Matt2h's Xanga

"There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn."

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 20:40:31 GMT

"There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn."

-- Albert Camus,
The Myth of Sisyphus (1942)

In fact, when all the smoke had cleared, Bear's shareholders received $10/share.

Sunday, October 18, 2009

Sun, 18 Oct 2009 03:50:10 GMT

The northern Philippines just can't catch a break! Super Typhoon Lupit is poised to wreak havoc on northern Luzon next week.

Meanwhile, Rick has remarkably strengthened into the second strongest hurricane on record in the eastern Pacific basin. Maximum sustained winds are an astounding 180 mph with gusts at least as high as 220 mph.

Hurricane Gustav Bearing Down on Louisiana.. All the Information You Could Possibly Need in One Plac

Sun, 31 Aug 2008 18:43:29 GMT

Some Thoughts on the Nader Campaign...

Sat, 01 Mar 2008 01:29:06 GMT

Nader 2008

Think politics and politcians are corrupt? Ralph Nader is your candidate.

Threatening to take away votes is the only language the party machines understand. The Party of Nancy Pelosi and Joe Lieberman is not my party.

Help the Democratic Party find its balls

Vote Ralph Nader for President

But a very reasonable objection will go: Democrats don't want the platform of Ralph Nader. If they did, they would have voted for someone like Dennis Kucinich or Mike Gravel in the primaries. You, Nader supporter, evidently hold these progressive values very nearly and dearly to your heart indeed.. but closer, I fear, than the majority of Americans do. And now you're in the position of second-guessing the voters and saying, "Well, you don't REALLY want a President Obama.. and the only reason you voted for him is because you're too much of a pussy to support those farther to the left.." And THAT is bigoted, conspiratorial and elitist. Now who's being anti-democratic?

Why Are Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama the contenders? Is it really because their policy positions most closely mirror the will of the American people? Or isn't the picture that straightforward, as the Nader campaign will have to argue.

To what extent is the Democratic Party's having settled on Barack Obama a genuine reflection of where the party is at this point of time, and to what extent is it a product of political cowardice, representation of these candidates in the media, and the profound influence of money on the democratic process? Is the media a mirror or a molder of perceptions and values? But what gets you on the air? Money. And who has lots of money? Corporations and interest groups. So already we see a striking inequality in who gets air time and who doesn't. Now, certainly large numbers of individuals can have a profound effect, as they have in the Ron Paul and Barack Obama campaigns, but the whole "money as speech" concept still seems fundamentally corrupt if we want to say that everyone has an equal voice. It's immediately evident that rich and successful get "more speech" than everyone else. And those wealthy interests get to finance candidates and buy air time and all the rest.

Or does Nader represent the positions and values that the majority of democrats really do hold dear.. but are... afraid... to openly advocate? There's a great argument for this. The Republican machine had John Kerry trembling in his boots about being "unpatriotic." He had to half-ass his positions on Iraq and on a number of policy issues in order to appease the conservative attack machine. So he ended up all wishy-washy.. floating somewhere in limbo.. slightly more liberal than the Republicans.. but his campaign slogan may well have been "I'm not George Bush." That's why people voted for him. But he STILL lost because he came off as a phony and a flip-flopper. And he was. He should have been true to himself and stood up for what he knew was right.

Americans want an end to the war in Iraq. That's why the Congressional elections in 2006 were so comparatively dramatic. But under the leadership of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, the Democrats have done little to end it.. afraid to cut off funding.. too afraid, again, that the Republicans will brand them as irresponsible and unpatriotic.

Most Americans seem to want universal single-payer healthcare. Why don't Hillary Clinton's and Barack Obama's plans call for this? Are they too afraid of the pharmaceutical and insurance companies? Are they too afraid of the Republican attack machine? What's the hold up?

Who will finally stand up and say enough is enough? Does the media deliberately ignore those candidates who challenge entrenched interests and paint the others as the "leading" candidates? Is that what happened to John Edwards? And Dennis. And Mike.

Or is this conspiracy theorizing? Is this the whine of the liberal extremist nerd unable to accept that his candidates' views are out-of-step with the (frustratingly stubborn) views of the American electorate as a whole?

Arguably, it's not that simple. And the millions of people disgusted with politics and politicians (many of whom, admittedly, have reasons for being disgusted with politics that are neither principled nor particularly intelligent) know it's not that simple.

At the end of the day, the candidacy of Ralph Nader will give voice to the millions of people who feel that there's something broken with current electoral system. It will give voice to those who are frustrated with the pace or the substance of the political "debate" we're going to hear all year.

It will be a movement which, if it garners significant support (which I sense it will not) , will force Barack Obama and Howard Dean to take notice.. and to think twice before drifting too far away from the liberal base.

That's where Ralph Nader's policy positions are - aren't they? Don't they reflect the views, attitudes, and favored policy positions of the liberal base? Then why don't Barack Obama's positions match?

Now, don't get me wrong. I hesitate to pick on Barack Obama. Although his positions have been frustratingly amorphous, he seems to be precisely the kind of blue-blooded person the Democratic Party should be tending towards.

But the base is large enough that if it were properly energized, it could elect someone like Dennis Kucinich or Ralph Nader. Why don't Democrats nominate the candidate they deserve? Enough bullshit. Enough half-assing. Enough going halfway for the sake of "electability." Electability is a self-fulfilling prophecy. You have to believe. You have to have faith, if you will, that others will follow. The Democrats who are fuming at Ralph Nader are asking progressives to settle for second best. They're arguing, like a bad pimp, that the Democratic and Republican Parties are the only game in town.. and without them, you are nothing. So might as well get with the program and choose the lesser of two evils. The politics of "the lesser of two evils" doesn't work. Liberals need to wake up and realize that. If there's any year to assert your agenda full-force and go for the gold.. this is that year. On the heels of the dumbest, most awful President in American history.

A rebuttal will go: But you can't be so starry-eyed that you split the party and end up with the worst of all possible candidates. Be reasonable! This is why we have primaries! So we can settle on our best compromise candidate and then put our best foot forward in November - a unified front.

But that's the whole question. Are political primaries working the way they're supposed to? On the one hand, nobody forced anyone to go out and vote for Clinton or Obama or McCain. This is the choice of the American people. If you're going to preach Democracy, you have to accept that!

Or did they...? Was there a subtle kind of coercion and distillation that resulted in choices that were not entirely lucid? A stealthy, insidious kind of infiltration of the American consciousness, directing the resources of the major media networks toward this end.. inducing them under the spell of your treacherous demagoguery and sophistry.

Clever, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, but not clever enough for this observer.

So which side are you on? If you choose to fume at Ralph Nader, then you are evidently satisfied with the mechanism and result of the political primary process. You ought to embrace your party's candidate in full and I don't want to hear you complaining about a choice between tweedle-dee and tweedle-dum come November. But if you sense that there's something askew in how it came down to the current slate of candidates, then I invite you to consider the candidacy of a third party like that of Ralph Nader.

I may "revise and extend my remarks" if the spirit moves me..

from a board post: the problem with liberalism in re: religious belief

Mon, 22 Oct 2007 02:59:57 GMT

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Me (in response to a number of things on a msg board):

"Acting like Jesus," despite what the mere construction of the word might suggest, is NOT what "Christianity" is. There are perfectly secular fruits of - and justifications for - "acting like Jesus" (like the Jesus we see in the Sermon on the Mount anyway). It was Paul however who put together this whole redemption story and transformed Christianity from being the religion OF jesus to being the religion ABOUT Jesus.

My idea in saying that hands-off respect for religious beliefs is killing us (which I share with writers like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins) is that (and you can probably count this as a critique of one of the features of liberalism) so many of us are so beholden to bizarre ancient myths that it's impeding our progress on numerous issues of socio-political importance. If you look into the heart of the opposition to any of a number of issue positions liberals like myself care about.. you're likely to find religious fundamentalism driving that opposition. Abortion, contraception, gay rights, stem cell research, science education, civil rights, foreign policy, environmental policy, and more. Yet it's regarded as abhorrently subversive and impolite to actually question the basis of those beliefs. We've agreed to an absolute relativism when it comes to religious beliefs.. anyone can believe anything they want.. and no one's beliefs are any more well-reasoned.. well-thought out.. well-justified than anybody else's. And even if they are, you're not allowed to say it! To even begin to suggest otherwise is to sin against the identity politics of liberalism! As Sam Harris ably points out, fundamentalists will talk about evidence.. it's liberals who insist that we all play nice and not talk about religious issues. It is this relativistic morass that I think bogs us down.. and prevents us from asking the questions that need to be asked of religious believers. We seem to consider it perfectly fine for people to hold whatever religious beliefs they please.. but then act surprised when they actually act on the basis of those beliefs, treating the effects but not the cause. We insist that religious belief is "personal" and need not impinge on other people. It doesn't surprise me in the least that Christians try to outlaw abortion and gay marriage.. try to convert other people.. conduct foreign policy believing that a god promised certain pieces of land to certain peoples, etc. Beliefs have consequences. They are expressed in the voting booth and they are expressed by our leaders. Indeed, what IS a religious conviction if it's not allowed to be acted upon? Christians believe that Jesus told them to spread the good news. And they do. That's consistent. Believers consider abortion, contraception, homosexual practice, embryonic stem cell research, premarital sex, and more.. immoral. So not only do they try to avoid those things themselves.. but they preach the sinfulness of those things and try to oppose them on a legal and societal level as well. That's consistent. For believers to try to express these beliefs through legal and social institutions is "intolerant" and "illiberal?" Is this realistic? That seems to me to be, at best, a diplomatic holding pattern to keep us from each other's throats for the moment. We call each other "intolerant" for expressing their religious beliefs rather than evaluating the theology itself which gives rise to those beliefs. It's a nice sentiment to say.. hey, not everyone shares your beliefs.. and because we live in a pluralistic society.. we're going to need to compromise and not impose certain restrictions/laws/whatever on people who do not share our convictions. But people really believe these things! How I wish it were that most people had the sense of genuine fallibility that the liberal assumes. If I believe that you're an apostate.. that you're leading others into sin.. leading society in the wrong direction.. and that you're hellbound.. wh.. I, if I'm a devout Christian, am just supposed to be okay with that and say.. well different strokes for different folks? I think that's naive and neglects the fundamentally social nature of religious institutions. Not that we want to be abrasively disrespectful of people's deeply held beliefs either. I understand that beliefs pf this nature are often deeply and passionately held. Let me modify what I just said. Beliefs are not entitled to respect. PEOPLE are entitled to some measure of respect. It's a variation on the hate the sin, love the sinner idea. Beliefs can be as stupid and groundless as can be. And I won't deny that there are less intelligent people and there are more intelligent people.. but it is the person who is to be accorded respect when arguing about these things. Many studies do show, incidentally, that atheists and agnostics on the whole have higher average IQs than religious believers.. but that works against the point I'm trying to make and we'll leave that aside.

My point was that political correctness - the automatic respect we seem to accord religious dogma - is preventing us from criticizing and questioning people who desperately need criticism, questioning, and a healthy dose of intellectual modesty. And in this way.. religious dogma has a deathgrip on our society. The United States is so backwards compared to the rest of the developed world because of the precedence of evangelicism in this country. Europe is in many respects what our future looks like and I welcome it.

Many of you are objecting that atheists need a dose of "criticism" and intellectual humility if we are claiming that there CANNOT BE a god. I am not claiming that. You don't DISPROVE an assertion. The burden of proof is on religious believers putting forward the proposition that there is a god and that "he" cares about our sex lives to provide evidence that this is indeed the case. In the absence of such evidence, the rest of us are justified in a WEAK ATHEISM. It's the subtle distinction between not believing in god and believing that there's not a god. Absent evidence, I can say.. what god.. I don't see any god.. I don't know what you're talking about.. and until you show me evidence of this god (that is not better accounted for by more simplistic principles of logic and science), then I just don't believe. Indeed, I do think that there are good reasons for believing that there is NOT a god as well, but that's a different story. The most fundamental question is one of evidence. What I see religious proselytizers doing is appealing to people's emotions.. their sense of human anxiety.. incompletion.. wonder.. insecurity.. loneliness, etc. and coaxing them, in this way, into buying into (this is a sort of salesmanship, after all) what are really ill-justified half-baked ideas about gods and ghosts and resurrections and prayers and sacrifices. People believe not on the basis of well-reasoned evidence but because they WANT to believe. They convince themselves that the events in their lives are answers to their prayers when in fact SOMETHING had to happen.. and the prayer hypothesis was never falsifiable in the first place. The denial of death is very consoling. Loved ones are still with us and we will never REALLY have to face mortality.

I've written enough. That's all I have to say for the moment.

Friday, March 09, 2007

Fri, 09 Mar 2007 15:08:37 GMT

Loving your neighbor necessitates the realization that behind all of the defense mechanisms, neuroticism, verbal feedback, and apparent asseninity is a fragile delicate, vulnerable, frightened inner child merely doing the best (s)he can to cope with the stresses of modern society. Strive always to see through the armor to the beautiful person underneath. So often our coping mechanisms tangle with another's, generating the illusion of malevolence when in fact both 'sides' are perfectly well-intentioned. Virtually no one intends to be a pain.. rather than bitching and berating and bemoaning.. try understanding. When you can open yourself up and accept the world and others as they are as opposed to how you want them to be, you can love.

(anyone and everyone)

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I think it would be hilarious to post very very amusing jokes/material on the wall in front of men's urinals, so that they laugh so 'heartily' that they shake their respective dicks around uncontrollably, pissing all over themselves

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Bill Maher Knows What's Up

Wit, Eloquence, and Insight: The Platinum Balls of Keith Olbermann

Sat, 27 Jan 2007 18:36:11 GMT

Friday, November 24, 2006

Fri, 24 Nov 2006 18:49:57 GMT

This is What Needs to Happen in Order for the Democrats to Win...

Sun, 05 Nov 2006 23:09:34 GMT

The Dems will win the House.

In terms of the Senate..

Tennessee is gone. Corker has pulled way ahead. The three key battlegrounds (all of which the Democrats must win in order to take control of the Senate) are now Missouri, Montana, and Virginia. The fight is difficult, but if anyone has a razor-thin lead, as the polls precariously suggest, it's the Democrats.

Dr. Jobe Martin's Creationist Lecture: A Critical Response

Fri, 29 Sep 2006 00:20:30 GMT

In the interest of fairness and intellectual honesty, I feel the need to make a number of points clear regarding Dr. Jobe Martin’s lecture, “Big Bang Evolutionism or Creation?”

While his presentation was delivered in an ostensibly calm and dispassionate manner, his childish antics, deliberate misinformation, and allegations of academic conspiracy amounted to little more than a laughably ignorant parody of sound scientific knowledge. Any vestige of dignity was maintained only because he was pandering to an audience of non-specialists too uneducated to dispute his so-called facts on the spot.

A few remarks..

At the beginning of his lecture, Dr. Martin presented a quotation from a fellow atheist outlining the stakes in the clash between serious Christianity and modern science. Many moderates, pluralists, and postmodernists attempt to soften the terms of the debate, insisting that one can have it both ways – that is, that one can both be a firm believer in evolution and take the book of Genesis at face value. Dr. Martin is absolutely correct to insist that the two worldviews conflict. They conflict insofar as they make competing knowledge-claims about the way the world is. It is impossible for anyone educated in biology to take seriously the Biblical idea that a man and a woman descended from heaven intact into a Garden of Eden some 6,000 years ago without some very impressive feats of acrobatic hermeneutics.

Dr. Martin made the extraordinary claim that nothing the Bible says has ever turned out to be false or contradictory. For a sample of contradictions, see here, here, and attachment). Of course, it’s easy to say that the Bible never contradicts itself if supernatural intervention is always on the table. Moreover, the “I can believe it until you prove me wrong” defense is a fundamental misunderstanding of the rules of logic and debate. The burden of proof is on the proposition. The Bible, in fact, says many contradictory, absurd, racist, sexist, barbaric, and just plain stupid things. As two audience members tried to point out, the Bible is not a one-stop source for factual information about the world. Insofar as faith and science conflict, the former must yield. Several branches of modern science render a literal reading of the Book of Genesis utterly absurd.

Oft-repeated before, during, and after Tuesday night’s lecture was the term “creationism-evolution debate.” But is there really a debate? Is creationism a competing scientific explanation for how the diversity on earth developed? No. It’s not science at all. The Supreme Court recognized this in 1987 when it struck down Louisiana’s “equal time statute” (stating that evolution could not be taught unless creationism was as well). Creationism, the Court ruled, upon sound advice from numerous experts, is a quintessentially religious idea. Why is creationism religious rather than scientific? Why is creationism not science? In answering this, you would do well to consult a philosopher of science. Creationism is unscientific because it posits an unverifiable, supernatural mechanism to “explain” observed facts about the world. Creationism does not present any explanatory framework by means of which to account for facts (besides “God did it”). Science by its very nature presupposes the existence of matter and the law of causation. Working within this paradigm, scientific inquiry has been immensely successful in explaining many facets of the natural world – many of which, in fact, had formerly been ascribed to supernatural entities. It’s not so much that scientists believe by “faith,” as Jobe Martin asserts, but that it always seeks the most parsimonious explanation - the least number of explanatory concepts necessary to yield the kind of predictive accuracy that makes science successful. To invoke “God” as the cause of life or its development begs the question, “What is this mechanism you’re invoking to explain what we see here? How does it work? How did it do it? What evidence is there that this was the cause?” The answers to all of these questions are utterly mysterious on this account. “God” is the most overly broad explanatory concept you could possibly invoke. It’s to give up and say that the problem is too difficult. It’s an argument from ignorance which says, in effect, I don’t understand how this could have come about, therefore some supernatural being (conveniently projected in my own image and with my own sense of morality and cultural convention) must have waved a magic wand and made it so. This is not scientific. Science only deals with concepts it can confirm or refute on the basis of evidence. Are there gaps in our understanding of how life forms come into being and change over time? No question. But give science a chance! Give evolutionary theory a chance to explain the features Dr. Martin pointed to and describes in his video series before concluding that the quest is hopeless and that the only alternative is to say that a supernatural being must have created it. That impulse to say, “God did it” is very preconceived. It’s based on a reading of the Bible. Creationism is a specific religious idea which public officials are not permitted to endorse under the Supreme Court’s establishment clause jurisprudence.

The Third Circuit Court of Appeals recognized the same when it ruled against the repackaged version of creationism – “intelligent design” – in Kitzmiller et al. v. Dover Area School District just last year. There is no anti-Christian atheistic conspiracy within the judiciary to discriminate against the Christian worldview. It’s more complicated than that and I urge you to educate yourself both about the crowning theory of modern biology and about the philosophical reasons why scientific inquiry operates within the conceptual framework that it does. Science rejects supernatural action not on the basis of a faith equivalent with religious faith, but out of methodological restraint. Science would experience no progress if it was content merely to say “God did it – and that’s all there is to it.”

A few additional remarks:

Dr. Martin talked about Noah’s Ark. If you believe that a man rounded up every species (or kind) of animal on the face of the earth and put them into a single boat, I offer you my sincerest intellectual condolences. If ever there was a miracle, it is that your faith in the Christian mythology has so thoroughly deluded you that you could really believe such a blatant impossibility. The size of the ark, the exhaustiveness of the search, and all of the logistics involved render any attempt simply impossible. It has always been, and will remain, a fairy tale in a book. Such an ark will never be found, mark my words. I would bet everything I have on it. The story is a manifest absurdity. And, again, saying “prove to me that it didn’t happen” is a misunderstanding. There is no evidence for the existence of such an ark in the first place, so the default position is skepticism until some – any – evidence is adduced to suggest that it is anything more than an entertaining tale.

- The Bible claims at 1 Chronicles 16:30, Psalm 93:1: Psalm 96:10, Psalm 104:5, and Isaiah 45:18 that the earth is fixed and unmovable.

- In Deuteronomy 13:7-11, the Bible instructs you to stone to death anyone who suggests other religious beliefs or lack thereof.

- Exodus 22:18 says “thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” (So many people were tortured and murdered for impossible crimes during the inquisition because of passages like this one)

Deuteronomy 22:13-19 instructs you to stone rape victims to death

A host of other passages advocating the practice of stoning can be found here.

Deuteronomy 13:1— “Whatever I am now commanding you, you must keep and observe, adding nothing to it, taking nothing away.”

There are many Many other passages of this sort that make both monstrous moral commands and absurd or otherwise contradictory factual claims. The Book of Genesis itself contains two separate creation accounts.

As for Biblical prophecy, I encourage you to educate yourself on the nature of prophecy. Most prophetic statements are excessively vague and only appear fulfilled in hindsight. And with a book as large as the Bible, there are bound to be some statements that appear to have come to fruition, while many others are ignored.

Verses like Isiah 53 and Psalm 22 give no indication that they’re talking about the messiah, but instead speak only generically about a suffering righteous man.

Deuteronomy 21:23 claims that anyone hung on a tree is cursed by God.

More importantly, we need to understand the nature of our sources of information about Jesus. Dr. Martin made the extraordinary claim that the Ressurection is an historical fact (citing Church fathers like Eusebius rather than historians). This is absolutely not the case. Historicans can only say what probably happened in the past. And miraculous events, by their very definition, are the least likely explanations. For an excellent discussion of this issue, see the extraordinary debate between William Lane Craig and Bart Ehrman, Is There Historical Evidence for the Resurection of Jesus? It is important to understand that the Gospels are not historically reliable. The gospel accounts were written some 30-70 years after Jesus’ death not by his followers but by Greek-speaking Christians in other parts of the empire based on oral traditions that had been in circulation for decades. The gospel accounts are not consistent, they’re not disinterested, and they’re not contemporary. You should know well that oral taditions over a few minutes, much less a few decades and across language barriers, have a tendency to get a little out of hand, even if those passing down the stories believe that they’re re-telling the story as they remember it. There are plenty of cognitive biases and memory distortions that come into play..not to mention the prospect that certain parts of the story just get deliberately made-up. Stories of this nature quickly become legendary. Getting your information about Jesus from the Bible is a bit like getting your information about Chuck Norris from the jokes.

So it remains entirely possible (and one must always say to oneself: which explanation is more likely) that the gospel writers (who are anonymous, by the way) wrote the stories about Jesus in such a way as to make them fit with Old Testament “prophecy.” The gospel accounts were written for the very purpose of trying to convince people that Jesus was the messiah and rose from the dead. They are not historically reliable accounts. The only thing disinterested historical accounts tell us is that stories of a risen god began to surface among a certain sect of Jews, surrounding a man who was crucified for crimes against the state. There were also other books and other versions of christianity which never made it into what is now the officical canon of scripture. It is important not to forget where your information about Jesus comes from.

But I have digressed significantly from my primary point.

Dr. Martin made the claim that animals do not exhibit moral behavior. This is not the case. There are numerous documented instances of altruistic behavior observed among many animal species.

Dr. Martin claimed that music is an exclusively human phenomenon. While it certainly depends on what you define as “music” and what you conceive the purpose of our music as being, this claim too is easily disputed.

Dr. Martin attempted to discredit evolutiuonary theory by arguing that Darwin was a racist. While Charles Darwin may have made somewhat prejudicial remarks by today’s standards, he was pretty tolerant by his own. Much more importantly, this objection amounts to an ad hominem attack and has no bearing whatsoever on the overwhelming validity of his ideas.

Again, Dr. Martin’s repeated claims of a conspiracy among academics to hide inconsistencies within evolutionary theory should be taken with a grain of salt. There is no such conspiracy. Pointing out gaps – both real and imaginary – in our understanding of the biological world under this paradigm does absolutely nothing to advance your “alternative” view.

Dr. Martin repeatedly suggested that, under the evolutionary view, complexity comes by way of an utterly random, blind, undesigned, chaotic process. It is important to understand that the revolutionary character of Darwin’s idea was that you can and do get design from a blind process. Heritable characteristics which contribute to the overall genetic fitness of an organism get replicated while those that don’t – just don’t. It’s really a strikingly simple idea when you think about it. This argument for the existence of god from the complexity of the natural world fell out of favor in intellectual circles long ago. This was an appealing argument – in the 17^th century. David Hume showed that the universe can’t be compared to a watch or a house without some serious conceptual errors. And Darwin/his contemporaries put the nail in the coffin. Not to mention arguments regarding the extensive amount of suffering and randomness in the world. As George Carlin put it, “If this is the best God could do, I’m not impressed.”

Dr. Martin repeatedly conflates evolutionary theory with both the question of the origin of life and the Big Bang model of the universe.

As for the question of life origins, there is some fascinating biochemical reserch being done in this area. Again, “God did it” is not an acceptable explanation (or at least is not enough) for a scientist. There is much to be learned. If you must insist that God had a hand in this kind of thing, then suffice it to say that scientists are attempting to understand how God did it. You may have reservations that this can be done, but I urge you to stand aside and allow scientists to do their work. We are making great strides. Of course the answers are extremely complicated. Of course our science of life is not anywhere close to being complete or even comprehensive. But there is a lot to be learned about how the world works and attacking the fruits of scientific inquiry is blatantly obstructionist and anti-intellectual.

While one cannot entirely dismiss him on this basis, Dr. Martin is not an expert on the subject of genetics, biology, physics, organic chemistry, philosophy of science, archaeology, paleontology, zoology, or evolutionary theory. Dr. Martin’s view on this matter is extremely fringe; indeed, it’s not even part of a genuine scientific dialogue. It cannot be repeated frequently enough: there is no debate within the scientific community regarding the viability of the theory of evolution by natural selection. If you want real facts and real science, you don’t consult someone like Dr. Jobe Martin. You consult a Ph.D, an expert in the field.

John Caputo and the College Bible Fellowship never wanted the facts on what evolutionary theory or astrophysics has to say about our place in the universe. They had a certain view in mind and invited a theologian who had studied the issue just enough to be able to tell tham what they wanted to hear. Shame on this group for their dishonesty if they thought they were getting a scientific perspective from such a man.

In the final analysis, Dr. Jobe Martin made awfully clear that you can’t challenge scientific evidence with Biblical passages without totally humiliating yourself. If religion is to maintain its legitimacy as a mode of inquiry and speculation about the nature of things, it cannot seek to compete with science without embarassing itself and causing unnecessary polarization of opinion and obstruction of human progress. Science too, you would be right to insist, should remain modest about what it can empirically demonstrate and what it can’t. The Bible and the doctrines of your faith, I would submit to you, are designed to guide you in how to live your life, if you choose to live by them, with the help of a few metaphysical doctrines which go beyond, but are still reasonably extrapolated from, where science has spoken. But where science has indeed adduced evidence for a particular view, faith must retreat. You must admit that religion is not equipped to do combat with science as far as empirical knowledge-claims are concerned. Quite simply, Jobe Martin overstepped his bounds as a man of faith Tuesday night.

For a breadth but not a depth of scientific responses to wide range of creationist claims, including many of those presented by Dr. Martin, click here, here, or here. For a depth of scientific understanding on this issue, I encourage you first to open your mind to all of the amazing discoveries science has to offer, and then to take a course in biology or read a mainstream, peer-reviewed article or book on the matter. Textbooks and encyclopedias are wonderful places to start. There is an abundance of these in both print and electronic formats.

Best of luck in your search for knowledge and happiness.

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Matt Henderson
matt2h@yahoo.com
AIM: Matt2h, Canoegod415
INTP

MillersvilleUniversity Class of 2006, Cum Laude
B.A. Philosophy, B.A. Political Science
Minor: Psychology

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