Intelligent Design Theory: Science or Religion?

Losing Sight of Progress

Would you explain to us what politicians, forget one off judges, are supposed to do if they truly believe atheism is unworkable and the short cut to catastrophe?

"Intellectual integrity and scientific achievement are worth defending.

Hold it right there, says Ann Coulter in her ridiculous book Godless: The Church of Liberalism. "The interesting question is not: How did a primitive eye become a complex eye? The interesting question is: How did the 'light-sensitive cells' come to exist in the first place?"

Is it permissable to fix upon one, any one, group of social, religious, physiological or ethical facts as the "cause" of another? "Certainly," the rationalistic school of history, and still more the up-to-date sociology, would reply. That, they would say, is what is meant by our comprehending history and deepening our knowledge of it. But in reality, with "civilized" man there is always the implicit postulate of an underlying rational purpose--without which indeed his world would be meaningless. And there is something rather comic in the most unscientific freedom that he allows himself in his choice of his fundamental causes. One man selects this, another that, group as prima causa--an inexhaustible source of polemics-- and all fill their works with pretended elucidations of the "course of history" on natural-science lines.

The cult of the useful was set up on high. To it Darwin, in the name of his century, sacrificed Goethe's Nature-theory. The organic logic of the facts of life was supplanted by a mechanics in physiological garb. Heredity, adaptation, natural selection, are utility-causes of purely mechanical connotation. The historical dispensations were superseded by a naturalist movement "in space." (But are there historical or spiritual "processes," or life- "processes" of any sort whatever? Have historical "movements" such as, for example, the Renaissance or the Age of Enlightenment anything whatever to do with the scientific notion of movement?) The word "process" eliminated Destiny and unveiled the secret of becoming, and lo! there was no longer a tragic but only an exact mathematical structure of world-happening. And thereupon the "exact" historian enunciated the proposition that in the history-picture we had before us a sequence of "states" of mechanical type which were amenable to rational analysis like a physical experiment or a chemical reaction, and that therefore causes, means, methods and objects were capable of being grouped together as a comprehensible system on a visible surface. It all becomes astonishingly simple. And one is bound to admit that given a sufficiently shallow observer, the hypothesis (so far as concerns his personality and its world-picture) comes off.

Hunger and Love thus become mechanical causes of mechanical processes in the "life of peoples." Social problems and sexual problems ( both belonging to a "physics" or "chemistry" of public--all too public-- existence) become the obvious themes of utilitarian history and therefore of the corresponding tragedy. For the social drama necessarily accompanies the materialist treatment of history, and that which in Goethe's "Wahlverwandtschaften" was destiny in the highest sense has become in Ibsen's "Lady from the Sea" nothing but a sexual problem. Ibsen and all the reason-poets of our great cities build--build from their very first causes to their very last effect--but they do not sing.

And one is bound to admit that given a sufficiently shallow observer, the hypothesis (so far as concerns his personality and its world-picture) comes off.

How did the 'light-sensitive cells' come to exist in the first place?"

Of course her answer has to do with godesses and boogeypersons.

You aren't asking any question spendi, you're just taking your ego for a jog.

What time is it fm?