Lefties and the like have liked Darwin's theory of evolution because it demolishes the notion of God creating the world, and the fishes and the animals. And Uncle Tom Cobbley and all.
The lefty religion stands or falls on the verdict that pre-lefty religion is all superstition and bigotry. And that lefty prophets have come down from the mountain with tablets of justice and equality that will save the planet.
So Darwin must be true.
But now it is becoming pretty clear that random mutations to DNA cannot explain the emergence -- or creation -- of new species.
So there must have been "intelligent design." Some-thing or some-one or some fill-in-the-blank must have designed things. So says Stephen Meyer of the Discovery Institute in Seattle.
There's a good piece by David Gelernter in the Claremont Review of Books that goes into the whole question of "Giving Up Darwin."
Intelligent Design is a good way of describing the notion that the way that living organisms develop make it seem as if there were an intelligent designer in his organism shop assembling new ideas for organisms and sending them out into the universe care of Galactic UPS.
But I propose: why not just say that God Did It. And I have a deep and sophisticated philosophical reason for saying so.
In my view, the notion of God is an astonishing and deep and sophisticated philosophical way of dealing with the primary fact of human life.
We want to know the "meaning of life, the universe, and everything" as recited ad nauseam in Douglas Adams Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy books, but we don't.
We don't know the meaning of life, the universe, and everything. So we make it up, and the author of this universe kit is a chap we call God. This is because we humans like to gin up a reason for the things we do and thereby justify both our noble acts and our unspeakable crimes. And ordinary wiving and thriving.
Making God the author of some mystery in the universe works like a champ until our human knowledge expands enough to understand the mystery in question.
But there are always millions of unexplained mysteries left over. Let's say that God is in charge of all those mysteries.
For instance.
Back in the day we humans reckoned that the gods on Mt. Olympus ran everything, including the day-to-day battles of the siege of Troy described in The Iliad. If one group of gods thought the Greeks had been having things too much their own way they would insist that the other gods let the Trojans win the next one.
But by the time that The Odyssey got written, humans had a lot more personal agency, and were not above tricking the immortals so they could get their human way. The lovely Penelope was responsible for keeping those Suitors at bay, and young Telemachus knew that he had to do something about the Suitors. What was that all about?
Close to our own time, we had the mechanics of Newton, which seemed to suggest that everything in the world was determined by the relentless billiard ball determinism of Newton's equations. So where did free will or mere chance come in? Did God do it?
Well, we sorta solved that one with quantum mechanics which developed the math to show that, until some event happened, the so-called sub-atomic particles existed in a fuzz of probability. Things didn't know what they were going to do until they did.
OK, so let's say that the fuzz of probability is where God exists. And, of course, there is the curious fact that the universe doesn't crystallize out of probability in just any old way, but according to clearly defined rules that can be represented mathematically, once we can figure out the math.
Right now, the easiest way to understand the creation of species and major mutations is by the notion of "intelligent design" or, less politely, God. But I expect that in the near future the "scientists" will discover some mechanism or probability function that explains how species creation works.
But the day after this magnificent discovery we will realize that underneath it is yet another mystery.
I say: why not just call that unfathomable mystery God and get on it.
The lefty religion stands or falls on the verdict that pre-lefty religion is all superstition and bigotry. And that lefty prophets have come down from the mountain with tablets of justice and equality that will save the planet.
So Darwin must be true.
But now it is becoming pretty clear that random mutations to DNA cannot explain the emergence -- or creation -- of new species.
So there must have been "intelligent design." Some-thing or some-one or some fill-in-the-blank must have designed things. So says Stephen Meyer of the Discovery Institute in Seattle.
There's a good piece by David Gelernter in the Claremont Review of Books that goes into the whole question of "Giving Up Darwin."
Intelligent Design is a good way of describing the notion that the way that living organisms develop make it seem as if there were an intelligent designer in his organism shop assembling new ideas for organisms and sending them out into the universe care of Galactic UPS.
But I propose: why not just say that God Did It. And I have a deep and sophisticated philosophical reason for saying so.
In my view, the notion of God is an astonishing and deep and sophisticated philosophical way of dealing with the primary fact of human life.
We want to know the "meaning of life, the universe, and everything" as recited ad nauseam in Douglas Adams Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy books, but we don't.
We don't know the meaning of life, the universe, and everything. So we make it up, and the author of this universe kit is a chap we call God. This is because we humans like to gin up a reason for the things we do and thereby justify both our noble acts and our unspeakable crimes. And ordinary wiving and thriving.
Making God the author of some mystery in the universe works like a champ until our human knowledge expands enough to understand the mystery in question.
But there are always millions of unexplained mysteries left over. Let's say that God is in charge of all those mysteries.
For instance.
Back in the day we humans reckoned that the gods on Mt. Olympus ran everything, including the day-to-day battles of the siege of Troy described in The Iliad. If one group of gods thought the Greeks had been having things too much their own way they would insist that the other gods let the Trojans win the next one.
But by the time that The Odyssey got written, humans had a lot more personal agency, and were not above tricking the immortals so they could get their human way. The lovely Penelope was responsible for keeping those Suitors at bay, and young Telemachus knew that he had to do something about the Suitors. What was that all about?
Close to our own time, we had the mechanics of Newton, which seemed to suggest that everything in the world was determined by the relentless billiard ball determinism of Newton's equations. So where did free will or mere chance come in? Did God do it?
Well, we sorta solved that one with quantum mechanics which developed the math to show that, until some event happened, the so-called sub-atomic particles existed in a fuzz of probability. Things didn't know what they were going to do until they did.
OK, so let's say that the fuzz of probability is where God exists. And, of course, there is the curious fact that the universe doesn't crystallize out of probability in just any old way, but according to clearly defined rules that can be represented mathematically, once we can figure out the math.
Right now, the easiest way to understand the creation of species and major mutations is by the notion of "intelligent design" or, less politely, God. But I expect that in the near future the "scientists" will discover some mechanism or probability function that explains how species creation works.
But the day after this magnificent discovery we will realize that underneath it is yet another mystery.
I say: why not just call that unfathomable mystery God and get on it.
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