Mensch tracht, un Gott lacht

Tuesday, December 20, 2005

Fetter All Logic

In a triumph of dispassionate, clear-eyed jurisprudence, a Federal judge in Pennsylvania decided today that a country whose Declaration of Independence cites inalienable rights bestowed by Nature's Creator has a Constitution that precludes the suggestion in a science class that Nature appears, in the view of some, to be sufficiently complex as to evidence creation by some higher intelligence. And right he is: there can be no higher intelligence than a Federal judge.

In response, The American Spectator is hosting some reflections by your humble servant. They will be available to the wider readership at midnight; our Club members get to peek.

A glimmer:

I approach the issue of random evolution vs. designed development as more than a judgment call one way or the other. It is not enough to say that design is a more likely scenario to explain a world full of well-designed things. It strikes me as urgent to insist that you not allow your mind to surrender the absolute clarity that all complex and magnificent things were made that way. Once you allow the intellect to consider that an elaborate organism with trillions of microscopic interactive components can be an accident, you are in a menagerie of bizarrerie; you have essentially "lost your mind" as a tool that operates and defines within recognizable parameters...

3 comments:

James F. Elliott said...

Wow, Jay, way to lay the subjectivity on thick.

Nevermind that this

"MEDICINE IS AN ACCIDENT. There is no reason why an illness in a human body should respond to some chemical from a plant or a mineral. No reason why a chemical should make you feel high or low; no reason why a chemical should make your blood run fast or slow. The shampoo that makes your hair silky is an accident. That a powder relieves your athlete's foot is an accident."

is completely erroneous reasoning.

This

"Even the bad warning smells, like rotten food or decomposing corpses, have no evolutionary explanation; they help man avoid the object but they don't help the object, so their benefit is entirely extrinsic."

is downright dumb. The benefit is that we recognize them as "bad" smells because our body recognizes something decomposing as unhealthy. Your looking at something that's DEAD, inanimate, kaputski, no longer living, shuffled off the mortal coil i.e. no longer evolving, to disprove evolution. That's just bad reasoning. I mean really bad. Almost as bad as...

...this:

"Music is an accident... [SNIPSNIPSNIP]
...Just us fooling around with what is and making the best of it."

Is an entirely subjective argument. You are basically stating "I perceive elegance and agency, therefore there must be design."

Way to go. You've just adopted the thought process of all those lazy liberal multiculturalists and feminists you dislike so intensely.

James F. Elliott said...

We perceive complexity and order in a piece of music and infer a composer.

Precisely. It's an inference. There are no scientific arguments for ID that cannot be handily backhanded away, therefore all that is left are subjective, "common (non)sense" ones.

Jay D. Homnick said...

Yeah, where did that come from?