Day: January 19, 2013

Believe in God?

Discommoded by unbelievers, in yr face or otherwise?  Try this on for size, where natural selection comes a-cropper (stumbles) and chokes on its own petard (!!):

what theism denies is natural selection, not evolution; for God might have selected evolution as the means for revealing his intelligence.

But naturalism has no means of accounting for the truth of its own claims. If natural selection is (as Dawkins puts it) “the explanation for the existence and apparently purposeful form of all life,” and if human theories (including the theory of natural selection) are a result of this blind and purposeless chance, then how can anyone know whether any theory (including the theory of natural selection) is true?

The assertion of its truth is circular and question-begging. The theory might only be the random result of blind chance. Without reference to an intelligence independent of natural selection there is no possible defense of the theory of natural selection.

In other words, forget application of reason to anything. Chaos, here we come.

Or so it seems to me.

This long essay feeds off an “opinionated account” of a debate in Feb. of ’09

at the American Philosophical Association meeting in Chicago, [where] the Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga of Notre Dame squared off against Daniel Dennett of Tufts, a leading spokesman for the New Atheism who has been described by Stephen Jay Gould as a “Darwinian fundamentalist.”

There’s lots more here, at A Commonplace Blog, run by D.G. Myers, a critic and literary historian at the Melton Center for Jewish Studies at the Ohio State University.

It’s the sort of discussion that gets you thinking and dulls the impact of what you hear from overly convinced non-theists.

He’s a nasty guy, is our prez

Something “utterly remarkable” in run-up to inauguration, which is meant to be full of “democratic fellowship and good feeling”:

President Obama has been using the days and weeks leading up to his inauguration to show the depth of his disdain for the leaders of the other major party and, by inference, that party’s voters, which is to say more or less half the country. He has been spending his time alienating instead of summoning. It has left the political air more sour and estranged.

In his news conference the other day,

he didn’t seem to think he had to mask his partisan rancor or be large-spirited. He bristled with unashamed hostility for Republicans on the Hill. They are holding the economy “ransom,” they are using the threat of “crashing the American economy” as “leverage,” some are “absolutist” while others are “consumed with partisan brinkmanship.” They are holding “a gun at the head of the American people.” And what is “motivating and propelling” them is not a desire for debt reduction, as they claim. They are “suspicious about government’s commitment . . . to make sure that seniors have decent health care as they get older. They have suspicions about Social Security. They have suspicions about whether government should make sure that kids in poverty are getting enough to eat, or whether we should be spending money on medical research.”

As if he’s bitter.