I have been dialled-up it seems.
fm-
Irreducible complexity means to me that cetain things are impossible of human understanding and beyond the reach of human endevour. Darwin uses a similar expression and I have seen it in other writings completed long before Dr Behe's principle anscestors had been thought of. It seems to me that the new meanings are being created by Dr Behe&Co. The God of the gap is another way of saying it I assume. It is that gap between reality and our possibility of understanding that the opportunity for interpretation arises and then rhetoric comes to the fore. The "best story" in terms of interest and utility and the Christian story does seem to have a high degree of utility so far.
It is no dodge. It is a fact and a simple and obvious one as I pointed out numerous times when I first joined this thread.
On the other I was referring to your claim to good manners.
What scientists are planning is a Grand World College of Science- a sort of Prytaneum- where the higher echelons will be gathered together in one place to determine things logically and there to reside in peace, security, leisure and honour, along with any ancilliary staff they deem necessary, in an agreed location probably at a height above where they are predicting sea-levels will reach in the near future.
As Matthew Arnold said about Cardinal Richelieu's supposed dream of a similar Grand European College of Art, Science and Literature -"That was a dream which will not bear to be pulled about too roughly.
His Eminence did establish the French Academy but his European dream remains, thankfully, yet unfulfilled. Its main avowed purpose, and it took a suspicious Parliament over 2 years to ratify the King's Letters-patent to effect it, was to purify the French language and set agreed tastes in literature. We do not have a similar body.
Mr Arnold comments-
Quote:This zeal for making a nation's great instrument of thought,-its language,--correct and worthy, is undoubtedly a sign full of promise,--a weighty earnest of future power. It is said that Richelieu had it in his mind that French should succeed Latin in its general ascendency, as Latin had succeeded Greek; if it was so, even this wish has to some extent been fulfilled. (1865). But, at any rate, the ethical (in italics) influences of style in language,--its close relations, so often pointed out, with character,--are most important. Richelieu, a man of high culture, and, at the same time, of great character, felt them profoundly; and that he should have sought to regularise, strengthen, and perpetuate them by an institution for perfecting language, is alone a striking proof of his governing spirit and of his genius.
Is the higher Science of such a spirit? No doubt such an ideal is just as appealing today as it was to Richelieu and the constant employment of the assertion in discourse is a sure sign of that spirit.
Only Religion can oppose such a project.
Of course, AIDsers will readily assert that such a project does not exist either duplicitiously or because they are innocently unaware of the unconscious biologically derived processes which would, without opposition, make it inevitable. They seem to have a definite tendency to believe themselves a new order of human beings and not subject to the usual passions and needs and they are trying to purify the language.
Once they have the Grand College of Science, art and literature having been dropped as too unscientific, they are unlikely to bother being so innocent and will rely on duplicity. Power has only one objective Orwell said and that is more power.
An increasing number of scientific minds entering the UN would be a slow and sure method of achieving the object all others having been laughed to scorn.
I think I prefer The Pope myself . He knows what day it is. A Pope fixed up the calender so you would always know when your birfieday occured. Like predicting an eclipse.
The Cambridge Philosophy Department is a sort of "just hatched" microcosmic version of the sort of institution I mean now it has been taken over by scientifically minded personel.
These days they discuss the meaning of meaning when they are not seeing to other important matters because, despite the attentions of flatterers in attendence upon them, they do have more about them of the mortal rather than the divine.
However refined the mind of our philosophers and scientists their bodies are, some think it irksome, liable to the same infirmities and offices to which the lowest among us are subjected without mercy although they do seem to suffer these afflictions, such as eating and drinking and shagging and their usual consequences, (musn't ever forger consequences), at a level conducive to the dignity of the offices they perform. Presumably likewise any other gratifiable appetites they can allow themselves to be burdened with.
Not that they would admit of any distinction between body and mind.
It's just something to ponder human nature being what it is and bureaucracies being what they are.
One special thing Science seems to have achieved, if we believe their own pronouncements, is that we have not only cause to be fearful for the future of our own grandchildren but also that of grandchildren the whole world over. No other culture I know ever tasted a failure of that magnitude in evolutionary terms. And in 400 years topside.
