In the Swillpit Chronicles, friend Regis Nicoll (On Science and Origins, August 28, 2009) takes a leaf from C. S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters, in which a senior devil advises a junior (heads, he gets souls for lunch and tails the junior devil).

You see, there is ecology even in Hell!

… as old Glutbore schooled you back in the novitiate, that began to change 150 years ago with the publication of that sublime text, On the Origin of Species. From then on, there was a thoroughgoing naturalistic theory for the diversification and complexification of life—a theory that had the explanatory heft to spark confidence in full-blown naturalism. No other single device of Hell has been as effective in dislodging the Creator from his creation, and demoting him from God to god in the minds of His, now our, creatures. Modification through natural selection from common descent - EVOLUTION, our “bulwark never failing”!

Glutbore was also fond point out that in all our devilish schemes, “science is not on our side.” I, myself, have reminded you of that more than once in your present field assignment. But, as with all dictums, there are exceptions; and this is one.

Science, not real science, mind you, which endeavors to discover the true nature of things, following the evidence wherever it leads without metaphysical or ideological blinders; but science, as it has been narrowed and limited to physical, unintelligent processes, is very much on our side.

Methodological naturalism, or “scientism,” as it is pejoratively referred to by execrable “God” believers—admitting, as it does, only natural causes and explanations has won us countless souls.

Go here for the rest.

Regis should really write more of these.

Denyse O’Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain.

A press release just landed in my mailbox for Creation, a pro-Darwin film to be aired at the Toronto International Film Festival, according to which we learn,

“Creation” is the story of Charles Darwin and his master-work “The Origin of Species.” It tells the story of the world-renowned scientist, crushed by the loss of a daughter, who conceives a book about the non-existence of God and the global revolution played out in the confines of a small English village.

Oh, so that’s what it really is all about then?

Someone from the BBC wants to interview me. I am not sure about that, because I am concerned that they are looking for a gap-tooth Canadian moron to spout Bible verses, rock the tent, and handle snakes. I’m okay with the last, with proper tools, though not as a religious exercise. (In case anyone cares, the main thing is to grab the snake firmly by the neck with long-handled tongs, at which point he has no further defences.)

As I have pointed out many times, the issues around the Darwin cult have never been politicized in Canada, for good political reasons. Various Darwinists have also tried to flog up a big scare about Canadians being afraid of science, but it is rubbish. Maybe the BBC will believe it though.

Aw, let ‘em believe what they want. Bring it on.

Denyse O’Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain.

That shows, like nothing else, how the design debate is taking off. The previously faceless functionaries at the Seattle-based Discovery Institute get to be villains for the public at large, not just for threatened Darwinists, in a new anti-DI novel, The Book of God and Physics :

The Jesuits aren’t the villains in this clash between God and physics. Joven’s target is the real-life Discovery Institute, an American think-tank that promotes the theory of intelligent design. Ross King, “Intelligent, By Design,” June 9, 2009

I wonder when the film is coming out. Pass the cheese popcorn.

PS: I have met the Discos. They are actually nice people just doin’ a job, taking out the Darwin trash that the Darwinists can’t take out themselves - on account of their theory having degenerated into a popular cult.

ScienceMag’s blog advises

On a visit to Cambridge last week to read her latest work, novelist and poet Emily Ballou offered that reflection on her 5 years researching the life of Charles Darwin. The result, her book The Darwin Poems, attempts to uncover the man behind the grand ideas that spawned evolutionary theory. The book follows the naturalist’s life from boyhood to after his death, with poems slicing through layers of Darwin’s character, exploring how his inquiring mind permeated his life’s work, his relationships, and his loss of faith in God….

…You can safely put God to bed now
the way you can’t your daughter anymore.
Tuck the sheets so tight he cannot move
and lock the bedroom door.

And what if it turns out that God is everywhere (omnipresent)? You’ll meet Him on the stairs.

Jason Rennie’s Sci Phi Journal offers Catch!, a short story by Mark Brandon Allen, about how far we can/should go in creating a “world” for a person in a damaged brain state. It is read by Mike Huberty of the band Sunspot. Catch! It if you can.

“Strange how the mind works,” Brad mused. He looked questioningly at the scan technician.

The Ensign smiled at Brad as she continued to work the scanner. “This was the right thing to do,
she said.”

No Spoiler alert.

Here.

Also from the Science Channel, how to build your own time machine and skip awful meetings.

Wow. Three years of my life back. There was a time when I thought the sweetest word in the whole universe was “adjourned.”

(Note: If you follow me at Twitter, you will get regular notice of new posts .)

What make you all of this, in City Journal:

How Science Fiction Found Religion

Benjamin A. Plotinsky

Once overtly political, the genre increasingly employs Christian allegory.

Winter 2009

There is a young man, different from other young men. Ancient prophecies foretell his coming, and he performs miraculous feats. Eventually, confronted by his enemies, he must sacrifice his own life—an act that saves mankind from calamity—but in a mystery as great as that of his origin, he is reborn, to preside in glory over a world redeemed. Tell this story to one of the world’s 2 billion Christians, and he’ll recognize it instantly. Tell it to a science-fiction and fantasy fan, and he’ll ask why you’re making minor alterations to the plot of The Matrix or Superman Returns. For reasons that have as much to do with global politics as with our cultural moment, some of this generation’s most successful sci-fi and fantasy movie franchises follow an essentially Christian plotline.

Hallelujah!” cries a minor character early in The Matrix, the 1999 cyberpunk flick, directed by Larry and Andy Wachowski, that took the nation by storm and, together with its two sequels, raked in about $600 million domestically. “You’re my savior, man, my own personal Jesus Christ.” The character is addressing Thomas Anderson, a restless computer hacker, played by Keanu Reeves, who goes by the handle “Neo” and has sold him some precious illegal software. It’s just one of the movie’s many references to its central inspiration. Neo, we learn eventually, is in fact a nearly divine savior, the Jesus Christ of the bizarre world in which he lives.
Anderson doesn’t realize it yet, however. First, a mysterious man named Morpheus must contact him, conveying a shocking truth: the universe isn’t real but is actually a “Matrix”—a “neural interactive simulation,” a “computer-generated dreamworld”—and the year isn’t 1999 but something like 2199. Early in the twenty-first century, Morpheus explains, human beings and intelligent machines went to war against one another. The machines, seeking a constant source of bioelectrical energy, started to breed people and use them as human generators, keeping them in little cells but convincing them, through illusion-conveying cables attached to their brains, that they still lived in an ordinary world. “You are a slave, Neo,” Morpheus says. “Like everyone else, you were born into bondage.”

It’s basically religion, at least I think. Funny how science fiction would come out that way.

Here’s Colonel Spitfire and the 7th Brigade Part One and Colonel Spitfire and the 7th Brigade Part Two.

This weeks installment of Sci Phi Journal is the first two part story and is written by Dr Chris Drohan. It is quite a weird story, but I also quite like it. I’d be interested to see what others think. Warning, there is a bit of reasonably graphic violence in this week’s story.

Relearning Touch

This weeks installment of Sci Phi Journal is a story called Relearning Touch by up and coming author Melvin Cartegena, and it is read by podiobooks author Arlene Radasky.

Here’s a brilliant example of language embedded in language. A friend writes to tell me that this video was submitted in a contest by a 20 year old. The contest was Titled “u @ 50.”

To get the point you must watch it through to the end.