Magic Statistics

Scientists are called to discover, but that calling is jeopardised when ideology intrudes into scientific debate. Uwe Siemon-Netto, UPI religion columnist, suggests that some proponents of Darwinian evolution are attempting to banish Intelligent Design for ideological, not scientific, reasons.

Perhaps I would be less incensed by the lockstep assault against Intelligent Design, or ID, if this offensive did not smack of Stalinism, to borrow a metaphor from my friend Gerald R. McDermott, a professor of religion and philosophy at Roanoake College. Like Stalinists, ID opponents consign ID proponents to an intellectual Siberia, McDermott says, and that's where they are meant to rot until doomsday.

Ironies abound in this dispute. For one thing, while biologists are in the forefront of the effort to dismiss ID, astrophysicists and other scientists studying the universe are not so sure about unguided evolution.

The funny thing is that the remaining priests of the anti-ID cult committed to a materialistic worldview are primarily biologists meant to study life, which if truth be told is still confounding science especially as it has never been replicated in a test tube.

Cosmologists studying the universe are less and less certain about the hypothesis that the world evolved accidentally. Every day, we make new discoveries showing the breathtaking beauty of the cosmos, making it simply impossible to rule out divine authorship, says Bruno Guideroni, director of the Paris Institute of Astrophysics.

"We don't know except by faith whether the Universe began by accident or on purpose. The most notable astrophysicist on earth said the choice is yours," Larry Leonard editorial director of the Oregon Magazine, wrote recently. Leonard was of course referring to Stephen Hawking, who holds the Lucasian chair of astrophysics at Cambridge University in England, a chair once occupied by Isaac Newton.

Another irony is that, when anti-ID zealots try to address theological implications of the dispute, they seem to have little idea what they're talking about.

In railing against Christians, philosopher Dennett opined in an interview with the German magazine, Der Spiegel, about their sacramental theology: "The idea that the bread is symbolic of the body of Christ, that the wine is symbolic of the blood of Christ, that's not exciting enough. The idea needs to be made strictly incomprehensible: The bread IS Christ's body and the wine IS his blood. Only then will it win in competition against the more boring ideas simply because you can't get your head around it. It's sort of like when you have a sore tooth and you can't keep your tongue off it."

Now, that's what I call shoddy. It is shoddy theology. Any theologian daring to opine as primitively about science as Dennett opined here about theology would be laughed clear out of the academy for life. And rightly so.

For more examples of Dr Dennett saying silly things, click here or here.

Amir Taheri wonders why Muslims are so preoccupied with such secular political issues as cartoons, The Satanic Verses, and Dutch films. If it's a religion, why do imams speak so infrequently about God?

Not long ago when I asked an imam in a London mosque why it was that God hardly featured in his sermons, he thought I had lost the plot. "What matters today is the suffering of our brethren under occupation," he snapped.

In other words: in our Islam we don’t do God, we do Palestine, Kashmir, Afghanistan and Iraq.
. . .
Islam cannot have it both ways: pretend to be a religion and demand special respect while operating as a political ideology which, by definition, must be open to criticism and even denigration.

Politicised Islam’s attempt at destroying individual freedoms is as much a threat to Islam as the inquisition was to Christianity.

The politicisation of Islam affords another angle on the growing conflict within the Islamic world.

via Melanie Phillips's Diary.

Charles Darwin suggested that life may have first emerged on earth in a warm little pond. That idea is being tested in "hot little puddles" in areas of volcanic activity and so far the results are not good for Darwin's speculation.

Life on Earth was unlikely to have emerged from volcanic springs or hydrothermal vents, according to a leading US researcher.

Experiments carried out in volcanic pools suggest they do not provide the right conditions to spawn life.

The findings will be discussed on Tuesday at an international two-day meeting to explore the latest thinking on the origin of life on Earth.

The quest to find the physical conditions required for the origin of life has proved so daunting that scientists are seriously exploring the possibility that the necessary raw materials arrived on Earth from elsewhere in the universe.

via Faith-Science News from the American Scientific Affiliation.

Who can tell what a day may bring forth? Cause us therefore, gracious God, to live every day as if it were to be our last, for we know not but that it may be. May we be found in Christ, who is our only Saviour and Redeemer. Amen.

Thomas a Kempis