the slightest obstacle, in evolution, to a belief in God, who may well have created the world in exactly the way science suggests it was created: with a big bang millions of years ago, with simple life forms adapting and growing more complex and splattering into diversity as conditions changed, and “evolving” into what we now call human, with the miracle of consciousness, and the inexplicable: a sense of humour, memories, music, and a capacity for tears. Where’s the problem, for the believer? There is none, except, ironically, for the limitations of human knowledge, demonstrated most vividly in the Intelligent Design movement which tries to solve a problem that does not exist.

How constricted is the Intelligent Design hypothesis? What is more amazing, and reflects more vividly the glory of God: the stunning diversity of life forms and geological shapes of the earth? Or those prudish zealots with their black markers and their wagging fingers who don’t know that they don’t know what the act of creation looks like.

I have a solution to the whole problem of religion vs. science on the issue of evolution.

The Bible says that God “created” the world. I hope that even devout, conservative, Bush-loving Christians might agree that the meaning of the word “create” is, at heart, a bit of a mystery. When we say someone “created” a house, we don’t mean he invented wood and glass. We mean he obtained or created a design, gathered all the necessary material components, assembled a crew, and put everything together into a “house”. It beggars, for example, the question of who created glass.

When we say God “created” the world, however, we mean he created the design and assembled the parts, but he also created the parts– from nothing.

We have as much reason to believe that he did it in one literal instant in a human sense as we have for the belief that he did it over billions of years, from a single point in space, outwards, and in a single point of time, outwards. Space did not even exist in a meaningful sense, nor did time, until God filled it.

How dare Michael Behe insist that he knows that “create” means “in the exact space and time in which we now live”?

Obviously, God willed creation into existence. What is the obstacle, then, to believing that science is merely the systematic study of the evidence of that act of creation? Science is the study of how God “created” the world. I would say that we know now that God probably did not make everything appear everywhere (where it is today) in one instant. He appears to have started the act of creation in one specific location, and the event spread outwards from there– and still spreads outwards today.

I need a name for this. How about: “Scientific Creationism”? “Ontological Intelligence”? Then I need to create a private Foundation and a text book and find some fat donors and give some speeches at gatherings of Republican Christians where I rail against homosexuality and gun control and those arrogant educated elites who think they’re smarter than us and the sins our age that are all the result of scientific atheism.

I will soon be rich.

Thank you.

Wiki on Irreducible Complexity

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John Maxwell’s Useless and Ephemeral Leadership “Wisdom”

There is only one real irrefutable law of leadership: Anyone who doesn’t already have what it takes to be a good leader will not know what it is they need in order to become a good leader.

And the obvious corollary: anyone who already is a good leader does not need leadership training and would be better off spending this time productively… doing something. Like have a sex change operation if you are a woman, because Maxwell doesn’t ever refer to a good leader as “she” or “her”.

Here it is — in the simplest possible terms: all “leadership training” sounds great in the workshop and works perfectly as long as you don’t let reality intrude. That’s all there is to it. The minute you leave the seminar and immerse yourself into the real world again you will find that your problems are no simpler and the answers are no clearer. And if you had weaknesses as a leader before the seminar, you will have the same weaknesses afterwards. I guarantee that.

However, a considerable number of people make a considerable amount of money trying to persuade middle managers and executives otherwise.

Almost without exception, none of these “leaders” have any real-world accomplishments: they are all preachers, essentially, or what they used to call “snake-oil salesmen”: glib speakers who charm and amuse you and persuade you that you can purchase that glib goodness itself and take it back to your place of employment and do magical things that you could never have done otherwise.

Not only are they unashamed of their lack of real world accomplishments — they sometimes seem to revel in it.

Have any of these geniuses ever actually accomplished anything in the real world? You would think a few would– just for PR value. Just to convince us that someone, somewhere actually used these principles in a real workplace with real problems and actually succeeded because of them. Just to show us that some people care about whether or not people who preach a lot of leadership actually know what they’re doing, in the real world.

Come on– do it! Just to prove– and here’s the most important thing– that the examples given in these workshops and presentations are not simplistic and unrealistic. In other words, nothing like the real problems real leaders will face in a real world.

Not one.

Well…. if you include celebrities like football coaches and Oliver North… But that sort of proves the point, doesn’t it? How wonderful it would be if you could run your company like a football team? Your team accomplishes exactly what your individual players are capable of accomplishing, and you get to credit yourself with some abstraction called “leadership” that miraculously appropriates your players’ talents.

How wonderful if you are a successful athlete– born with a gift– and people will pay to hear you talk about how you invented the gift, nurtured it, developed it, with your hard work and determination. What you have with these people is an attempt to cash in on their celebrity.

Maxwell gives Churchill as an example of a great leader. Why? Because he stood up for democracy and human rights? No. Because he defied the most efficient and powerful military machine in Europe? No. Because he was determined to win. Well, so was Hitler, and so was Custer, and Marc Antony, and Lee.

John Maxwell is at his most offensive when he tells you that the only way to cultivate effective leadership in your church is… surprise! By buying more and more John Maxwell books and video tapes. No– wait– even better! By subscribing to his various leadership clubs so that you receive something in the mail every month– along with expensive ongoing subscriptions.

It is a tribute to Maxwell’s charm, I guess, that he can get away with these blatantly self-serving stratagems in front of an audience that has paid to hear him speak! Wow. That is leadership!

It is even more wildly amazing that while telling this audience that leaders can’t be herded like cats because they think for themselves and ask critical questions and think outside the box…. he insists they all need to buy his tapes and books and videos, and they all nod obediently and scribble down the names of the stuff they need to buy from John Maxwell to realize their potential.

The real purpose of all this stuff? To make you feel entitled to your position. To give you the illusion of authority and influence. To convince you that you are really more necessary and more valuable than the people who actually produce products and ideas but don’t know how to suck up to those in authority.

The results from all this “training”? Mission Statements that consist of a platitudinous enunciation of the obvious, and Strategic Plans (a redundancy: a “plan plan”).

And I imagine that most of them probably do. They reach their potential. Just as you will and I will.

John Maxwell does not take questions. Real world issues must not intrude, because they introduce complexity that reveals the utter uselessness of most of his “wisdom”. John Maxwell does not take questions, but he probably could– because this audience does indeed look like sheep.

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“Heaven is a Place Where Nothing Ever Happens”

When I was a child I thought that heaven would be a land of free ice cream and pop and salt & vinegar chips and I would be able to fly and no one would ever, ever have sex.

When I was in high school, I was taught that there would be no wars or conflict in heaven and that, in fact, heaven would be a lot like earth, except perfect. But still no sex.

In college, some of my professors admitted they had no reasonable idea of what heaven would be like. Others sustained my denomination’s embrace of the idea that heaven was really something like a new earth, wherein the lion would lie down with the lamb. Lions do not kill animals and eat them in heaven. Do birds still kill worms?

It’s about 30 years later… I still have no idea of what heaven will be like. I’m pretty sure it won’t be a separate place. It’s going to be here. It might even be a lot like life here and now, except that we would have God with us. We’d know he was here, with us. Maybe we would just think everything’s fine.

Maybe the Talking Heads are right.

 

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Wandering

If you are convinced that you have enemies in the world and that they hate you and that they are coming after you, you will eventually convince the world to hate you and come after you. And indeed, you will have enemies in the world. They will hate you for your paranoia and your defensiveness and the way you always lock your doors and the way you constantly plan revenge for some outrage that has yet to happen. Christ said, turn the other cheek. No wonder they crucified him. He didn’t even do them the comfort of striking back at them. He offered them the quintessential liberality of: they don’t know what they’re doing. I say kiss the other cheek, because that covers just about everyone: they don’t know what they are doing.

We claim that our virtue is offended by some action by some inadequate human being out there, somewhere, but the real offense is that we thought anyone should take our virtues seriously or that anyone would think that we actually believe in them for their own sake. Nothing is more external to the soul than virtue, for it is precisely the only thing protecting your soul from the uncomfortable insinuation of others’ mortalities. We would rather die than have them kill us. We would rather kill than have anybody think we were killers.

If it is a conceit to pretend to be smarter than anyone else, it is an even bigger conceit to believe that intelligence is something to be ashamed of. Who do we prefer to kill: those who refuse to bow to our insights, or those who confront us with undeniable evidence of our inadequacies?

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Contradictions

America as theocracy.

Grand schemes don’t work and we need a strong military because human nature is corruptible; less government is better because man is so good he can be trusted not to exploit or abuse the weak. God created the world but he doesn’t want us to take good care of it. Because I am pro-life I think we should kill criminals. I believe in truth and integrity so I smear my political opponents. George Bush is godly and frankly quite hot. Part of the fight for freedom and democracy means allying ourselves with paragons of democracy and freedom like Saudi Arabia and Egypt. It’s not about the oil. To preserve western values like freedom and human rights, we might have to torture and imprison people without charge, conviction, or sentence. We are so godly, our church is state of the art. Rock music represents the evil, sensual side of human nature, so we will adapt it for use in our worship.

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Brief Self-Serving Acknowledgement

Told you.

I wrote in an earlier rant on Dobson that if McCain ever shows any signs of making a competitive election of it, Dobson will find some flimsy excuse to let bygones be bygones and suck up to him.

Well, Sarah Palin’s nomination as VP gave him the opening that he needed. Not that he’s alone– the rest of the agents of intolerance are all lining up behind him, lips puckered…

McCain, desperate for any kind of help in an election year in which Americans have shown clear signs of wanting a change, caved in to the Christian right and held several meetings at which he suddenly expressed his craven admiration for the likes the John Hagee and Dobson, leading Phil Burress, an organizer in Ohio for religious groups, to announce that McCain had won him over because– wait for it– he couldn’t be “pressured” into changing his position.

At least, not the other position.

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Rick Warren

Rick Warren was invited to give an address to TED in February 2006. Time Magazine had recently identified Rick Warren as a veritable god of popular religion and wisdom, so I thought I’d better check it out.

Not that I hadn’t checked out “Purpose Driven Life”…. I tried. I couldn’t finish it. I couldn’t find the content. It was the kind of sustained generic common sense which, devoid of any specific application, can never be proven wrong. Be yourself. Have patience. Set goals. Plan ahead. Was there something remarkable in this book that I missed? Are there really millions of people out there who don’t have any purpose but would buy a book about it? Will any of them, really, acquire one by reading this book?

Warren makes the stunning assertion that he doesn’t know a single pastor who is “in it for the money”. That’s a stereotype, he says, but it’s not true. That’s amazing. He doesn’t think pastors draw a salary anywhere? He doesn’t believe that deep down within their presumptive souls it never occurred to most pastors that they could get paid to talk?

I leave alone for the moment the outrageousness of it all, but either he’s right and all those exposé’s about preachers living in hugely expensive mansions or driving around in limousines or wearing expensive designer clothes are false…. or he’s being incredibly disingenuous. Either “Elmer Gantry” is a fraud or Warren is. Either Jim Bakker is a shocking aberration or he just happened to get caught. Either John Hagee is just covering his expenses or he is living very, very well. Either Dobson has bodyguards or he doesn’t. Either Rick Warren himself has bodyguards or he doesn’t.

Warren traveled to Syria in 2006 and made several statements afterwards that appeared to praise Assad’s regime there as tolerant and moderate. I get that Warren believes he can personally negotiate world peace, but I also get that he, like Billy Graham, may be naïve, and may be in the process of allowing himself to be used by shrewd politicians.

What does he get out of it? Well, gosh, just read his stuff. Like Rev. James Dobson, he loves to name-drop. Even worse, when taken to task by Joseph Farah, one of the fanatics at WorldNetDaily, for his comments, Warren appeared to misrepresent himself– to put it generously. Then he accused Farah of being Satan’s proxy. Then he apologized to Farah. (Farah, by the way, is far more scary than Warren will ever be, and almost as scary as Dobson but not quite as scary–or comical–as John Hagee).

It is a little difficult to believe that any preacher presenting a message, nowadays, that is genuinely biblical, and transforming in a spiritual sense, would be invited to speak at the NBA all-star game. The organizers of the NBA all-star game are not going to invite someone to speak who seems to hold exotic values. They won’t invite someone who believes that sports are not really all that important, that success is not about winning, that trinkets and souvenirs won’t buy you happiness.

Warren claims that he wants evangelicals to stop voting for candidates based on single, “wedge” issues like abortion. He wants us to believe that he is more sophisticated and mature than that– he thinks the environment is also important, and poverty. So Warren hosts Obama and McCain this year– separately– claiming to be non-partisan, but in 2004, he issued a “toolbox” for pastors which urged them to urge their church members to consider abortion as the only non-negotiable moral value in the election.

So Warren wants to sound objective and enlightened and a little more sophisticated… but he ends up with the same position as Pat Robertson, who doesn’t drive around in a limousine, don’t you know.

A website critical of Warren posted the following, from a workshop Warren gave in 1998 at Saddleback Church::

“Now, at Saddleback Church, we are unapologetically contemporary… I passed out a three-by-five card to everybody in the church, and I said, ‘You write down the call letters of the radio station you listen to.’ I wasn’t even asking unbelievers. I was asking the people in the church, ‘What kind of music do you listen to?’ When I got it back, I didn’t have one person who said, ‘I listen to organ music.’ Not one…. So, we made a strategic decision that we are unapologetically a contemporary music church. And right after we made that decision and stopped trying to please everybody, Saddleback exploded with growth….

“I’ll be honest with you, we are loud. We are really, really loud on a weekend service…. I say, ‘We’re not gonna turn it down.’ Now the reason why is baby boomers want to feel the music, not just hear it…. God loves variety!”

Unusually democratic for a church, don’t yo think?

JIM WALLIS: You know, some of those faith-based organizations who are providing services are the very ones who are now saying we can’t keep pulling bodies out of the river and not send somebody upstream to see what or who is throwing them in. So they’re talking about policy questions. So this is where the old left-right thing breaks down.

I think values are a good conversation for politics. It may be the future of our discussion. But it can’t just be partisan values wedged in to divide people. But I think a broader sense of values, personal and social — personal responsibility and social responsibility together are at the heart of religion. The two together will provide a powerful political vision for the future.

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Sarah Palin

The funny thing about John McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin for VP is how utterly, purely ideological it is. Imagine, for a moment, if you will, Dr. James Dobson announcing that, while he liked Ms. Palin, he couldn’t endorse her because there is nothing in her record or experience to indicate that she is ready for the most powerful job on the planet.

Imagine…

But that would require James Dobson to apply consistent standards to all politicians, regardless of party.

Surprise: though you might have read otherwise, the hard Republican right doesn’t care about competence at all. Not at all. The only thing that matters is ideological purity. Ms. Palin hates abortion, loves guns, and ready to open up any part of the country to those beautiful oil wells. Best of all, as a true Bush Republican, she just rustled up a $500 million subsidy for a Canadian pipeline company. Free enterprise? Taking a risk and then working hard so you can be rewarded for your initiative and hard work? Obviously, that’s just for schmucks. Real capitalists suck at the government teat and Governor Palin, like Bush, pardon the image, is more than happy to provide it.

Ms. Palin– she does accept the “Ms.” for some incomprehensible reason– is also in favor of abstinence-only sex education and we all know how well that works. Come to think of it, Ms. Palin appears to have intimate experience with the failures of that approach, but conservatives never let failure stand in the way of ideological purity and, besides, most of the Republican’s most militaristic leaders never served in the army, so I suppose we shouldn’t be shocked when its most passionate advocates of abstinence…. (Her oldest son, Track, was born April 20th, 1989. She eloped August 29th, 1988. Do the math.) But this is also consistent with Republican sexual morality: John McCain, Bob Dole, Newt Gingrich, Henry Hyde, and so and so on, all “fooled around”. This list, of course, doesn’t include the Republicans who didn’t get caught.

Is the essence of Republicanism to persuade others to not do what you did?

The other thing is this: Palin has five children, including a child with Down syndrome who is less than a year old. But she clearly and willingly represents a constituency that thinks young mothers should be at home with their children. This is not a job in the secretarial pool. Would they mind if she was paid less than male vice presidents? It’s like divorce and military service. The Republicans are bravely and conspicuously hypocritical. She will fight to deny other women the right to enjoy the benefits of fifty years of feminist activism.

To her credit, she did not seek an abortion for her fifth child though she knew he had Down syndrome. Bravo. But statistics show that over 90% of parents who receive that diagnosis– regardless of political philosophy– do opt for an abortion. That means another fair chunk of the right wing constituency says do as I say, not as I do, but not Palin.  Fair enough.

 

Watching Jon Stewart the other day, something struck me… his sarcasm can be a bit relentless and sometimes seems to fill in for analyses — the best satire is really witty analysis– but think for a moment about the one thing even Jon Stewart dare not mock— that’s right: the sponsors.

Are these people crazy? Irving Kristol appears to have met the good witch of the west. Does any single rational person doubt that if Obama had picked someone of Palin’s experience and qualifications for VP, Irving Kristol would be leading the charge against?

 

 

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Unruly Adolescent Males

No reform can enable schools to cope with the 36.9 percent of all children and 69.9 percent of black children today born out of wedlock, which means, among many other things, a continually renewed cohort of unruly adolescent males. Washington Post, April 24, 2007

I don’t know. Not much to add to that really.

Well, let’s make this point. If, over a long period of time, 70% of children born to black mothers are born out of wedlock and raised without a father…. what we have here is what is “normal”. What is “abnormal” for that community is the traditional television family of Mom, Pop, Uncle Charlie, and the kids. On the other hand, now that I mention it, most television families are single parents– so the writers can introduce a romance every so often– like every other episode– because otherwise we would find the show boring.

So maybe we should quit whining about children being born out of wedlock and just face facts and start establishing programs that are optimized to work with single parent families instead of assuming a “normal” two parent family.

From a sequence in the comic strip “For Better or Worse” that I frankly found rather creepy. At no point is there any attempt to find out whether “Grandpa” is really into this clingy, enmeshed caregiver. Is this about love or possession and control? Is this something that describes your soul or circumscribes your individuality?

As a Christian, I don’t believe that marriage “defines your soul”. Your faith does. Christ himself demanded that his followers be ready to forsake their families to follow him– not exactly James Dobson, is it?

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Have You Heard of Hugh Thompson

Hugh Thompson, Larry Colburn, Glenn Andreotti. You probably don’t know their names. I didn’t know their names, off hand, until just recently.

Hugh Thompson was a warrant officer and helicopter pilot in Viet Nam in 1968. He happened to be flying over My Lai at the time of the massacre. When he realized what was going on, he lowered his helicopter between William Calley and several women and children and demanded that he stop the killing. Calley was a Lieutenant, and Thompson a mere warrant officer. Calley stopped, for the moment, and Thompson was able to evacuate several women and children. When Thompson returned to his base, he demanded the someone intervene to stop the slaughter. Nobody did much of anything.

It’s human nature that today we all know the names of Mark Spitz and Jessica Simpson and Michael Jackson and Regis Philbin…. but I’ll bet most people could never tell you who Hugh Thompson is.

The Remarkable Lt. William Calley apparently massacred more than 500 civilians all by himself. No one else has ever been convicted of participation in the My Lai massacre.

Calley, nevertheless, was only charged specifically for the deaths of 109.

What is the punishment for 109 counts of murder? This is America, the land of law and order, remember? This is the bible-believing Godly nation of belt-buckle blustering bible-thumping believers… The nation that believes justice should be swift and true…. the nation that sentences drunk drivers to life in prison, and video-tape thieves to 30 years, and charlatans to 144 years…

So what should be the sentence for 109 cold-blooded murders?

Three and one half years of house arrest.

And then there was an outcry from the “Pro-Life” Christian community and our evangelical leaders that this sentence made a mockery of the lives of those innocent Viet Namese civilians….

Well, no, not that I remember.

I think most of our evangelical leaders were actually calling for Calley to be pardoned. After all, you know, boys will be boys.

I’ll bet you didn’t know

  • Calley is 5′ 4″ tall
  • He’s still alive today.
  • Former Secretary of State Colin Powell, as a 31-year-old Major, was part of the cover up. He investigated complaints about U.S. behavior towards Viet Namese civilians in the region and came to the conclusion that “relations were excellent”. In fact, they were a slam-dunk of good relationships.

So I went home and talked to my friends and my relatives and all of my people who I thought had been my mentors. They all, almost to the person, said, ‘Shut up. Shut up. This is none of your business—leave it alone.'” – Ron Ridenhour.

We think we are a moral people, a nation with principles and integrity. But Ron Ridenhour came home from Viet Nam aware of an awful atrocity that had been committed by U.S. soldiers and he asked his friends and relatives what to do and they did not say: speak up, report it, let justice be done. They had been to the parades and monuments and speeches and dedications, and they all knew that all of it was a lie. Freedom? Democracy?

Ridenhour ignored his friends’ advice and followed his own conscience and reported what he had heard to his congressman, among others. Eventually, at the insistence of Morris Udall, an investigation was initiated and the My Lai Massacre was exposed.

How does a soldier decide if the orders he has received are lawful or not lawful? From the U.S. Court of Military Appeals, 1971, the United States vs. William Calley:

[16] The acts of a subordinate done in compliance with an unlawful order given him by his superior are excused and impose no criminal liability upon him unless the superior’s order is one which a man of ordinary sense and understanding would, under the circumstances, know to be unlawful, or if the order in question is actually known to the accused to be unlawful.

[19] Colonel William Winthrop, the leading American commentator on military law, notes: … Where the order is apparently regular and lawful on its face, he [the subordinate] is not to go behind it to satisfy himself that his superior has proceeded with authority, but is to obey it according to its terms, the only exceptions recognized to the rule of obedience being cases of orders so manifestly beyond the legal power or discretion of the commander as to admit of no rational doubt of their unlawfulness. … Except in such instances of palpable illegality, which must be of rare occurrence, the inferior should presume that the order was lawful and authorized and obey it accordingly. … Winthrop’s Military Law and Precedents, 2d ed., 1920 Reprint, at 296–297.