Thursday, July 07, 2005

Wanker(s) Of The Day

With apologies to my religious friends (RMJ, Prior A, left rev), yet another reminder of why I'm not religious - from an op-ed piece by the archbishop of Vienna. Count how many times your head explodes:

Evolution in the sense of common ancestry might be true, but evolution in the neo-Darwinian sense - an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection - is not. Any system of thought that denies or seeks to explain away the overwhelming evidence for design in biology is ideology, not science.

(snip)

[Pope John Paul II] went on: "...To speak of chance for a universe which presents such a complex organization in its elements and such marvelous finality in its life would be equivalent to giving up the search for an explanation of the world as it appears to us. In fact, this would be equivalent to admitting effects without a cause. It would be to abdicate human intelligence, which would thus refuse to think and to seek a solution for its problems."

Yes, that's right - evolution is ideology, and creationism/intelligent design is science. Invoking evolution means "giving up on the search for an explanation," but saying "It's God's will" does not. Just spectacular.

As a side note on the topic, there is an insidious aspect of intelligent design that I don't think I've ever seen mentioned anywhere: If the development of life on Earth is all according to God's plan rather than natural selection, then the same is true of extinctions. This effectively absolves mankind of all responsibility for protecting endangered species, because if they die out, well, it was just God's will, can't be helped. Kind of a Christian Scientist approach to the environment...

3 comments:

ntodd said...

Count how many times your head explodes

I can no longer count, given my head just exploded for the Nth time.

Eli said...

Or the NToddth time.

oldwhitelady said...

Wait, why aren't you religious?