One might say that the truth is lovely. Her loveliness needs no reasoning--it is a feeling
Only lovely art can do duty in expressing truth.
One would hardly say that cascades of blood clotting agents in chiclid ankle bones circa 600 million years BC are lovely.
"Been so long since a strange woman has slept in my bed,
Look how sweet she sleeps, how free must be her dreams.
In another lifetime she must have owned the world, or been faithfully wed
To some righteous king who wrote psalms beside moonlit streams."
That's lovely.
As Joseph Joubert said-
Quote:One should be fearful of being wrong in poetry when one thinks differently from the poets, and in religion when one thinks differently from the saints.
There is a great difference between taking for idols Mahomet and Luther, and bowing down before Rouseau and Voltaire. People at any rate imagined they were obeying God when they followed Mahomet, and the Scriptures when they hearkened to Luther. And perhaps one ought not too much to disparage that inclination which leads mankind to put into the hands of those whom it thinks the friends of God the direction and government of its heart and mind. It is the subjection to irreligious spirits which alone is fatal, and, in the fullest sense of the word, depraving.
So it's nothing new folks.
If some chancers and snake-oil operatives are ramping it up for personal motives too sordid to discuss what difference does that make to the intellectual argument? One might admire the skill and perseverence, not to say desperation, as they might only be fit for unskilled labour otherwise. They might even be happier.
Then Joubert goes on to define the essence of the idea of intelligent design-
Quote: May I say it? It is not hard to know God, provided one will not force oneself to define him.
Do not bring into the domain of reasoning that which belongs to our innermost feeling. State truths of sentiment, and do not try to prove them. There is a danger in such proofs; for in arguing it is necessary to treat that which is in question as something problematic: now that which we accustom ourselves to treat as problematic ends by appearing to us as really doubtful......'Fear God,' has made many men pious; the proofs of the existence of God have made many men atheists. From the defence springs the attack; the advocate begets in his hearer a wish to pick holes; and men are almost always led on, from the desire to contradict the doctor, to the desire to contradict the doctrine. Make truth lovely, and do not try to arm her; mankind will then be far less inclined to contend with her.
Why is even a bad preacher almost always heard by the pious with pleasure? Because he talks to them about what they love. But you who have to expound religion to the children of this world, you who have to speak to them of that which they once loved perhaps, or which they would be glad to love,--remember that they do not love it yet, and to make them love it take heed to speak with power.
You may do what you like, mankind will believe no one but God; and he can only persuade mankind who believes God has spoken to him.
With only 3% of Americans being atheists it is easy to believe that their atheism began with a "desire to contradict the doctor".
