Category: ‘Religion’ · TangleBones
Baltimore Loves the FSM
Photographed by Sidereal
For those not from the area, “Believe” is the current “Yay Baltimore” campaign, and “Hon” is what everybody calls everybody else.
Oh, and the Flying Spaghetti Monster is the Intelligent Designer that those creationists are always talking about.
A Merry, but not religious, Christmas
Whenever it comes up in conversation that I’m an atheist, and especially in the winter months, people ask me if my family celebrates Christmas. The short answer is, of course! The long answer is that we have a lot of good reasons to celebrate:
- I’ve long been of the belief that there is no excuse to flimsy for a party. Like a fraternity on BtVS, I’m willing to have a party because it’s a day ending in “y”.
- Christmas is also the one time of year when we can hope to get those big-ticket items that we’ve been pining for all year but haven’t been able to justify budgeting for. There’s no way I can buy myself a Sony PSP on any normal day of the year, but I think I’ve got a pretty good chance this Sunday.
- My wife and I love Christmas decorations. And luckily, none of the ones we like are all that Christian.
- The Christmas Tree? Probably associated with the Norse god Freyr.
- Mistletoe? Sacred to the Druids – and possibly representative of bull testicles, at that.
- Snowmen? Yeah, like it snows in Palestine.
- Stockings? I’m pretty sure Jesus never wore socks.
- Poinsettias? Native to Panama.
- Angels? You almost got me – but have you read Ezekiel’s description of Angels? (start at verse 5) That’s not what I put on my tree. Mine all look like chicks with wings, not four-faced chariots.
- And let’s not forget whose birthday is on December 25: Mithras the god born of a virgin woman who was visited by shepherds who brought him gifts! You know, the one whose church consecrated members with baptism, and shared wine and bread as a sacrament? Not ringing any bells?Wow – one millenium you’re the hottest god celebrated on Sunday, the next they give your birthday to some other Zoroastrian copy-cat. =-)
- I am an incurable fan of Christmas music. Mostly I listen to the songs that aren’t even Christmas specific (Jingle Bells was written for Thanksgiving), but who doesn’t like Silent Night? But even when I’m singing hymns, the events are as real to me as Rudolph, Santa and Frosty. Maybe less so, since I’ve seen more stop-motion animation films of Rudolph.
- Santa Claus may represent an actual Christian Saint, but he doesn’t seem much like a fourth-century Turkish bishop when we’re reading “A Visit from St. Nicholas.” Maybe your house talks about him throwing bags of gold into a man’s windows so that he wouldn’t have to sell his daughters into prostitution, but we gloss over that bit and stick with reindeer.
- I also think that Santa Claus offers an invaluable opportunity: you get to teach your children that even the people who love them the most will go to great lengths to lie to them. That’s the kind of disillusionment that stays with a kid, you know?
So, in the spirit of the season, I wish all of you a Christmas filled with exactly as much religious zeal as you can stomach, more presents than you can carry, and enough batteries to last you through the year.
An Open Letter to Jeff Jacoby, columnist for the Boston Globe, RE: Intelligent Design
This is an email that I sent to Jeff Jacoby. It covers the same ground as my previous article on Intelligent Design, but I thought I’d put it up here anyway since it seems a little bit less confrontational.
Mr. Jacoby,
In your article, The timeless truth of creation, of October 2, 2005 you state:
Today, Darwinian fundamentalists fight to keep the evidence of intelligent design in the diversity of life on earth out of the classroom, because that would be at odds with a strictly materialist view of the world.
What evidence are you talking about? ID doesn’t actually have any. In fact, it argues against looking for evidence.
Take the case of the famed bacterial flagellum. ID proponents say that they can look at it and see that it is impossible that it evolved. That’s an opinion, not evidence. On the basis of that opinion, they say that we shouldn’t look for an explanation for how it could have evolved. (The fact that there are explanations for how the bacterial flagellum evolved seems to escape them. Ditto for their other examples: blood clotting, the bombardier beetle and the immune system.)
In fact, their entire point is that no evidence can exist to explain some things. They state that a supernatural entity caused some things to just pop into existence. This supernatural entity left behind no traces which means no evidence. You can’t test for the hand of God – it seems he has no fingerprints.
Worse yet, it means no predictions. If science is to depend on the free will of an undetectable force that occasionally decides to intervene in the mortal world, how do we make useful predictions? As children we all learn from experience about gravity: if you drop a toy, it falls. It never turns into a flower or flies to the moon. We’re able to make predictions, even as children, about what will happen, and it’s that ability that allows us to walk to school and clean up our toys without worrying that we’ll all float off into the sky.
But ID introduces a supernatural element. It says that things we can’t predict or plan for are going on all around us. Where does supernatural science lead us? Should we try to build
engines that instead of running on the well-understood natural phenomena of internal combustion are powered by prayer? You know, just beseech the Intelligent Designer to push the car?
What lessons would we teach our schoolchildren? That you can never know how an experiment will turn out because a supernatural force could decide to change the pH of the water or the voltage of the batteries? Should we instead be teaching them about Gideon? You know, leave a fleece out in the school parking lot overnight and pray for God to make the ground dry and the fleece wet? I think Judges 6 would make an interesting teaching reference – but not a particularly helpful one.
Your article goes on:
Unlike creationism, which denied the earth’s ancient age or that biological forms could evolve over time, intelligent design makes use of generally accepted scientific data and agrees that falsification, not revelation, is the acid test of scientific validity.
Actually, you’re confusing young earth creationism with plain old creationism. And there’s no way to falsify the statements made by ID since they make no predictions for future events. But let’s ignore all of that for the moment and focus on a point that you brought up that many of ID’s proponents haven’t caught on to: that ID includes evolution.
The people pushing for ID state that evolution explains most of what has happened. They think, however, that certain systems and organs are too complex to have evolved, so that the Intelligent Designer had to use His influence to cause them to appear ex nihilo.
Think of the implications of that.
God creates the universe. He sets the wheels in motion and allows natural laws to guide his creation. Gravity causes matter to form together into stars and planets, light imparts energy to fuel life, and natural selection causes that life to evolve and create the myriad forms we see around us.
It’s as though God is setting up dominoes, or creating an elaborate Rube Goldberg device that he knows will eventually result in the creation of Man. Still with me?
But ID proposes that God wasn’t that good at setting up the dominoes. Sometimes his creation required him to
step out of the background and force the creation of certain organs or processes. He wasn’t capable of setting up the laws that govern his world to create everything – he had to nudge the system occasionally, like a pinball player bumping the machine.
So the basic argument of ID is that God is incompetent.
Really.
But I don’t know why I’m telling you all of this: you already seem to understand why ID is such a bad idea because you go on to say:
In truth, intelligent design isn’t a scientific theory but a restatement of a timeless argument: that the regularity and laws of the natural world imply a higher intelligence—God, most people would say—responsible for its design.
…which of course is the reason that it mustn’t be taught in science classes. We’re supposed to teach science there, not an appreciation for God. I think we already have places to talk about God. In fact, my dad works at one: he’s a United Methodist minister.
My dad used to tell me that the Bible was the only perfect rule for faith, doctrine, and conduct. If what you’re looking for is recipes, astronomy, or physics, you might want to try a different book. For instance, the ancient Hebrews believed that the sky was made of tin and that the stars were lanterns hung from the sky. I’d rather we didn’t teach that as an “alternate theory” in astronomy class. Wouldn’t you?
Lets keep religion out of the classroom. It doesn’t make for useful science.
Thank you for your time, and have a Merry Christmas.
Sincerely,
Jemal Cole
p.s. Sorry I’m so late in replying – I didn’t notice your article the first time around. If you’ve changed your mind and decided that ID isn’t science, please ignore the preceding message. =-)