Month: January 2009

Heather Mac Donald argues with Martin Gardner:

Gardner assumes that were God to start preventing some deadly accidents, he would have to prevent all such accidents, resulting in chaos.  The reality is far worse than that.   Since believers give credit to God for answering their prayers when they are saved from catastrophe or illness, they have to explain why he answered their prayers and not those other people’s prayers, why he saved these children from a tsunami and not those other children.  Any believer who today thanks God for making sure that his coronary bypass operation was successful has to explain why God allowed at least 37 peasants to be buried in a Guatemalan landslide on Sunday.  Such an explanation requires either extraordinary narcissism on the believer’s part or positing capricious injustice on the part of God.

Laterra Hopkins of Washington, DC, weeps while listening to U.S. President-elect Barack Obama address a rally with 40,000 people at the War Memorial Plaza January 17, 2009 in Baltimore, Maryland. Obama, Vice President-elect Joe Biden and their families traveled by train to Washington for a whistle-stop tour before Tuesday’s inaugural ceremony. By Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.

Lisa Miller writes about a man suing to stop Obama from saying "so help me God" at the inauguration:

Obama wants to say "so help me God"—and by all means, he should do so. The public prayers by two Christian ministers are more problematic. Today, the greatest threats to our safety come not from godless communists but from religious fundamentalists abroad. Our new president might use his Inauguration then to showcase the values that have made this country great: pluralism, moderation—and the separation of church and state. Though not as politically expedient, the better choice might be to pray in private.

Althouse weighs in:

I don’t really want to talk about these attention-seekers, even though I teach Religion & the Constitution, because I resent the way they cause many people to despise the Establishment Clause and to think atheists are litigious louts. I detest the idea that Obama’s magic moment — turning into President — has been intruded upon by people doing PR for their crusade.

ScienceNews has a cover story on the science of attraction. It’s all about facial movement.

(Hat tip: Mind Hacks).

Appleyard contemplates atheism:

Even if I was offered final and complete Neo-Darwinian and neuroscientific accounts of my experience, what would that tell me? In effect, nothing. These would be accounts of the experience, not the experience itself. They would be based on the dubious conviction that there was something – scientific knowledge – that lay above the human experience. To accept these accounts as final would be to bow down before a disguised metaphysic, a concealed god. Of course, I could choose to do so. But why? What would I gain? Again nothing.

Maclin Horton quotes Benedict’s Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures:

Even if I throw in my theoretical lot with agnosticism, I am nevertheless compelled in practice to choose between two alternatives: either to live as if God did not exist or else to live as if God did exist. If I act according to the first alternative, I have in practice adopted an atheistic position and have made a hypothesis (which may also be false) the basis of my entire life…

John Schwenkler adds his own thoughts.

"I love torture. I think torture is good and Christian-y," – "Ann Coulter", parodied by SNL.

I cannot be alone in immediately having my mind leap to Robert Kennedy’s funeral train as I watched Obama’s Inaugural express make its way toward Washington yesterday. Forty years. The same crowds along the tracks; the same intensity of emotion – but now inverted from crippling grief to tentative hope; the connection between one human being and the millions of others who sensed and sense that he understands, like few others do, the crisis we face and the American character we now need. Here is a very affecting oral memory of that RFK train by the photographer, Robert Fusco, who helped sear it into global consciousness.

For me it feels as if history is undoing itself, as if some great, dark wound has somehow returned to be healed, before it is too late.

Another from 1968:

And yesterday:

Know hope.

(Photos by Robert Fusco in 1968 and Christopher Furlong and Chip Somodevilla 2009.)

Matt Ridley writes a riveting little essay on the "natural order of things":

Living beings are eddies in the stream of entropy. That is to say, while the universe gradually becomes more homogeneous and disordered, little parts of it can reverse the trend and become briefly more ordered and complex by capturing packets of energy. It happens each time a baby is conceived. Built by 20,000 genes that turn each other on and off in a symphony of great precision, and equipped with a brain of ten trillion synapses, each refined and remodelled by early and continuing experience, you are a thing of exquisite neatness, powered by glucose. Says Darwin, this came about by bottom-up emergence, not top-down dirigisme. Faithful reproduction, occasional random variation and selective survival can be a surprisingly progressive and cumulative force: it can gradually build things of immense complexity. Indeed, it can make something far more complex than a conscious, deliberate designer ever could: with apologies to William Paley and Richard Dawkins, it can make a watchmaker.

(Hat tip: Ronald Bailey)

London, England, 7.58 am