That last creationist email I posted was agonizing in its longwindedness…how about something short and illustrated?
(Mild warning: this sketch might be considered obscene if it weren’t so crude and talentless that any relationship to real anatomy is a scurrilous rumor.)
I tried. I really, honestly, sincerely tried. I’ve been struggling with this book, The Spiritual Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Case for the Existence of the Soul(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mario Beauregard and Denyse O’Leary, for the past week and a half, and I’ve finally decided it’s not worth the effort. It’s just about completely unreadable.
Attila takes a tour of Nature headquarters — it looks like they’re doing some cool, progressive, net-friendly innovation there. I was jealous of one thing: they’re using an internal corporate blog instead of email. It’s an easy and obvious solution, and I wish there were a way to implement that kind of thing at my university — we use godawful mailing lists for everything, which means notices about campus assembly meetings and student issues get all clogged up in my inbox with staff putting lawn furniture up for sale or disposable nonsense about football games.
We really should have a discussion about the future of intra-campus communication here sometime…or maybe about the ten-years ago of communication.
I don’t even know what Wilkins is complaining about anymore, but he’s got some kind of objection (or agreement? I don’t know) to things I’ve said before or didn’t say. This is the danger of getting into discussions with philosophers — they’re saying something with great erudition, but sometimes you don’t quite see the point, except that they must say something.
Anyway, it’s something about the conflict between science and religion this time. At least I can try to say what I mean. I’m not going to worry about whether it answers what he asks, whatever it is.
After his recent rampage against the Baylor administration, Bill Dembski now claims to be offering an apology to Baylor…only not really. I don’t think he knows what ‘apology’ means — a statement loaded with reservations like “I mean in no way to mitigate the gravity of Baylor’s wrong in censoring the research of Robert Marks and his Evolutionary Informatics Lab” and “I hurt my family and lost about three weeks of productive work by being consumed with anger about the injustice against Robert Marks” is not an apology — it’s an opportunity to reiterate your grievances. And closing with the injunction to “leave justice in the hands of a God” is just a standard Christian passive-aggressive threat.
This wasn’t an apology. It was an opportunity for Dembski to flush several embarrassing posts down the UD Memory Hole™.
Omnibrain provides the proof. We live in a universe ruled by chance, the product of chaos, where reason simply does not matter.
Now that that has been established, I find myself with the sad thought…is this a world I want to live in?
I wrote of my fondness for salmon the other day, and now I learn of a strange and rather satisfying coincidence: Larry Craig was an enemy of the salmon.
The surprising fall of Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho, removes a longtime obstacle to efforts by Democrats and environmentalists to promote salmon recovery on Northwest rivers.
Craig, who was removed from leadership posts on the Senate Appropriations and Energy committees after a sex scandal, is known as one the most powerful voices in Congress on behalf of the timber and power industries. Environmentalists have fought him for years on issues from endangered salmon to public land grazing.
I don’t think he should have resigned over stupid sexual behavior, but that he was one of those rats who fought to destroy the environment…that ought to be a hanging offense. It’s not an entirely happy story, though. I find myself a bit peeved that in this country you can lose your job for waving your hand under a toilet stall divider, but accepting money from industry to allow them to poison the land and circumvent reasonable ecological restrictions…pish. That’s nothin’.
Dawkins does know how to tweak the fluffy little wankers, that’s for sure. He is suggesting that universities ought to dismantle their theology departments!
We who doubt that “theology” is a subject at all, or who compare it with the study of leprechauns, are eagerly hoping to be proved wrong. Of course, university departments of theology house many excellent scholars of history, linguistics, literature, ecclesiastical art and music, archaeology, psychology, anthropology, sociology, iconology, and other worthwhile and important subjects. These academics would be welcomed into appropriate departments elsewhere in the university. But as for theology itself, defined as “the organised body of knowledge dealing with the nature, attributes, and governance of God”, a positive case now needs to be made that it has any real content at all, and that it has any place in today’s universities.
You don’t see colleges retaining their astrology and alchemy departments, so I think it is quite reasonable to shuffle the superannuated fogeys off to the glue factory, and let the others find their places in disciplines with some foundation in reality, like philosophy and history.
It ought to be considered a promotion. I’d be embarrassed to have a degree in theology … and history, philosophy, literature, etc., all have considerably more respectability.
Before everyone goes nuts with the queries, here’s the official word on the now closed commenting contest.
It will take a day for us to determine the winners of the contest. We have to make sure our data is correct before making the draw happen. We will email the winners directly. If you don’t hear, you didn’t win. It will probably take a week or so to contact and hear back from the winners.
I have no say in anything, and will not know anything until the winners contact the big guys managing the contest.
You are encouraged to go on commenting to run the tally up to a million.
