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

“Let me summarise my proposed course of action. Soon after the end of this broadcast, and of those transmitted to other countries, I shall be vacating my position as overseer of the world, indeed of the universe. I shall be going you-know-not-where, never to return. It will be as if I had never existed, a state of affairs which correlates quite closely with the views held by a significant proportion of you. “The result of this action will be to render some specific questions irrelevant: Did the universe have a creator? Does mankind have free will? What is the meaning of life?

Did you know there were two tin woodmen in Oz? Probably not–the second one appears for the first time here.

“He thought it was a curse. I saw it differently. You probably remember his story–how he fell in love with a certain girl, who happened to be my niece. Her mother, my poor late brother’s widow, didn’t want her girl getting married, so she went to the witch to buy a hex on the fellow. Next time he went out to the woods, his axe slipped and cut a horrible gash in his leg. There was nothing to be done for it, the leg was lost; so he went to the tinsmith and got a replacement. He went back to chopping, not knowing his axe had been turned against him. He lost one arm to it, then another–and then in the end he was all tin.

“I didn’t understand what was going on any more than he did. Anybody could have told something was up, though. He wasn’t that bad an axe-handler! Somehow he was oblivious to what was really happening, and he kept right on cutting wood, and cutting himself. Maybe there was a spell on his brain, too–I can’t believe it was just his axe that was addled. Most people would have found it pretty remarkable to survive with a tin body, but he took it in stride–as long as he was well oiled, that is. His one big complaint was he had lost his heart.

“Well, I’m a woodman too. I saw what he never saw. Oh, he was proud enough of his new tin body, all shiny and all, and he was glad enough to have a skin that the axe couldn’t cut any more. But he never caught on to just how much good it had done him. He was a woodcutting machine! Fast, accurate, never bothered by the nettles and the brambles; he could keep going and going with hardly a break except to oil up. And he had the gall to complain about it!

“He didn’t know–not until it was way too late–just who it was who had caused this. But I knew. She was having one of those little gossip sessions with my wife, complaining about this and that. My wife–bless her–was one of my own bigger mistakes. When she got into one of these gripe-fests with other women, she only complained about one thing: me. ‘He’s lazy, he doesn’t make us any money, I’m so mistreated,’ and on and on. What did she know about woodcutting? I swung that axe all day long, sweating, blistering my hands, never knowing when some idiot with another axe was going to drop a tree on my head–and all she could do was whine.

“I have to admit, though, she wasn’t all wrong. Woodcutting is a hardlife: we never had any extra money, hardly enough food to eat, and our home was always just about falling apart. That’s how it was until I got things figured out. It was lucky, in a way, how I happened to overhear them talking (usually I stay as far from them as I can). My sister-in-law was crowing to my wife about how she had gone to the Wicked Witch of the East, and how it had cost her just two sheep and a cow to get this spell cast.

“That gave me the idea. It was only natural, don’t you think? We didn’t have any livestock to spare at the time, but I figured I could make a deal to pay the witch later, once I got myself improved.

“The witch went for it, the same deal she asked from my sister-in-law. Now, you’re probably thinking she would have had some huge evil trick in mind, to steal my soul from me, or make me burn with misery getting turned into tin, or have me pine away with regret for all I gave up. No, she may be a wicked witch, but she kept her word. A few good chops and a visit to the tinsmith, that’s all it took; then two sheep and a cow, as soon as I could afford them. That’s all she got out of me.

“I really don’t need animals like that now anyway–tin men don’t eat, and we don’t mind about keeping warm. I just have to keep my joints oiled up. I may not have a heart, but then, I wasn’t all that lovey-dovey with my wife anyway, if you know what I mean. Who cares about all that, anyway? I hardly ever think about a tree falling on me anymore; the other woodcutters mostly stay out of my part of the woods. I move a lot faster now.

“Why do they call her a wicked witch, anyway?”

Prediction: intelligent design will be here to stay when it appears in Hip-Hop music.  News Flash: Atom tha Immortal has released the first full-fledged ID Hip-Hop song I’m aware of called Achilles. Give it a listen here and read the lyrics below. To learn more about Atom or to download his newest album, Sons of Slaves and Lords, go to his website.

Apocalyptic G-d presence/
Feeling the fire of G-d’s essence/
You need Rosetta Stones to unlock my poem’s message/
Born in a body of sand since early dawn/
Adam spawned genetic code of early on/
Written on the rocks of Hebron, The Earth Is Gone/
Reverted from an Information Age to Early Bronze/
Punishment of Civilization/
The only reason why this wicked nation ain’t burning is G-d’s patient/

Chorus:
——-
The best decision/
For somebody in your position/
Is head down, hands up in submission/
Realize/
We’re where the future lies/
With Y-S-H-U-A the truth’s alive/
(x2)

Will somebody tell me how come/
My sound waves will never ricochet/
Obliterate your breath and leave your chest concave/
Killing a knave/
Sound decibel levels of wrath/
Your inner ear hammer will crack your anvil in half/
I follow a path through Euclidean spacetime/
Mythological allusion inserted in every line/
Telekinetically crack a lion’s spine/
Freeing the blind from mind control on mankind’s soul/
So/
We strike Achilles at his heel/
We strike the modern man like Gregor Mendel, meddling with his alleles/
Wounds of Darwinian Theory will never heal/
Once the population finds Intelligent Design/
Enzymes hold the signs of a Divine Mind/
Darwinian speculation is useless/
To explain emergence/
Of cellular machines below the surface/
Seeing Specified Complexity points to a purpose/
Of a system of integrated parts/
Excluding chance as part/
Of how it could ever start/
So/
I speak with truth and in reason/
But whether you believe or not/
We leave Darwinian fish bleeding/

(Chorus)

This weeks installment of Sci Phi Journal is the wonderful story, You Pretty Thing by Australian Author Lee Battersby. It is read by Rick Stringer of the variant Frequencies Podcast. I hope you like it.

The basic thesis is that a man has developed a plan to cheat death:

“This,” he said, indicating his body. “A clone, created from genetically manipulated junk stock. Download myself into it via a brain transplant at the point of death.”

“The cancer?”

“Not in my brain.” He tapped the side of his head. “All my memories, all my experiences. I’m me. The body is just a vessel.”

“Except?”

“Except I have to prove it. Beyond reasonable doubt.”

The questions you are invited to discuss in the comments are

I Do you think Rhodes has managed to achieve immortality ?

II Is this really still Jonathan Rhodes ? I

II Does the test prove that ?

The story is available in available in a variety of sound, text, and palm reader formats. 

Accidentally on Purpose

Robert Frost Till Darwin came to earth upon a year

To show the evolution how to steer,

They mean to tell us, though, the omnibus

Had no real purpose till it got to us.

Never believe it.

At the very worst It must have had the purpose from the first

To produce purpose as the fitter bred:

We were just purpose coming to a head.

What these authors are doing is even more tricky, if you look at their work as a sneaky critique of ID theory. Essentially they’re saying, “Let’s invent a universe where ID is truth. Oh, that would be the universe that science will build for us.” And ultimately, in these novels, the Designer is not a God or even gods, but instead a whole bunch of sentient creatures harnessing the power of science and technology to design worlds and bodies intelligently.

Well, what if … whatever.

True, I have gone on record saying that almost all “cause” art of any kind is “freakingly awful”:

Most “cause” books and movies are terrible. Just terrible. Freakingly awful. There is a good reason for that. A novel or film must incarnate, not explain. It must show people living the situation, not talking about it.

But Fuller has an interesting premise: A postmodern talk show on which Charles Darwin (Chuck) and Abe Lincoln (Abe), whose birthdays fall on the same day, appear. They are interviewed, and decide if they want to stay in the present or go back to wherever they are now (not disclosed as a matter of broadcast policy). There are two hosts – the big hair hostette (Sheila) and a wisecracking dude on a short lead (Jack). Here’s just a snippet:

ABE [bemused]: Like it or not, Darwin, it seems that you’ve been turned into the God behind the new science of Genesis!

CHUCK [looks cross]: I fail to see the humour in all this. My good name has been misappropriated for some sophisticated form of alchemy!

SHEILA: Chuck, lighten up! The stuff works – at least most of the time. I mean – I’ve got this recent testimonial from an expert. Listen to what he says: “Genes are digitally coded text, in a sense too full to be dismissed as an analogy. Like human words they have the power to hurt and to heal, and that power is the greater because, given the right conditions, genetic words can dictate with stronger predictability than most human imperatives.”

CHUCK: That sounds like the ravings of some theologian still stuck in the seventeenth century with his Book of Nature and Book of God.

SHEILA: No, Chuck! That’s Richard Dawkins. He’s on your side. He’s the greatest evolutionist ever produced by television!

CHUCK: That word again! Television.

JACK [Trying to be helpful]: Chuck, look at it this way: Not only do we need to manufacture evolution and the science of evolution, but we also need to manufacture a demand for the science of evolution. And so, in the end, most of our money gets thrown at the marketing department to sell evolution to the masses. And by God, can Dawkins reel in the punters! And he does this in the medium we call television…

Actually Dawkins and the ponderous “evolution” TV specials have been the best source of business for the intelligent design advocates in my view. I am glad someone understands this, even if it is only the ghost of Darwin. Hey, let’s give the ol’ ghost a glass of spirits to ease his passage back to wherever …

She reflects on the Chauvet paintings found in south central France. These oldest known paintings predate the Lascaux and Altamira friezes by fifteen to eighteen thousand years. The history of interpretation of older artworks has suffered from too-ready assumptions about “primitive” people, in particular that, as mud slowly morphed into mind, art would gradually become more sophisticated. For example,

He had also made the Darwinian assumption that the most ancient art was the most primitive, and [i]n that respect, Chauvet was a bombshell. It is Aurignacian, and its earliest paintings are at least thirty-two thousand years old, yet they are just as sophisticated as much later compositions. What emerged with that revelation was an image of Paleolithic artists transmitting their techniques from generation to generation for twenty-five millennia with almost no innovation or revolt. A profound conservatism in art, Curtis notes, is one of the hallmarks of a “classical civilization.” For the conventions of cave painting to have endured four times as long as recorded history, the culture it served, he concludes, must have been “deeply satisfying”—and stable to a degree it is hard for modern humans to imagine.

Also, curiously in the light of the notion of the “violent brute” cave man,

No human conflict is recorded in cave art, although at three separate sites there are four ambiguous drawings of a creature with a man’s limbs and torso, pierced with spearlike lines. More pertinent, perhaps, is a famous vignette in the shaft at Lascaux. It depicts a rather comical stick figure with an avian beak or mask, a puny physique, and a long skinny penis. He and his erect member seem to have rigor mortis. He is flat on his back at the feet of an exquisitely realistic wounded bison, whose intestines are spilling out. The bison’s glance is turned away, but it might have an ironic smile. Could the subject be hubris? Whatever it represents, some mythic contest—and the struggle of prehistorians to interpret their subject is such a contest—has ended in a draw.

Her descriptions are beautiful,

A great frieze covers the back left wall: a pride of lions with Pointillist whiskers seems to be hunting a herd of bison, which appear to have stampeded a troop of rhinos, one of which looks as if it had fallen into, or is climbing out of, a cavity in the rock. As at many sites, the scratches made by a standing bear have been overlaid with a palimpsest of signs or drawings, and one has to wonder if cave art didn’t begin with a recognition that bear claws were an expressive tool for engraving a record—poignant and indelible—of a stressed creature’s passage through the dark.

and I will spoil no more of them for you. A fierce controversy rages over how exactly to interpret the art and its purpose – or whether one should attempt to interpret it at all. One archaeologist defended his interpretation as follows:

Clottes was hurt and outraged by the rancor of the attacks that greeted “The Shamans of Prehistory” (“psychedelic ravings,” one critic wrote), and the authors defended themselves in a subsequent edition. “You can advance a scientific hypothesis without claiming certainty,” Clottes told me one evening. “Everyone agrees that the paintings are, in some way, religious. I’m not a believer myself, and I’m certainly not a mystic. But Homo sapiens is Homo spiritualis. The ability to make tools defines us less than the need to create belief systems that influence nature. And shamanism is the most prevalent belief system of hunter-gatherers.”

Influence nature, yes, but we also need to understand and interpret nature. Probably the most important thing that the cave paintings tell us about ourselves is that the mind seems to have emerged rather suddenly, not by a long series of increments, a point that Mario Beauregard and I discuss in The Spiritual Brain.

Tour the caves, courtesy France’s culture ministry. The image above is but one of many you can click on. Also tour Lascaux here (at Virtual visit) and view Altamira images here.

by Casey Luskin

Somewhere a dialogue is presently taking place concerning intelligent design, and it may be going something like this:

ID Proponent: DNA. Genetic code. Language. Commands. Information. Intelligent design.

Darwinist: Wedge.

ID Proponent: Cambrian Explosion. Pattern of Explosions. Cosmic Fine-Tuning. Intelligent design.

Darwinist: Wedge.

ID Proponent: Complexity of life. Irreducible complexity. Specified Complexity. Intelligent design.

Darwinist: Wedge.

ID Proponent: Human intelligence. Creative Genius. Love. Music. Art. Leonardo da Vinci. Beethoven.

Darwinist: Wedge.

ID Proponent: Molecular Machines. Molecular motors. Cellular factories. Intelligent design.

Darwinist: Wedge.

ID Proponent: Science. Evidence. Data. Observations. Intelligent design.

Darwinist: Wedge.

ID Proponent: Atheism: Richard Dawkins. Daniel Dennett. Sam Harris. Eugenie Scott. Barbara Forrest. Stephen Jay Gould. E.O. Wilson. Michael Ruse. P.Z. Myers. Many others. Wedge? Irrelevant.

Darwinist: Hmmf. Kitzmiller.

ID Proponent: Judges can’t settle science. Courts can’t change data.

Darwinist: Kitzmiller.

ID Proponent: Judge adopted false definition of ID.

Darwinist: Kitzmiller.

ID Proponent: Judge ignored positive case for design.

Darwinist: Kitzmiller.

ID Proponent: Judge copied many errors into ruling from ACLU. Judge ignored ID rebuttals. Judges make mistakes all the time.

Darwinist: Kitzmiller.

ID Proponent: Judge ignored peer-reviewed pro-ID publications. Meyer, Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington. Dembski, The Design Inference. Beye/Snoke, Protein Science. Others.

Darwinist: Kitzmiller.

ID Proponent: Judge ignored pro-ID research. Minnich’s flagellum research.

Darwinist: Hmmf. Type III Secretory System has ¼ flagellar parts.

ID Proponent: Not an explanation. Huge Leap.

Darwinist: Type III Secretory System has ¼ flagellar parts.

ID Proponent: Flagellum: Rotor, Stator, Bushings, Motor, Propeller, U-Joint, Rotary Engine 100,000 RPM. Irreducibly complex.

Darwinist: Type III Secretory System has ¼ flagellar parts.

ID Proponent: Then provide step-by-step evolutionary model.

Darwinist: Hmmf. ID has no research.

ID Proponent: Minnich. Axe. Dembski. Marks. Meyer. Behe. Snoke. Gonzalez. Biologic. Others.

Darwinist: Hmmf. NAS rejects. AAAS rejects. “Steves” reject.

ID Proponent: That’s Politics. Thomas Kuhn was right. “Science not a democracy” –Eugenie Scott. All majority views started off as minority views.

Darwinist: Hmmf. ID = Politics.

ID Proponent: ID also has science. Plus Darwinism has politics: NAS anti-ID edicts; AAAS anti-ID edicts; Witch hunts (Sternberg, Crocker, Gonzalez, others).

Darwinist: Hmmf. ID = Creationism.

ID Proponent: DNA. Genetic code. Language. Commands. Information. Not Bible based.

Darwinist: ID = Creationism.

ID Proponent: Cambrian Explosion. Pattern of Explosions. Cosmic Fine-Tuning. Not Faith based.

Darwinist: ID = Creationism.

ID Proponent: Complexity of life. Irreducible complexity. Specified Complexity. Not Divine Revelation based.

Darwinist: ID = Creationism.

ID Proponent: Molecular Machines. Molecular motors. Cellular factories. Not Religion.

Darwinist: ID = Creationism.

ID Proponent: World’s most famous evolutionist Richard Dawkins (who is anti-ID): “Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.”

Darwinist: Hmmf. TalkOrigins Quote Mine Project.

ID Proponent: DNA Nobel Prize winner Francis Crick (who is anti-ID): “Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved.“

Darwinist: TalkOrigins Quote Mine Project.

ID Proponent: Former NAS president Bruce Alberts (who is anti-ID): “The entire cell can be viewed as a factory that contains an elaborate network of interlocking assembly lines, each of which is composed of a set of large protein machines. . . . Why do we call the large protein assemblies that underlie cell function protein machines? Precisely because, like machines invented by humans to deal efficiently with the macroscopic world, these protein assemblies contain highly coordinated moving parts.”

Darwinist: Hmmf. Then who designed the designer?

ID Proponent: Theological Objection—Irrelevant. Theological Answer: God is eternal, has no designer.

Darwinist: Who designed the designer?

ID Proponent: Knowledge of designer not necessary for design inference.

Darwinist: Who designed the designer?

ID Proponent: Why does the universe exist?

Darwinist: Hmmf. Progress of science. God of the gaps.

ID Proponent: Science seeks truth. If ID is right, ID is progress.

Darwinist: Progress of science must be NATURALISTIC. God of the gaps.

ID Proponent: That’s my point: Naturalism failing. How did flagellum evolve? Evolution of the gaps.

Darwinist: Progress of science. God of the gaps.

ID Proponent: Where are Cambrian ancestors? Evolution of the gaps.

Darwinist: Progress of science. God of the gaps.

ID Proponent: How did the first cell arise? Evolution of the gaps.

Darwinist: Progress of science. God of the gaps.

ID Proponent: ID is positive. DNA. Genetic code. Language. Commands. Information. Cambrian Explosion. Pattern of Explosions. Cosmic Fine-Tuning. Complexity of life. Irreducible complexity. Specified Complexity. Human intelligence. Love. Music. Art. Leonardo da Vinci. Beethoven. Molecular Machines. Molecular motors. Cellular factories. Science. Evidence. Data. Observations. Information in nature requires intelligent design.

[Empty Silence; Crickets]

ID Proponent: How did any single biochemical pathway arise? Evolution of the gaps. ID dramatically superior.

[Empty Silence; Crickets.]

Darwinist: Wedge. You’re ignorant, insane, and wicked.

——————————–

Note: This was intended as a parody only, although sadly it represents the many fallacious objections to ID raised by Darwinists. If anything, this parody underestimates the amount of name-calling and personal attacks that a Darwinist would have probably leveled (in this case, the Darwinist refrains from personal attacks until the very end.)

A real scholarly debate between those on both sides of the intelligent design controversy would have much more technical arguments. Nonetheless, the sad truth is that when many criticize intelligent design in the media, courtrooms, classrooms, and even scientific journals, their arguments often fail to rise above those of the “Darwinist” antagonist presented here. For those interested in serious, scientific discussions of intelligent design, check out any of these two books that have both pro- and con- arguments regarding intelligent design:

·  Darwinism, Design, and Public Education, Edited By: Campbell, John Angus and Meyer, Stephen (Michigan State University Press, 2003).

·  Debating Design: From Darwin to DNA, Edited By: William A. Dembski and Michael Ruse (Cambridge University Press, 2004).

*” … and when we think of coconuts and pigs, there are no coconuts or pigs in the brain.” — Gregory Bateson

[ ... ]

Where are the pigs Where are the coconuts

The brain is a compendium of holographic mechanisms

Help me find the coconuts Help me find the pigs

The brain is a neuro-physiological metaphor

The brain is an illusionist’s exercise in Euclidean geometry

The brain is a vibrational amplifier for ambient field quanta

Find me the goddamned coconuts the pigs

The brain is a cybernetic miracle with a three-ring triune brain circus at its centre [ ... ]

Read the rest here. It is simply the best sendup I have ever heard of materialist neuroscience.

So rarely does a poet actually take on the nonsense rigorously, as opposed to simply sneaking away into some romantic or nihilist haze.  – Denyse O’Leary

PS: If you find the pigs, lose them again, will you, and keep the coconuts for your trouble. – d.

We recently received a large brown envelop from our mail carrier with no return address. Inside we found photocopies of what appear to be internal memos from the Natural Sciences Department at the University of Ivory Tower. A note inside indicated that the sender was a graduate student at the university who felt these documents needed to be made available to the public. The sender simply referred to himself/herself as “Sager”. We will be posting these memos (that our staff dubbed the “Ivorygate” documents) one at a time as we are able to review and authenticate them. Today we are releasing the memo entitled “Educators Guide to dealing with intelligent design“.

If you said no, you would certainly be affirmed in your decision by critics at the top Entertainment sections. Independent upstart Metanoia Films’ first effort (Bella, 2006) was roundly trashed, as this sample from Rotten Tomatoes shows:

- “Bella is certainly a sweet, life-affirming picture, but it’s just not authentic or captivating enough to justify its wildly concocted scenario.” – Gary Goldstein, Los Angeles Times -

“A barely disguised anti-abortion tract, Bella is simple-minded, heavy-handed and as subtle as a gorilla in a tutu.” – Tom Long, Detroit News -

“… defiantly unsubtle, structurally clunky specimen. ” – Lisa Schwarzbaum, Entertainment Weekly -

“A Mexican movie in which the outcome is never in doubt, the scenes are endless — sorry, we meant poetic– and the false beard on the central character’s face looks as though it could use a little extra gum.” – Desson Thompson, Washington Post

All from the “cream of the crop” critics, compiled at Rotten Tomatoes, where the film averaged a low 36% rating

New York Times reporter Stephen Holden dismissed Bella as a “saccharine trifle” and worse:

If Bella (the title doesn’t make sense until the last scene) is a mediocre cup of mush, the response to it suggests how desperate some people are for an urban fairy tale with a happy ending, no matter how ludicrous.

The Toronto Star didn’t get around to running a review of Bella by Susan Walker until April 11, 2008. But under the circumstances, why did the Star run a review at all? Ah, there is a story in that …

But what did the audience think?

Bella prompted a sudden second look when it won the 2006 Toronto Film Festival People’s Choice award – that, of course, is the audience rating, not the critics’ rating. As Hollywood Reporter (September 27, 2006) announced breathlessly

Hollywood handicappers always think they know who stands to win top honors at film festivals, but as we saw in Toronto earlier this month surprises are always possible. Going into the festival, absolutely no one, including the team of filmmakers that made “Bella,” ever imagined it would capture the People’s Choice Award voted on by festival audiences. Now in the wake of “Bella’s” breakthrough victory, it’s being screened for domestic distributors whose interest in acquiring the heartwarming drama is understandably greater than it was only a few weeks earlier.

And Rotten Tomatoes grudgingly conceded,

Consensus: A sweet, but ultimately pedestrian drama. Critics labeled Bella as a simplistic and mostly pedestrian, but positive word of mouth gave this tiny indie surprising theatrical legs.

Indeed, Bella soared in audience popularity in 2007, winning Best Picture and Best Actor at the 2008 MovieGuide Awards. It was also #1 in a New York Times’ readers’ poll, and at Yahoo and Fandango (WorldNetDaily, November 3, 2007) , as well winning as many other awards and honours – and doing just fine at the box office.

One reason Bella was trashed by elite critics is that they apparently perceived the film as anti-choice or even anti-abortion. To them, that meant that it was unrealistic about the limited and possibly unlivable future of working class people.

True, Bella has been enthusiastically plugged by prolife and profamily groups, but the film is in no sense an anti-abortion tract. The word abortion is not used, though the subject is discussed (“termination).” Jose obviously does not want his new friend Nina to abort her baby, but he refrains from offering “arguments” against it. He has a much larger project in mind, as we shall see.

The most interesting question about the film’s popularity is, why didn’t the elite critics’ condemnation matter much? Two reasons, I suspect: Not only is there a huge divide between elite culture and popular culture in North America, but elite culture is losing its hold on the Internet, which is fast becoming the primary medium of communication. For example, recent stats (April 15, 2008) show that time spent at news media Web sites is declining. Web users merely drive by and then go on to seek a variety of alternative views.

Bella and the design of life

If I told you exactly how I think Bella relates to intelligent design, I would spoil critical scenes and, – worse – tempt you to read it as some kind of an allegory. So let me hint: Nina starts out assuming that life is determined in advance, and it is very limited. No one cares, and no one will ever care what she does. Therefore, she must have an abortion.

She doesn’t exactly “want” an abortion. It would be more accurate to say that she cannot imagine a future in which she did not have one. An abortion will accomplish the only goal she can imagine: set her back on the treadmill to nowhere instead of tipping her into the abyss of nothingness. And that is her future – her full stop is delayed a while.

We are not encouraged to judge Nina for her past or proposed choices, but rather to see them in the context of her limited expectations.

But Jose, the chef at Nina’s former workplace, has plunged into the abyss himself. He has emerged, knowing that life is not as Nina thinks. On the contrary, there is a design to life, and that design is much larger and more promising than we usually imagine. If we cooperate with it, we become our best selves. If we don’t, we wander, aimless and self-destructive, forever bound by limits of our own making. Jose impulsively walks away from his frantic kitchen and sets out to demonstrate that to Nina. 

He senses that he is one of the few men who can truly relate to the dilemma Nina and many other pregnant single women face. His own life, like theirs, was forever altered by the outcome of a few moments of unwise choices. After Nina learns Jose’s story, she will not likely ever say to him, “You don’t understand what it is like.” He does understand.

Bella avoids tipping over into mere sentiment in large part because Jose’s close family are the survivors of his tragedy. Their relationships are all they were left with – love among the ruins.

Bella is a beautiful film, and I can think of no higher praise than to say it is loved by the right people – and hated by the right people as well. Only at the very end do we discover the meaning of the title, and I will not spoil that for you.

Redemption motif: Redeeming the Latin lead

For Eduardo Verastegui, co-owner of production company Metanoia Films, the role of Jose was the outcome of a profound personal discovery and commitment. As Deborah Gyapong relates, in Western Catholic Reporter (May 28, 2007),

Verastegui had reached the zenith of Mexican celebrity as a soap opera star and singer who had toured at least 13 countries to sold-out concerts. He’d appeared as Jennifer Lopez’s love interest in her popular music video Ain’t It Funny. His growing Hollywood TV and movie credits included the starring role in the 20th Century Fox movie Chasing Papi and a co-starring role in the independent film Meet Me in Miami. He’d been listed as one of the 50 most beautiful people in the world in People en Espanol.

So far, Verastegui was well on the way to a career as a conventional Latin star, but

In Los Angeles, while studying English, he found himself drawn to a deeper faith in Christ through his devout Catholic teacher. He began to see all the reasons he had wanted to be an actor – fame, money and pleasure – as empty and vain. He realized he’d been typecast into portraying the unfaithful, lying Latin lover and playing those parts promoted negative stereotypes. The media portrayal of Hispanics in general demeaned both men and women, resembling nothing like the dignity and beauty of his mother and sisters in Mexico.

He understood he had hurt people through the work he had done and the messages in his movies were “poisoning society.”

“It broke my heart,” the actor told the annual Rose Dinner in Ottawa May 10, following the annual March for Life in Ottawa.

“I realized I had offended God.”

Verastegui spent months in tears, sold his goods, and vowed never to play another role that demeaned his culture.

Later, he ran into director Alejandro Monteverdi, co-writer of the screenplay with Patrick Million, and they formed an independent film company to produce the film, which was shot in New York in 24 days. 

Resources:

Bella official site

Bella Fan Club

Bella trailer

Bella box office

One of the most profound spiritual experiences I’ve ever had was my first encounter with the Hubble Deep Field Photographs. What appears to be a little dark space in the heavens as we gaze up with the naked eye turns out to be filled with hundreds of odd shaped galaxies when examined more closely by the Hubble Space Telescope. You can hear a hundred lectures on how big the universe is, but when your mind starts extrapolating what your eye sees in this photo, you are suddenly overwhelmed by the largeness of the universe and the smallness of your life, and yet somehow you fell connected to that largeness, and privileged to be here to observe it. I think folk guitarist Peter Mayer has captured that experience beautify in his song My Soul from his Midwinter CD.

My Soul by Peter Mayer

There are a hundred billion snowflakes swirling in the cosmic storm
And each one is a galaxy, a billion stars or more
And each star is a million earths, a giant fiery sun
High up in some sky, maybe shining on someone

And deep inside a snowflake, I am floating quietly
I am infinitesimal, impossible to see
Sitting in my tiny kitchen in my tiny home
Staring out my window at a universe of snow

But my soul is so much bigger than the very tiny me
It reaches out into the snowstorm like a net into the sea
Out to all the lovely places where my body cannot go
I touch that beauty and embrace it in the bosom of my soul

And so brief and fleeting is this tiny life of mine
Like a single quarter note in the march of time
But my soul is like the music, it goes back to ancient days
Back before it wore a human face, long before it bore my name

Because my soul is so much older than the evanescent me
It can describe the dawn of time like a childhood memory
It is a spark that was begotten of the darkness long ago
What my body has forgotten, I remember in my soul

So we live this life together, my giant soul and tiny me
One resembling forever, one like smoke upon the breeze
One the deep abiding ocean, one a sudden flashing wave
And counting galaxies like snowflakes, I would swear we were the same

Oh my soul belongs to beauty, takes me up to lofty heights
Teaches sacred stories to me, sanctifies my tiny life
Lays a bridge across the ages, melts the boundaries of my bones
Paints a bold eternal face on this passing moment, oh my soul

It seems like every time we turn around a scientist is pointing out the genetic similarities between humans and chimps – our closest evolutionary ancestors. For some of us, this constant preaching can grow old. Why is it that scientists feel it necessary to continually remind us that we are not made in the image of God, but in the image of an ape? I propose that they are doing it for our own good. The belief of human exceptionalism is a sin of the worst kind. Most evil and atrocity in the world can be traced back to this belief. The “Fall of Man” was not when humans denied God and became selfish, as the Christians say. It is exactly the opposite. The Fall occurred when humans began believing in a God and started denying their selfish genes. When scientists remind us that we are 98% ape, they are graciously attempting to save us from our sin and restore us to an apish virtue. We should be grateful. However, I believe the reason that many of us have become deaf to the Darwinist gospel is because we are disillusioned. When we hear scientists tell us that we are apes and that morals are an accidental by-product of nature, but then they turn around and talk of human “inalienable rights,” as if there is some objective moral law, we immediately recognize the hypocrisy. Therefore, I think that we owe some praise to scientists who have the courage and integrity to act with an apish virtue before they preach it to others. Although instances of this type of high character are rare, the academic community has recently witnessed just such an example.

Professors in the Astronomy, Physics, and Religious Studies departments at Iowa State University have come under scrutiny for conspiring to unfairly deny tenure to Guillermo Gonzalez (a heretic and advocate for Intelligent Design) and then lying about their reasons. While some simple minded people will criticize the behavior of these professors, I say it is commendable. They are acting consistently with the beliefs they espouse. If it is true that our closest relatives are chimps, then we should not be surprised when some of us exhibit chimp-like behavior. Nor should we apologize for it. Chimps are known to be aggressive, unfair, brutish little bullies at times. The professors’ behavior is strikingly similar. The behavior exhibited by these professors merely corroborates their own hypothesis that they are 98% ape. And while there are some Darwinists who would take that as an insult, the more enlightened ones (the true believers) should take it as a compliment. Why should they feel insulted by someone merely agreeing with a hypothesis that they proudly and boldly profess?

Some of you may be thinking, “What about the bonobo? They are our ancestors too and they are kind, sweet, and fair. Shouldn’t we harness our inner bonobo and shun our inner chimp? Isn’t the bonobo just as much a part of us as the chimpanzee?” Well, no. Our DNA is not as close to a bonobo as it is to a chimp. Furthermore, why should we prefer bonobo behavior over chimp behavior? They are both the products of purposeless processes of nature. To say that one is any better than the other is to imply an objective standard of some sort, which is rubbish.

I know that a lot of this may sound unpleasant. But I am simply stating the facts of Darwinism and applying them consistently. Not all Darwinists have the courage to admit these things, much less the stomach to act upon them. It seems our heroes at ISU have both. Their example stands as a symbol of Darwinian truth for all the world to see. Students can look to this inspirational story and glean from it an important lesson: It may take a real man to admit he is merely a sophisticated chimp, but it takes a real ape to act like one.

I recently had the honor of being interviewed for a podcast on idthefuture.com. The main topic of the interview was some short stories I had written that have been featured here on idarts.org. The podcast sparked some fierce debates in the comments between Darwinists and ID proponents. From what I can decipher of the Darwinists’ comments, their main argument seems to be that ID proponents are liars for denying the claim that we believe in ID because we are Christians. Ironically, I addressed this issue briefly in the first Socrates debate, which was featured in the podcast. Evidently, the Darwinists didn’t feel it necessary to read the stories before dismissing them. So, I thought I would go further in depth and fully address this accusation from the Darwinists in the second installment of the Socrates debate series. In order to accurately represent the Darwinist position, I will use some quotes taken directly from some posts in the comments of the podcast.

“As a child and young man, music spoke to my soul in a way that nothing else did. I can’t explain it and won’t attempt to. It seems to me that the arts, and music in particular, present a real problem for Darwinism. How would such an ability come about in a step-by-tiny-step fashion and what would be the survival value of the transitional intermediates, or even the end product? (Never mind what mutations would be required to rewire the central nervous system for musical ability, and the probability of those mutations occurring.) Of course, for Darwinists, Darwinism must explain everything, so they will invent stories about how ancient jungle drummers got the girls, just like rock stars get the groupies. But everyone enjoys music with absolutely no evidence that it offers any survival or reproductive advantage. It just seems to be programmed into us at a very fundamental level.

Music is based on the physics of sound — in particular, the overtone series which is produced when a string or column of air vibrates. The division of the octave into 12 semitones is not an accident or a matter of personal preference; this produces notes that coincide with the overtone series. This is the basis of melody and harmony, and why some sounds are dissonant and some sounds are consonant.

Imagine a world without music: no music accompanying the movies you watch, no music in your church services, no music on the radio or television, no violinists, no pianists, no guitarists, no singers, no songs — no music at all! Wouldn’t your life be indescribably impoverished?

And here’s the weird thing: music is a totally abstract art form, but has tremendous power. When I was in college I took a number of courses in music theory. I remember a chapter in a book about melody. All the technical elements of melodic composition were discussed but there was one final comment that struck me (I paraphrase): Most people associate “melody” with something that cannot be described, but they know it when they hear it, and there is no way to teach how to write a good melody.

In closing I would like to offer some of the great piano music that inspired me, in hopes that it will inspire you as well. You are free to make CDs and distribute the music in any way you like, and I would encourage you to include the program notes when you do. In them I include a tribute to my wonderful music teacher, Ruby Bailey, who taught me from the time I was a child through high school, and then again in college. She was unbelievably gifted as a musician, pianist, and pedagogue, and was a wonderful person in general.

I am something of an evangelist for classical music. When one has been blessed so profoundly by something, one feels compelled to share it with others. Although I no longer perform concerts (with rare exceptions) I do continue to perform classical music informally and play keyboards for a praise band.”

ARN correspondent

I first determined to make a point of reading historian Richard Weikart’s meticulously researched book, From Darwin to Hitler because Darwinists were very clearly upset by the implications of his work. Some seemed obsessed with proving Weikart, who teaches at California State University (Stanislaus) not only wrong but dishonest and irresponsible – which he certainly isn’t.

I am glad I read this magisterial work, because I now understand much better the relationship between 19^th century Darwinism and the rise of Hitler. Weikart unearths so many old, almost buried 19^th and early 20^th century German sources. Indeed, one can only wonder at his patience, systematically reading through the many, many articles and books of long-dead eugenicists, imperialists, pacifists, socialists, and such.

Weikart unearths several lines of evidence that are critical for understanding what happened. Darwin himself was a wealthy, upper crust, peaceful British racist, regretting the inevitable demise of the lesser forms of human life. No one, least of all Darwin, thought that he should do anything to make it happen. However, in Germany, both rightists and leftists wanted to use Darwin’s theory to rid the nation of people that they felt were holding it back. They had no problem with the idea of struggle or violence; it was their job, in their own opinion, to make sure that the right side won.

Racist eugenics was accepted as science and many scientists were complicit with the Nazis. Nazis generally prided themselves on being “scientific”, and by that they meant being eugenicist – and by that, in turn, they meant that they were loyal to Darwin after their fashion.

One discovery I found enlightening is that German pacifists were not like the peaceniks who carry anti-war signs in today’s societies. German pacifists regretted that wars destroyed fit people, as opposed to unfit ones. In short, destruction itself did not trouble them, rather the fact that war’s destruction could not be engineered against those they deemed inferior. Under the circumstances, if an idea like natural selection or survival of the fittest gained popular approval, it could end only in disaster.

Hitler himself was not a man who read deeply, but, as Weikart shows, he gained a lot of social Darwinism from the popular literature he read. The genocidal policies he enacted had become popular over a period of about seventy years.

Finishing the book, I found myself wondering why anyone would find it worth their while to argue whether Darwinism played a role in Nazi eugenics policies, because it so obviously did. Yet some do indeed wish to argue that, as my combox attested last year. Reviewer Sander Gliboff, for example, anxious to defend modern Darwinism, completely misses the point of the book – that Darwinism was an important, but not essential, plank in the growth of Nazism. It would have been possible to construct Nazism without Darwinism, but Darwinism was very much part of the mix.

If you lined up all the early Darwinists and eugenicists and such from Germany fifty years before the glorious Reich ended in the suicides in the bunker in 1945 and asked them, “What do you think now that it has come to this?” – they would doubtless be stunned. They only thought they were getting rid of the detritus of evolution, the people who didn’t matter anyway.

Other resources

Here are two of Weikart’s articles that are available online:

Does Darwinism devalue human life?

A number of years ago two intelligent students surprised me in a class discussion by defending the proposition that Hitler was neither good nor evil. Though I kept my composure, I was horrified. One of the worst mass murderers in history wasn’t evil? How could they believe this? How could they justify such a view?

They did it by appealing to Darwinism. Their pronouncement on Hitler occurred while we were discussing James Rachels’ book, Created from Animals: The Moral Implications of Darwinism (Oxford University Press, 1990). Darwinism, these students informed us, undermined all morality. This was not the first time I had heard such a view. In fact, at that time I was in the beginning phases of a research project on the history of evolutionary ethics, and I had already reviewed the work of some scientists and social scientists who believed that Darwinism undermined human rights and equality.

Killing them kindly

Decades ago a prominent euthanasia proponent stated that “there is a place in humanity for murder, that is to say by killing the unfit.” Another commanded, “Chloroform unfit children. Show them the same mercy that is shown beasts that are no longer fit to live.” One might be forgiven for thinking that these were rantings of a Nazi leader, for they do reflect the ideology underlying the Nazi euthanasia program, during which about 100,000 handicapped Germans were murdered by physicians under government direction. But alas, these statements came from prominent British and American progressives–the former from the British physician Havelock Ellis, and the latter from the controversial American lawyer Clarence Darrow.

Here are some reviews of From Darwin to Hitler. Here is a favorable review by Orthodox priest Johannes Jacobse:

To most Germans, Hitler never appeared to be an evildoer, and thus subsequent attempts to portray him as a fanatical madman betray a misunderstanding of the epoch in which he ruled, Weikart argues. Instead, Hitler was very much a man of his age. The moral justifications for the evil he unleashed were developed long before he rose to power.

 

I asked Richard Weikart to comment on the reviews:

The reviews by historians have been a mixed bag. The anonymous referees who reviewed it for the publisher praised it and gave it high marks, which led Palgrave Macmillan to publish it in the first place (so, yes, it is peer-reviewed). The historians Richard J. Evans of Cambridge Univ., Ian Dowbiggin of Univ. of Prince Edward Island, and Alfred Kelly all provided glowing dustjacket blurbs (see my website). I received a very positive review in German Studies Review, a review that was largely positive but also contained some criticisms on H-Ideas (available on-line), a review that tilted toward the negative, but also contained some positive comments, in Central European History, and some rather vicious reviews in American Historical Review (where readers were told that I was advancing a “theocratic agenda”) and in Journal of Modern History (where the reviewer ridiculously claimed I was arguing that Darwinism leads logically and inevitably to the Holocaust).

All the reviewers admitted that my writing and research were good and none pointed out any significant errors of fact. Most of the criticisms I have addressed in a response posted to my website. (Scroll down to Response to critics.)

Apparently, Dr. Weikart will be speaking at the Darwinism after Darwin conference at the University of Leeds, England in September. His talk is open to the public.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O’Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada’s Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the forthcoming The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist’s case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

I recently discovered my outrage at thumbs. Yes, I am speaking of the short, stubby little phalange protruding from the hands of humans and primates. Oh, I shudder at the sight of them! Not only am I convinced of the darkness of these halfling metacarpals, but I intend to start a public campaign to help educate people about the potential danger and inherent wickedness that lurks within their own hands. Allow me to explain how I arrived at this position.

I was reading some of the words of Richard Dawkins, the Oxford Professor of the Public Understanding of Science. First, he explained away belief in God as an evolutionary adaptation, no different than our eyes or feet or, *shivers* thumbs. Then he went on to express his outrage at this particular adaptation. He explained how religion has been harmful to society and is responsible for many atrocities throughout history, and how we would therefore be better off without it. At first, I was a bit confused at how he could be furious at, what he says, is simply an evolutionary adaptation formed by mindless and purposeless processes of nature. Then, slowly, I started to understand, and finally it clicked. He was right! Religion has been responsible for many atrocities throughout history. But, as I see it, he isn’t going back far enough. Dawkins’ outrage is misguided. He is campaigning against the wrong evolutionary adaptation. What first allowed animals to grasp objects well enough to use them as weapons? Thumbs! What trait led to the development of more sophisticated tools, including tools of destruction? Thumbs! What species won the good graces of Natural Selection, placing them at the top of the food chain with oppressive power over all other animals? That’s right, the species with thumbs. Long before humans evolved religious belief they were committing atrocities with the aide of their thumbs. The horrors perpetrated by these dreadful digits are incomprehensible. It is the thumb that allows the murderer to grasp the gun handle; the butcher to clench his chopping knife; and the jockey to lash his horse whip. How many people have died at the hands of thumb-wielding murderers? How many animals have been mutilated by thumb-boasting butchers? How many horses have become humiliated beasts, oppressed and enslaved by thumb-happy horse trainers? I needn’t say anymore.

It is my firm conviction, that if we are going to unite ourselves against any one of our evolved traits and cast it aside, it is our thumbs that need amputating. Dawkins helped me to realize the meaning of the verse, “If your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out.” It doesn’t matter that your eye is an accidental by-product of nature. For, “it is better to enter heaven with one eye, than to have two eyes and yet be cast into hell.” Just the same, it is better to enter into non-existence without thumbs than to…..well, enter into it with them! Dawkins would tell us that religion is the adaptation that needs to be expunged. But while it is a matter of debate whether belief in God is to blame for the Inquisition, there is no question as to what made possible the building of the guillotine.

ARN correspondent

A sculpture of a mammoth and figures of other animals, the oldest ivory carvings ever found, dated to 35 000 years ago, shed another ray of light into early human culture. (Most existing artifacts are less than 5000 years old.):

The figure of the woolly mammoth is tiny, measuring just 3.7 cm long and weighing a mere 7.5 grams, and displays skilfully detailed carvings. It is unique in its slim form, pointed tail, powerful legs and dynamically arched trunk. It is decorated with six short incisions, and the soles of the pachyderm’s feet show a crosshatch pattern. The miniature lion is 5.6 cm long, has a extended torso and outstretched neck. It is decorated with approximately 30 finely incised crosses on its spine.

What’s remarkable about these sudden flowerings of art is that they show an astonishing level of sophistication that doesn’t appear to have precursors. See also, for example, the Willendorf Venus and the Lascaux Caves. These finds support a top down view of intelligence (mind comes first) rather than a bottom up one (matter gradually morphs into mind).

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O’Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada’s Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the forthcoming The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist’s case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

ARN correspondent

Illustrations

Here are some illustrations riffing off the popular myth of the “Ascent of Man”, and other evolution folklore:

A spoof of the biology text

Devolution of Obese Man

Evolution of Computer Man

Evolution of the Research Grant

For these graphics, hat tip to a correspondent from Singapore!

Cartoons

I’ve also collected these ID-related cartoons along the way:

(Note: The cartoons are not necessarily ID-friendly. Most attracted my attention because they showed genuine wit.)

Eight cartoons

Tax code laff

Manwhile, here is an amazingly ugly cartoon used to promote Darwinism by a classical Darwin lobby!

.. and a Spoof!

For a spoof of Darwinism by ID-friendly wags, you can’t beat the Brites.org, its very name a spoof of The Brights – a group of self-consciously superior Darwinists.

Here are some current entries:

Professor of Pugilism Conway Moore attempts to savage ID-friendly astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez:

CM: … Look. Religious whackos who believe in Intelligent Design believe the earth is only 5000 years old because it says so in the Bible in the book of Guinness. By any standard…

ED: Do you mean Genesis ?

CM: Whatever.

ED: Dr. Gonzalez believes the universe is billions of years old and originated at the Big Bang.

CM: Oh. Nevertheless, …

The “I Love Lucy” petition, insisting that the now (apparently) discredited she-gorilla “Lucy” is really adorable Mum after all:

Professor Yoel Rak at the Sackler School of Medicine’s department of anatomy and anthropology said, “The presence of the morphology in both the latter and Australopithecus afarensis and its absence in modern humans cast doubt on the role of [Lucy] as a common ancestor.”

Rak’s statement infuriates Finch.

“If man didn’t evolve from apes,” offered Finch, “then I am an obnoxious pompous overeducated immature egocentric materialist with goo for brains.”

Also, this sendup of evolutionary psychology’s latest theory on the origin of humor – but the trouble is, evolutionary psychology is so inherently ridiculous that it is genuinely hard to spoof. Still, the illustration of “crude Ardepithecus humor” definitely works.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O’Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada’s Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the forthcoming The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist’s case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O’Leary

ARN correspondent

UCLA molecular biologists say they have converted protein sequences into classical music (though some say it’s only pop music):

On the biologists’ site , you can listen to the compositions and even submit your own genetic sequence and have it translated to music. The browser allows anyone to send in a sequence coding for a protein, which will then be converted into music and returned as a MIDI audio file. The research is published in Genome Biology, a major journal in the field of genomics.

This has all the potential in the world for schlock, of course, but on the other hand, one of the scientists found that a piano teacher understood it all better that way. Particularly scary is the sequence for the deadly disease, Huntington’s chorea.

Here are some other items I have posted at the Post-Darwinist and the Mindful Hack:

When they aren’t monitoring themselves very carefully, NASA people say the most surprising things …

Here, for example, from Science Question of the Week from the Goddard Space Flight Center, on the position of the North Star, ever the friend of mariners:

Polaris or the North Star is nearly directly above the North Pole (it’s actually about 1 degree away from the celestial pole). You might think that with all of the stars in the sky, it shouldn’t be that unusual for a given star to rest above the pole, but really, it’s an extremely unlikely occurrence. It’s even more unlikely that our pole star would be relatively bright – second order magnitude. If you divided the night sky into squares that are one degree latitude by one degree longitude in size, there would be 41,253 square degrees in our night sky. There are approximately 2,000 stars that we can see on the clearest night, and perhaps 6,000 different stars are visible to us throughout the year, but only 50 of these are as bright or brighter than Polaris. The chances of a star like Polaris occupying a place over the pole are about slim indeed – about 1 in 1,000. Nevertheless, Polaris defies the odds and has become our guiding light.

We are told that Polaris will shove off in a couple of centuries, and not come back for a long time:

Polaris and the Sun are now about as close to each other as they’ll ever get. Alas,all good things must come to an end, and in a few centuries, Polaris will drift away from it’s current heralded post to a location carrying much less esteem, somewhere to the south of where it is now. If it’s any consolation, Polaris will return to the pole again but not for another 20,000 thousand years.

You read it here first: In the meantime, we will have to make do with the Global Positioning Satellite.

Maybe I should revisit Guillermo Gonzalez’s “Privileged Planet” hypothesis. No, wait! Isn’t he the one they’re trying to get rid of at Iowa State? Guy probably talks too much.

Here’s some more stuff I blogged recently:

Why do media people treat statements from scientists as gospel?

When science disowns religion, it discovers politics, according to thinker.

Did Albert Einstein accept intelligent design?

Researchers discover free will in fruit flies. (I think they have simply discovered that the flies are not mere machines, as they had thought.)

Just for fun, my 17 favourite oxymorons

Kids from religious homes behave better.

More huffing and puffing on behalf of the flatly ridiculous anti-God crusade

In the 21^st century world, ideology is dead but spirituality lives.

Cardinal Schoenborn, the Pope’s anti-Darwinist point man says some pointed things on faith and science

Quantum Theory and Faith: A physicist’s thoughts

New Book! The Physics of Christianity by Frank Tipler

Lighter moment: Doubtful student receives letter from God.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O’Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada’s Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the forthcoming The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist’s case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

ARN correspondent

Just today, I received a most interesting note from a retired Australian poli sci professor Hiram Caton, late of Griffiths University, noting that the Darwin exhibition, developed at the American Museum of Natural History, is hitting the road, and may stop at a museum near you.

Caton explains,

You are well aware of my former colleague Dave Stove’s critique of Darwinism. We are alike in that we have no religious affiliation; also in that we do not believe that Darwinism can provide a basis for ethics or for ‘conservative’ politics, in the manner of Larry Arnhart.

At his site, Caton offers a most useful anti-docent, “Getting Our History Right: Six Errors about Darwin and His Influence,” documenting the following six errors:

For more go here.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O’Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada’s Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the forthcoming The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist’s case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

ARN correspondent

Before this arts site got started, I had been reviewing movies and books that are relevant to the intelligent design controversy at the regular ARN site. Here are brief intros and links to reviews that this site’s users might enjoy. I will add a link to this post to my future posts, so you can get back here if you are looking for a past review.

March of the Penguins: Why there was a fuss about the “intelligent design” implications of this film

Should you permit your children to see March of the Penguins? Not if you want to raise them as unquestioning Darwinists.

What the Bleep Do We Know?: Well, somehow, I don’t think we know this, anyway …

This film addresses the reasons, based in quantum mechanics, for doubting the radical materialist view of the universe. I’m all for doubting radical materialism, but I don’t quite think this approach is the answer, and here’s why.

The Exorcism of Emily Rose: Why was this tale of devilry linked to intelligent design theory? The only connection – but it is certainly an interesting one – is the film’s portrayal of what happens when an apparent truth cannot be accepted by a society that is committed to an ideology that rules that truth out of bounds.

Science fiction: Rob Sawyer takes on intelligent design in The Calculating God What if the aliens land, and they think the universe shows evidence of intelligent design? Even more remarkably, they are much more interested in Toronto (Canada) than in Washington or New York? Why?

Darwinian Fairy-Tales: Why evolutionary psychology is nonsense In Darwinian Fairy-Tales, agnostic Australian philosopher David Stove minces evolutionary psychology. The problem is that evo psycho is true to Darwinian theory but not to human experience.

Tech guru George Gilder: Why ID is onto something! One thing I learned from covering the ID controversy is that intelligent design makes many more converts among engineers than among biologists. I think that is because engineers have a much clearer grasp of the critical question, “how, exactly.” They must make processes work every day. So, for example, if six different processes involving cellular machinery consisting of hundreds of molecules must randomly self-assemble by means of natural selection, what, exactly, is the probability of success in given time frame? Gilder addresses Darwinism in this light.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O’Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada’s Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the forthcoming The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist’s case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

“After graduating high school in 1997, I started a rock band called Elevator Division. Shortly thereafter, I embarked on a deep journey of philosophical questions concerning my childhood Christian faith. This prompted an ongoing independent study, researching the evidence for and against the existence of God, that lasted the remainder of my time with the band. One record deal, two U.S. tours, and seven years later I decided to quit the band and go to school to become a philosophy professor. So I enrolled at the University of Missouri-Kansas City to study Philosophy, where I am currently.

In the spring of 2006, I attended a seminar at school called “Was Darwin Right?” hosted by the local Muslim Students Association. At the seminar they showed a video promoting the theory of Intelligent Design, with which I was already well acquainted. Following the video was a Q & A session that turned out to be a three-frontal attack on the young Muslim host by Darwinists in the audience. Coming to the defense of the speaker I quickly found myself in the middle of a debate with a biology professor and two biology students. They ended the debate by insisting there is an unknown law of nature that causes matter to organize itself into complex working machines. Realizing this as a last ditch effort on their part, I let it rest and did not pursue the argument any further. However, I did vent my frustration from that experience in a short work of fiction called, “Confession.”

Upon the advice of my English professor, I submitted “Confession” to Number One Magazine, the University’s student literary magazine. They accepted and agreed to publish it. However, they asked me to censor parts of it because they believed it could be offensive. I refused. The magazine’s policy of printing whatever the author wishes worked in my favor and Number One published the story uncensored.

While I still play music with a buddy of mine, in a project we call Chouteau, my main passion now is school and writing – particularly in dealing with philosophy of science issues. Hopefully, other stories and essays that are in the works will get equally effective responses as did “Confession.”

Currently I live in my hometown of Kansas City, Missouri with my wife Lisa. I work and go to school full-time. I plan to graduate next December and will seek admittance to a graduate program in Philosophy.”

Rob Sawyer’s sci-fi novels

Neanderthal Trilogy:

Hominids (Tor, 2003)

When a Neanderthal physicist, Ponter Boddit, accidentally finds himself in another universe, in an underground research facility in Canada, it turns out that Neanderthals would develop a completely different civilization.

Humans (Tor, 2003)

Ponder Boddit, a Neanderthal physicist, takes a Canadian geneticist back to his universe to see what sort of civilization the Neanderthals would develop.

Hybrids (Tor, 2003)

How would humans co-exist with other species if such distinctions as race and sex divide them?

Quintaglio Trilogy:

Far-Seer (Ace, 1992)

For intelligent dinosaur Afsan, modeled on Galileo, discovering the true arrangement of the heavens is not merely of scientific interest; it is life or death for his entire world.

Fossil Hunter (Ace, 1993)

Toroca, a dinosaur geologist, is seeking unusual metals that can take dinosaurs to the stars. But suppose he discovers instead the true origin of the dinosaurs?

Foreigner (Ace, 1994)

If the mind of a great (alien) scientist were analyzed, what would it show?

Other Novels:

Rollback (2007)

The aliens have sent us a message, and we have responded.

Mindscan (Tor, 2005)

Jake Sullivan has cheated death by copying his consciousness into an android. However … that isn’t the perfect solution.

Calculating God (Tor, 2000)

An alien lands on Earth, in Toronto, bearing the news that God really exists. But maybe Earth soon won’t.

Flashforward (Tor, 1999)

Due to a bungled physics experiment, the entire human race gets a look at two minutes twenty-one years from now. But what if you see nothing?

Factoring Humanity (Tor, 1998)

Asignal from the Alpha Centauri star system is detected in 2007. … it shows amazing new technology that practically eliminates space and time. Could this be a new stage of human evolution?

Illegal Alien (Ace, 1997)

The first time humans contact aliens is when a disabled Tosok starship lands. At first, all is conventional well-wishing. But the a popular scientist is found dead, and one of the Tosoks is the most likely suspect.

Frameshift (Tor, 1997)

A dying scientist accepts the opportunity to raise a child who might be part Neanderthal.

Starplex (Ace, 1996)

Mysterious, artificial wormhole have solved the problem of space travel. These interstellar passages seem too close, too conveniently, for Starplex Director Keith Lansing.

The Terminal Experiment (HarperPrism, 1995)

Dr. Peter Hobson, testing his theories of immortality and life after death, has copied his personality into three electronic simulations. Things don’t go as planned, of course.

End of an Era (Ace, 1994)

To learn how the dinosaurs died, we first must watch them live . . .

Golden Fleece (1990)

Is a mere starship engineer really any match for a murderous computer?

Short Story Collections

Relativity (ISFiC Press, 2004)

Iterations (Quarry Press, 2002)

Many American reviewers also professed to see anti-Americanism in Calculating God .

As a Canadian, I am of two minds about that. Many Canadian authors have been forced to reset their novels in the United States because American readers supposedly refuse to read books set in Canada. Sawyer has – throughout his career – refuses to go along with that and achieved stardom while making a point of setting novels squarely in contemporary downtown Toronto (Canada’s largest city, whose “greater Toronto area” has about 5 million people, or more than one seventh of Canada’s entire population). His choice of setting includes (thrown in for free, if you like) the way Toronto looks at the United States. I suppose many Americans would prefer him to set the story in Atlanta instead, but I am glad he didn’t. Anyway, these factors may have dragged down the book’s ratings, which is unfortunate, but don’t cheat yourself of reading it on that account.

So, here are some other reviews:

Mark Wilson, at Off the Shelf, SciFi.Com :

Provided with arguments for an intelligent creator, the natural human response is dissatisfaction: “Then why did he do this? And this?” Humans want a perfect world, but don’t know what’s meant by that; few see the perfection, interplay and balance of what already exists. Provocative issues and emotions raised in a novel meet as much resistance and misunderstanding as their counterparts in real life. Sawyer has postulated a universe in which the physical and the metaphysical plausibly synergize. Moreover, he provides a role for humanity grander than pure science might suggest for any species riding a microscopic speck of a planet through an incomprehensibly vast cosmos.

Jonathan Cowie, at Concatenation provides some very interesting information about why Calculating did not win a Hugo sci-fi award:

Calculating God was nominated for the 2001 Hugo (World Science Fiction Achievement) Award. Even more importantly it was the most voted for SF novel short-listed! So congratulations Robert you are now technically a Hugo winner. Naturally, World SF Convention fandom may give a double take here. ‘Hang on, mate, Sawyer did not win the Hugo in 2001.’ Correct, he did not. The winner went to one of Rowling’s children’s Harry Potter fantasy novels, purely owing to latitude in the constitution of the World SF Society so as not to exclude works bordering on fantasy. But, as has been pointed out by many elsewhere, given that fantasy novels have their own World SF event and awards it was a bit of a waste conferring the 2001 Hugo on a Harry Potter book let alone an undermining of the spirit of the Hugo. Ho hum. Nonetheless, it is a unassailable fact that the most votes an SF novel received that year for the Hugo was Calculating God and in our book at least Calculating God would have been more of an appropriate and deserving a winner.

Elisabeth Carey, at New England Science Fiction Association says,

Leaving aside a certain amount of stereotyping of Americans, this is an entertaining book, though not as deep and thoughtful as it would like to be.

David Soyka, inSF Site Reviews, praises Sawyer’s readability and ready familiarity with popular science culture:

Thus we are firmly planted in the realm of hard SF, typically characterized less by plot than ongoing dialogues among characters, the purpose of which is to expound upon scientific principles. Unlike some hard SF, which I find can get a bit tedious in constantly providing physics lessons, Sawyer writes well and with a sense of humour that, in the tradition of the old Mr. Wizard television show, proves just how much fun science can be. There’s a host of scientific references (e.g., Stephen Hawking, Stephen Jay Gould, Sagan himself) that anyone interested could consult for further edification, as well as constant mentions of popular culture and science fiction in particular. For example, at one point Tom and Hollus watch Star Trek movies. While Hollus finds fault with the idea of inter-species mating that could result in a Spock (which ironically foreshadows later events), there are some interesting points to be made in contrasting the second and third installments of the venerable series. In The Wrath of Khan, Spock sacrifices himself to save the Enterprise and its crew, complying with the Vulcan edict of the “good of the many outweighs the good of the one,” which is also an underpinning principle of socio-biology. Yet that principle is contradicted by human behaviours such as those portrayed in The Search for Spock, in which the “good of the many” is jeopardized for “the good of the one.”

though he, like so many critics, is uncomfortable with Sawyer’s premise that the universe could show evidence of intelligent design.

Don Webb, ofBewildering Stories, really wishes that Sawyer could accept Yankee materialist boilerplate:

It comes as something of a shock that Steven Jay Gould’s distinction between science and religion is dismissed as “bafflegab.” If Thomas Jericho is the one who is speaking, his reaction is unaccountable in a scientist: the eminent American paleontologist deserves a fair hearing and a reasoned response. And the rudeness is quite un-Canadian.

Maybe Sawyer sees through the “distinction”, as many have? For example, Phillip E. Johnson, American constitutional lawyer and friend of the court for the ID guys, writes,

The realm of value assigned to the church [by Gould] is more like a radio talk show, where all opinions are equal and none is authoritative. Any attempt by the church to assert a genuine teaching authority would have to rest on assumptions of fact, such as the divinity of Christ, and these would be checkmated by science.

For example, Gould says that his settlement would forbid the church to teach that miracles have actually occurred, because that would be a claim of fact within the magisterium of science, which rejects supernatural interventions as a matter of principle. Among the questions of fact which scientists would determine, then, are such questions as whether God directed and guided the evolution of life, whether Jesus actually rose from the dead, and whether there is a factual discontinuity between animals and humans attributable to divine intervention. The answers would all be negative. The rules of NOMA give scientists exclusive authority to say which factual claims are real and which are illusory, and scientists will say that the alleged supernatural events upon which the church bases its magisterium are among the illusions.

Now, Sawyer’s character Jericho might have very different reasons from Phillip Johnson for seeing a problem with Gould’s formulation, but it’s a bit harder to understand why anyone would who thinks very hard about the problem would not see one.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O’Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada’s Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the forthcoming The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist’s case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

Science Fiction Star Experiments with Mystery/Sci Fi Blend – And It Works

by Denyse O’Leary

Although he is Canada’s best known science fiction writer and the recipient of nineteen awards, including the Nebula for Terminal Experiment (HarperCollins), the Canadian Aurora Award for Starplex (Ace Books) and the Japanese Seiun Award for End of an Era (Hayakawa), Rob Sawyer is not one to just let the space turf grow under his feet.

Recent books such as Terminal Experiment, Frameshift (Tor Books), and Illegal Alien (Ace) intentionally incorporate the mystery novel into the sci fi genre. So far, the fans love it. But for Sawyer it’s a matter not only of personal interest but also of survival in an increasingly demanding publishing world.

Sawyer, who has been able to write full time for about eight years, has thought a lot about science fiction novels and about mystery novels and the curious similarities between the two.

“I find the genres incredibly intertwined both in publishing history and in many of the creative challenges they face,” he acknowledges. “In mystery, very often, the main character is a detective. In science fiction, for a great part of its history, the main characters were always scientists. I still have a tendency to write about scientists. But many of my colleagues beat the bushes to find characters they can write about who aren’t traditional scientists, just as mystery writers beat the bushes, asking “‘Who can I write about, who can I thrust into a crime, that wouldn’t naturally be there?’”

When Sawyer does beat the bushes for characters, he’s pretty thorough. Some of his murderous characters are: an overzealous computer with a talent for lying (Golden Fleece); an electronic entity seeking vengeance through the Internet (); an alien from Alpha Centauri who thinks there is no free will (Illegal Alien ); and far more poignantly, a war crimes suspect pursued by a man dying of Huntington’s chorea (Frameshift ).

One difference between science fiction-based mystery and conventional mystery is obvious from the above list. Only a science fiction writer could introduce any of the first three as possible suspects in a mystery.

How and why science fiction has changed over the years

Another critical difference between the two genre traditions, Sawyer believes, is that mystery fiction has had a close relationship with “serious” literature for a much longer period. “Science fiction, even more than mystery fiction, came out of a pulp magazine tradition,” he notes. “Mystery always had some really great writers. But science fiction through the Thirties, Forties, and Fifties didn’t have any really great English writer.”

In fact, he believes that by the Sixties, the science fiction genre was really faltering. TV and movies had co-opted “outer space” with riveting special effects. How could tales of wonder in mere prose compete with Space Odyssey 2001? And prose science fiction hadn’t yet found something it could do better than celluloid.

But “in the late Sixties in Britain they started to redefine science fiction,” he says, ” The phrase they adopted was ‘the exploration of inner space,’ of human psychology.”

At last, prose science fiction had found something it could do better than movies. Because, as Sawyer explains, “For us it wasn’t just exploring characterization. A good mystery obviously explores characterization. But we could explore characters in situations that had never existed before, that no human being had ever experienced, and have it ring as true. I never knew a man who lived for ten million years, as in one of my books, StarPlex. The inner life of the characters became the real challenge for science fiction writers in the last couple of decades.”

“In one way, it’s great that science fiction started to do that. In another it’s a damning indictment of the genre that it wasn’t until the late Sixties that we should actually be talking about characters,” he adds.

“In science fiction, I’m actually of the right age,” he muses. “I was born in 1960 the first generation that got interested in science fiction through television, as opposed to reading. I discovered it through the original Star Trek and TV series like Lost in Space that were on in the 1960s. In 1968, when I was eight years old, my father took me to see the movie 2001.”

Did he understand the movie?

“It’s incomprehensible to an adult; imagine how incomprehensible it was to an eight-year-old! I found it absolutely fascinating. It was TV – and that movie – that got me interested. My father was a professor at the University of Toronto. He realized that (science fiction) was a way to get his son reading.”

But after graduating from radio and television arts at Ryerson Polytechnic in Toronto in 1982, Sawyer had learned something else: Despite his love of TV and movies, he did not want to write for them. “I am not by nature a collaborative writer,” he explains. “In a novel, you labor over every word. You’re lucky if a screenplay bears some resemblance to what you wrote, yet it may still have your name on it. I found this a source of infinite frustration. Writing books, although it is a less lucrative and less secure profession, was going to be much more emotionally and creatively satisfying for me.”

Career planning: How Sawyer became a sci fi writer

Interviewed early in 1998 in his comfortable condo in Thornhill, full of books and science fiction memorabilia, Sawyer, verging on forty, seems the very picture of genre novel success. His wife, Carolyn Clink, was able to quit her job at a printing company to work as his full time executive assistant a refreshing alternative to the too-common role of the hapless “writer’s spouse” who works to support the other spouse’s writing habit.

But it soon becomes clear during the discussion that Sawyer planned his career as a writer very carefully, which is perhaps fitting for the son of a professor of economics. He knew early on that the odds are against any writer making money, unless the writer is both very good and has an excellent business sense. Sawyer majors in both. His success was no doubt a pleasurable surprise, but it was not by any means a mere chance.

He did some documentary work for the CBC after graduation but then moved into corporate and business journalism during the Eighties. “That was beautiful because I didn’t care at all,” he recalls, “I was doing all of this with a definite goal in mind. The goal was to save a lot of money. I was saving enough. Even before my first novel had sold I had essentially quit writing non-fiction and was writing fiction full time.”

Bankrolling money for a fiction career turned out to be a critical decision, because the young Sawyer soon discovered a sad fact of the writing life: Non-fiction writers seldom write much fiction. “I kept thinking I would.,” he remembers, “But you’re at your clients’ disposal day or night. During the six years I did this, I maybe sold one 1500 word short story a year. I was not finding the time.”

Today’s book market: Go big or go home

Sawyer had both a practical and an aesthetic reason for blending the science fiction and mystery genres in his work. First the practical: The decline of small press runs and small book shops in publishing has endangered writers who appeal only to one genre. Sawyer sees his crossover into mystery as a key to appealing to a large enough selection of readers to stay near the top of the list.

“One thing I stopped doing is setting books in outer space,” he admits, “Only a hard core science fiction fan will read a book set on a starship. I saw the writing on the wall that the mid-list – which was where I was when I was writing books like Golden Fleece - was drying up. You either give up or broaden your audience appeal.”

But Sawyer, whose favorite contemporary author is Eric Wright (he is also a big fan of Robert P. Parker and of Sherlock Holmes), also found an innate sympathy between the two genres. “The classic novel of detection is based on the premise that there is some mystery to be solved through the gathering of clues and the interpretation of facts. In fact, the traditional mystery novel is an intellectual exercise, a work that prizes the rational process. Science fiction is very similar. You very often are dealing with a mystery.”

“The second thing they have in common is a great deal of ‘talkiness,’” he adds. “You read Peter Robinson’s Inspector Banks, and you’re fascinated by the way Banks will question somebody and how he will cogitate on what he has learned until he puzzles it all out. I think that the science fiction reader and the mystery reader both understand fundamentally that ‘talking heads’ should not be a pejorative statement. Two people talking about things that have great consequences are interesting!”

“There has never been a more interesting time to be alive,” he insists. “We are faced with issues that Plato and Aristotle couldn’t even conceive of. We’re in an era of ethics and the issues are not clear cut. At the end of the book, you’re still left pondering.”

Truth, fiction, and consequences

Many of Sawyer’s novels deal with science and ethics issues that have great consequences. For example, in Frameshift , a Neanderthal girl is recreated by cloning her from DNA. In the wake of the success of recent mouse cloning experiments, would it be possible today, one wonders? Or what about recreating a tyrannosaur, as in Jurassic Park?

“Can we bring back the passenger pigeon? I think they could do it today,”Sawyer believes. “I also think it’s going to be very easy to recreate things that have been extinct for a few hundred thousand years. We will certainly be able to bring back early forms of humanity. But is it ethical to do so? If you brought back homo erectus, he would be considered, by all the standards of our day, severely mentally retarded. But DNA is very fragile and the chances of pulling off the Jurassic Park scenario are almost nil simply because there probably is no intact tyrannosaur DNA. It’s like asking a thousand years from now if somebody still has a copy of the first issue of the Toronto Sun.”

Right now Sawyer is working on a book called Mosaic [Flashforward ], in which, due to a bungled physics experiment, the consciousness of everybody on earth jumps ahead twenty-one years for three minutes. He explains, “The mystery plot is this: One of the main characters sees nothing. If you see nothing, you’ll be dead. He becomes obsessed can he prevent it somehow? He’s trying to track down people who got a glimpse of who might have killed him.”

Celluloid and novels: Dumberer and still dumberer?

Will any of Sawyer’s books become films any time soon?

Sawyer is ambivalent about the possibility. “The sad truth is that if you look at all the great mystery and science fiction writers of the twentieth century, there’s been no Eric Wright movie, no Peter Robinson movie. What movie there was of Sarah Peretsky’s V.I.Warshawsky stunk. In science fiction, the worst film of last year, The Postman, was an adaptation of a fifteen-year-old novel by one of the finest science fiction writers. It was ruined in the translation to movies. Hardly any writers get a movie made of their work and when that movie is made it is almost always a disappointment to the author and to the fans. The only reason I would want to have a movie made of my work is that I would make hundreds of thousands of dollars. But I prefer writing novels.”

“And,” he adds, “I rankle a little at the idea that a novel is a stepping stone to a movie. A novel is a complete work of art. No more is my novel somehow unfulfilled because it hasn’t been committed to celluloid than Michelangelo’s David is unfulfilled because Mattel hasn’t made an action figure of it.”

Denyse O’Leary (oleary@sympatico.ca )is a freelance writer based in Toronto.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O’Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada’s Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the forthcoming The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist’s case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

ARN correspondent

If Calculating God hadn’t been written by Rob Sawyer, I would be reluctant to even start it. Why start a book that addresses the intelligent design controversy only in order to end up throwing it at the wall when the author turns out to know far less than a person can find out just by reading a single chapter of what a respected ID theorist actually says.

But it was written by Rob Sawyer, … so I was looking forward to it. A prolific Canadian sci-fi author, Sawyer writes science fiction that draws on science and ethics/philosophy issues taken from the headlines. His premise is usually a what if – and better still, he delights in challenging stereotypes.

What if, for example, the aliens land and, instead of trying to destroy New York or conquer Washington, they send a quiet (six-legged) scientist to a museum in Toronto? What if they are actually here on Earth on a religious quest, of sorts?

I knew I was going to like the book at the point where the spidery being emerges from the space shuttle at the Royal Ontario Museum and says “Take me to a paleontologist.”

But of course. The alien scientist Hollus is researching mass extinctions. There have been five mass extinctions on Hollus’s planet, Beta Hydri, and also on another one – and they occurred at the same time as Earth’s five great extinctions.

A coincidence? Hollus doesn’t think so. Scientists on Hollus’s planet assume intelligent design is the correct interpretation of the features of our universe.

What Hollus wants to know is, what exactly is the design? Because, at a certain point, advanced civilizations – a bit more advanced than Earth or Beta Hydri – simply disappear. Where to? How? Why? Should it be prevented? Can it be prevented?

You can’t choose the ways in which you’ll be tested.

- from Calculating God (2000)

Sawyer’s work usually features lots of heady dialogue, which is okay because he generally links it securely to an action-packed plot. For example, one problem with seeing God exclusively as a designer – as Hollus does – is that most humans want more from God. The paleontologist who starts working with Hollus, Tom Jericho, discovers that he has lung cancer – an outcome of a life lived amid the dust of ancient bones- and thus he has a very limited life expectancy.

So he wants more. He wants a cure for cancer, in fact. Unfortunately, neither the Forhilnors (Hollis’s species) nor the Wreeds (the other intelligent one) know a cure for cancer, or old age either.

Not wanting to die was another universal constant, it seemed.

- from Calculating God (2000)

Somehow, that seems intuitively right. Cancer, an abnormal development in cells, riffs off normal development. Old age is the natural outcome of the fact that we live in time and space in a universe with limited physical resources. We cannot declare war on our universe, or change it dramatically either. Against such things, even the victories of advanced civilizations must be small and temporary.

When new developments in the visible universe suggest that the aliens may actually get a chance to meet God at a certain point in spacetime, Tom decides to go away with them and die there.

How do you define God? Like this. A God I could understand, at least potentially, was infinitely more interesting and relevant than one that defied comprehension.

– Calculating God (2000)

A sub-plot revolves around a couple of fundamentalist abortion clinic bombers – a shade too dumb, in my view – who moonlight by blowing up the “lying” Burgess Shale fossils that fascinate Hollus. But could these guys blow up a beach ball? I doubt it.

It’s interesting to look at the question, post-911. Nine-eleven completely changed popular culture’s idea of a terrorist bomber. No longer is he a sweaty, two-neuron rube griping about liberal values – he is an intelligent Middle Eastern suicide aspirant, disgusted by Western depravity.

Rob Sawyer, a Best Novel Hugo and Nebula Award winner, and winner of an awesome string of other awards, doesn’t disappoint, because he takes the questions he raises seriously and avoids simplistic answers.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O’Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada’s Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the forthcoming The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist’s case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

Elsa, the heroine in Wagner’s Lohengrin, is accused of fratricide and trysting with an illicit lover by her antagonists, Telramund and his sorceress wife Ortrud. These two conspire in a plot as nefarious as that of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Their intent is to usurp headship of the Duchy of Brabant, which rightfully belongs to Elsa’s brother, Gottfried, heir to Brabant’s Christian dynasty. Gottfried, now strangely absent, is presumed dead, and Ortrud is progressively corrupting her husband by her false testimony that Elsa has murdered him. The collapse of Telramund’s nobility under the influence of his wife is a significant subplot of the opera.

When King Heinrich arrives to investigate the strife attending succession of the Duchy of Brabant, Telramund has bought Ortrud’s lies wholesale and takes up her false witness against Elsa. Elsa is called upon to defend herself, but she only replies by relating a dream of a knight who has promised to defend her cause. A herald calls repeatedly for a defender for Elsa’s cause, but none appears. Elsa prays that the chivalric knight of her vision will now come to her aid. At last, transcendence breaks into the world of human injustice. In the romantic illumination of Wagner’s music the knight Lohengrin appears on the River Scheldt in mythic splendor in boat drawn by a swan.

Lohengrin betroths himself to Elsa and answers her prayers for aid on the condition that she will never ask his name or lineage. He announces that he will prove her innocence in mortal combat. King Heinrich prays that justice will be established in the ordeal. Lohengrin and Telramund draw their swords. The contest that follows is brief and decisive. The virtuous knight subdues Telramund. With blade poised above Telramund’s heart, Lohengrin says he will spare the accuser’s life. He exhorts him to spend his borrowed time in repentance for the evil he has perpetrated against Elsa.

The first act of Lohengrin has established the basic premises of a theodicy. Elsa’s innocent suffering poses a dilemma of the sort that, left unresolved, casts doubt on God’s goodness. The premise that God is powerful is assumed. A transcendent being unable to overcome the actions of human malefactors would not be God. Even in absence of Elsa’s prayers, God must act in her defense, or there must be a satisfactory explanation, should God permit the injustice to continue. Theology in a Calvinistic vein that sustains the inscrutable sovereignty of God against human comprehension does not play well on the stage. Sending the defender of Elsa’s virtue shows God’s benevolent intentions, but resolution of the problem in Act I would not provide sufficient time for Wagner’s music to elaborate.

Ortrud and Telramund plot in the night to reverse Elsa’s good fortune. When the opportunity arises, Ortrud attempts to dissuade Elsa from trust in the heroic virtue of her betrothed: if Lohengrin comes anonymously and inexplicably from a place that must remain a mystery, will he not someday depart as abruptly, leaving bereft both Elsa and the Duchey of Brabant of which he now has been proclaimed guardian? Magical in her own right, Ortrud calls upon her spirits to deceive Elsa and overthrow her defender. She invokes the ancient Gods, Wotan and Freia, of the Norse pantheon.

Telramund listens to her oaths of vengeance and her invocations in service of the betrayal of trust she is building with Elsa. Telramund now understands that he was deceived by Ortrud’s lies about Elsa. He laments the loss of his virtue and recalls his valor in defense of land and people who gave him honor, now lost. Yet in full cognizance of the deception that, with Ortrude, his actions sustain, he enlists four nobles to strive with him against his new rival.

To compound the pathos of Elsa’s innocence, she tries to befriend Ortrude, even as Elsa is being undone by Ortrude’s insinuations. She pities Ortrude’s destitution, assuming that her husband invented the accusations from which Elsa was miraculously delivered. She invites Ortrude to join with her in the wedding procession at the cathedral and makes Ortrude her maid of honor. In return, as Elsa’s bridal procession is entering the cathedral, Ortrude and Telramund block the procession and demand to know the name and origin of the groom. Lohengrin’s enigmatic reply is that he is bound to no one, save Elsa, for an answer. Since she, in good faith on her agreement, refuses to ask the forbidden question, King Heinrich and the people of Brabant conclude that the wedding is legitimate and that it shall proceed.

It is clear in the story from which the composer began that Elsa’s faith is the critical factor in her relation to the figure of her redemption. She has every reason to trust the man who confounded the lies of her accusers and saved her from death or exile. As long as she doesn’t waver on her agreement, the romance continues. Ortrude and Telramund are now again in disgrace. The bride and groom retire to their nuptial bed. All is well until Elsa’s trust gives way to the suspicions planted in her by Ortrude. She begins to probe his anonymity. He first evades her queries then reminds her of her vow. She persists, and her inquisitiveness becomes more intent on having an answer. At the critical moment, when she finally insists on knowing her husband’s name and lineage, Telramund and his cohorts storm the house. Telramund’s sword is of no avail even in ambush, and Lohengrin slays him. Instead of the sensual evocation of a Wagnerian climax, this thrust disgorges Telrumund’s entrails on the bridal bed. A determined foe has been slain, but Elsa’s question has dislodged the balance that secures her place of safety in the universe of this drama. Her husband sadly tells her that he will publicly give answers to her questions.

In the morning, the assembled people of Brabant learn the name and status of their guardian. His song begins as the strings evoke the transcendent realm of his origin. “In far off land, to mortal feet forbidden, there is a castle, Monsalvat by name.” In the ethos of medieval chivalry Monsalvat is the sanctuary of the Holy Grail, the sacred challis Jesus shared with his disciples when he instituted the Eucharistic memorial of his death. The Holy Grail appears from the world of Celtic myth in Welsh legendary tales of The Mabinogion. Sir Thomas Malory continued the tradition in English literature with his tales of King Arthur’s Round Table. On the European continent the grail legend had a life of its own. An unfinished 12th-century poem by the French poet Chrétien de Troyes, describes the discovery of the grail by Parsifal. Wagner’s interpretation of the Grail motif comes from an epic by the 13th century German poet Wolfram von Eschenbach. In Spain Cervantes began writing a parody of chivalric ideals in Don Quixote only to find himself captivated by chivalry in the end.

So, in the first utterances of his song, Elsa’s defender and the acclaimed guardian of Brabant identifies his nobility as transcendent in origin. He is a knight of the Holy Grail. His strength comes from participation in a divine order that shares the mystery of the blood of Christ in the castle Monsalvat. “A gleaming temple therein is hidden, so rich as nothing on earth could frame/ Therein a cup most holy powers possessing/ Is guarded as a gift of heaven’s love/ To be to sinless men a boon and blessing/ It was brought to us by angels from above/ And every year a dove descends from Heaven/ The mystic might within it to resolve/ It’s called the Grail/ And purest faith it lendeth to all the knights who in its service strive/ He whom the Grail to be its servant chooses/ It arms with holy supernatural might/ Opposed to him deceit its magic loses/ The powers of darkness he can put to flight/ Though in distant lands the Grail may send him, the cause of injured virtue to defend/ Holy might will attend him, while unknown to all he can remain/ The art that in the Grail is hidden/ Its light no mortal eye can gaze upon/ From every doubt its knight must be protected/ If recognized, he must at once be gone/ Thus compelled, now I reveal my sacred story/ The Grail’s servant to you I hither came/ My father Parsifal reigns in his glory/ His knight I am/ And Lohengrin my name.”

The crescendo in the brass and trumpet flourish that attends this revelation leaves no doubt of Wagner’s intent. He understood this story very well and the effect it would have on his audience. King Heinrich sheds a tear, and Elsa laments paradise lost. Aware that his hope of love in this world is also lost, Lohengrin grieves with Elsa that her sincere remorse is vain. The people of Brabant are bereft of their guardian. Against King Heinrich’s entreaty Lohengrin explains that should he, in disobedience, seek to remain, his power would be gone and his cause would fail. He reassures Heinrich with a premonition: the Eastern horde will not prevail against German lands.

To everyone’s dismay, the swan returns on the River Scheldt. In Lohengrin’s greeting another mystery begins to unravel. If Lohnegrin had been able to remain one year in Brabant, Elsa’s brother Gottfried would have been released from the servitude to which he is bound by Ortrud’s magic. Lohengrin gives Elsa his sword and horn and a ring, which, should Gottfried ever return, will give him strength in battle, succor in danger, and remind him of the one who took up their cause. With this, it is time to say, “Lebwohl”. In the tradition of Knights errant, and rangers in American Westerns, Lohengrin must depart to find service elsewhere and to others.

As Lohengrin heads up the riverbank to the boat, Ortrud explicates the mystery of Gottfried’s fate. She verifies, by the gold chain around the swan’s throat, observable to all, that this swan is Gottfried transformed. The true heir to the throne of Brabant is now engaged hence. This, she says, is vengeance from the gods of the Norse pantheon on the apostasy of a Christian dynasty of Brabant. But the Grail has one final consolation. Lohengrin kneels in silent prayer, and the white dove of Monsalvat hovers over the boat. Lohengrin perceives it with gratitude and springs up to unfasten the chain from the swan’s throat. The swan sinks into the water, and Lohengrin lifts to the bank a youth in gleaming silver garments. Ortrud collapses with a shriek, and Lohengrin steps onto the boat. The dove seizes the gold chain and draws it off Gottfried’s neck while Elsa gazes on him with rapture. He makes obeisance to King Heinrich. The men of the community kneel in homage to Gottfried. He hastens to Elsa’s arms, and she, in joy, turns hastily toward the shore, but Lohengrin is gone.

Wagner didn’t invent this story, but it is his rendition that endures in the modern world. The opera is one of the standards of any company with the resources to mount a production. Singers still aspire to the vocal challenges it presents. The familiar motifs of an inspired quest in defense of the powerless continue in modified form in cinematic drama, and, of course, every film score uses techniques Wagner invented or adapted for his purposes. In the productions of Lohengrin being mounted, however, many directors try to mute the clear demarcation between good and evil evident in the work. In an unsigned essay in a subscribers booklet circulated prior to Seattle Opera’s 2004 production, the author calls Ortrud a “rationalist”. Ortrud is clearly the force for evil in the drama, yet this writer asks, under the heading Wagner’s Moral Complexities, “How do we know Ortrud is so wicked? Her questions about Lohengrin are perfectly sensible. And if her tactics seem ruthless, remember that Ortrud truly believes that the throne is rightfully hers, that it was usurped from her family by Elsa’s. And why do we believe Lohengrin is so wonderful? The trial-by-combat scene in which he defeats Telramund, although sanctioned by King Henry’s medieval government, was as barbaric and foreign to Wagner’s audience as Ortrud’s black magic. By putting this scene onstage, Wagner was asking: Does might make right?”

This analysis is missing a salient theme in medieval literature. At the heart of the Grail legend and the chivalric code is the idea of might for right. If Ortrud is fighting for what she thinks is rightfully hers, she has no moral compunction about destroying the innocent in her ambition. In this vein one might also say of Lady Macbeth that she is fighting for what she thinks is rightfully hers. The opera Lohengrin is not morally complex. Though the composer certainly was morally compromised, he found truths in his art that were probably beyond him.

The essayist, still anonymous, unlike Lohengrin, says “Wagner’s Lohengrin uses this popular pattern, and this old story, to talk about a central issue of the day: the crisis of faith in nineteenth-century Europe. During Wagner’s lifetime, the rise of science, technology, and industry were shaking to its foundations people’s faith in the church, long the mainstay of European society. Wagner shows us how Elsa’s pure faith in Lohengrin’s virtue evaporates when she listens seriously to the intelligent questions of Ortrud, who is competing with Lohengrin for power over the community. Ever the rationalist, Ortrud demands proof, and Lohengrin’s powerful mystique, penetrated by her piercing light of logical inquiry, turns out to be airy nothing.”

Ortrud the rationalist! This is akin to calling her invocations of the Norse deities Logical Positivism—absurd. Elsa’s fragile faith is an important element of the story, but in this drama, at least, the church isn’t in crisis. The crisis is, indeed, correctly identified as within the human soul. It is a crisis of finding the spiritual resources to continue living in an unjust world, not a crisis of the church. In the world of this opera injustice is perpetrated by Ortrud and Telramund as he becomes complicit in Ortrud’s lies. You couldn’t find a less ambiguous case of false witness in the book of Leviticus.

Nietzsche admired Wagner, and for a while they were fellow travelers, but analysis of this medieval plot will be better served by leaving the Nietzschean will to power and its moral ambiguity aside. The profound and truly human question in this story is why the innocent suffer while God remains inaccessible? The answer, in a bald-faced abstraction of the sort that is not consoling in absence of myth like that of Lohengrin, is that supernatural assistance, transparent and clearly evident to all observers, would irrevocably compromise human freedom.

Despite the weight of postmodern ideology and the theory of evolution, there are moral truths, and there is some help to be found in transcendental categories. Suffering, when it has meaning, ceases to be unbearable suffering. This is a reasonable literary explanation for Lohengrin’s extraction of the promise that Elsa never ask his name or lineage. If he were to remain in Brabant after everybody knows that his strength is divinely ordained, his authority would be unquestionable, and human actions could never, for long, diverge from virtue as established by the community. The Christian Dynasty of Brabant would be eschatological.

In this sense the story says the same thing as the Genesis account of the fall, and Elsa’s part resembles that of Eve under the influence of the serpent. A clearer case for archetypes in the collective unconscious could scarcely be found. Thankfully, Wagner is better dramatist than Carl Jung. Whether Wagner accepted the tale, as truth, is certainly questionable; the substance of the issue involved isn’t. Listen to the music with suspension of judgment, and draw your own conclusions. In contemporary productions, you might have to close your eyes to what they put on the stage. (audio-10)

Michael Dodaro

audio-10: Wagner; Lohengrin; excerpted from Deutsche Grammophon recording 2530 176; Kubelik.

Faust’s search, simply put, is for the satisfaction of a moment that he would wish to sustain. An abbreviated treatment of Goethe’s version of the Faust legend, the opera centers on Faust’s seduction of Marguerite, a peasant girl who soon finds her life in ruins. Faust’s conquest can be seen as an upshot of the materialistic world view. There are many versions of the legend, and several operas based on it. In some versions of the odyssey the philosopher’s quest becomes the life of a sensual athlete, including romps with courtesans of legendary reputations—Helen of Troy, Cleopatra, Thäis. In the opera by Gounod Satan serves Faust’s inclinations while amusing himself baiting the bourgeoisie. Using the power Satan puts at his disposal, Faust enraptures Marguerite with jewelry and his transitory affections and then deserts her. But this story resolves on Marguerite’s redemption. Her apotheosis and translation to heaven is musically exultant, ascending chromatically and aimed at an experience of transcendence. (audio-7) It concludes with a chorus of angels singing, “Christ has triumphed over sin and death; there is now no condemnation for those who put their trust in him.”

This traditional Christian cosmology evidently played very well in Paris in 1859. The opera was an immediate success, revitalized French opera, and remains a standard of the repertoire. It is remarkable that the French responded in droves a hundred years before their existentialists and atheists—Sartre, Derrida, Foucaut et al.—took center stage. The hell of it—as if Satan is collecting on Faust’s agreement and taking his due—is that Darwin’s materialism supplants metaphysics for ensuing generations. Dialectical materialism, that presumed-inevitable liberation of the underclass, becomes an obsession among the intelligentsia. Marxists, and the nihilists who follow them, are a thousand times more predacious than the bourgeoisie they depose. Blind to atrocities by regimes claiming to redistribute material resources—for what other resources are there?—they abet or incite revolts against every civilized institution. Western Civilization is, of course, an obstacle to those who would take back territory lost by oligarchies of earlier eras. If it can be deconstructed, deconstructionists or their minions will march in to fill the void.

Excerpted from Civilization and the Sublime by Michael Dodaro;

Audio-7. Faust; Gounod; excerpted from EMI recording 79-750462; 1979; Domingo/Freni/ Ghiaurov/Pretre.

IDArts is pleased to welcome to our community opera singer and chorister Mike Dodaro. Mike has degrees in English literature and theology, including a BA in English from the University of Washington and MA in theology from Fuller Theological Seminary. A church cantor and choir member, he has also sung leading roles with northwest regional opera companies and worked for several seasons as a regular chorister with Seattle Opera Association. He is the editor of The Sacred in the Opera Discussion Forum and published in First Things Journal of Religion, Culture, and Public Life and The New Oxford Review.Writing documentation for computer programmers keeps him from running after the next operatic engagement, but he still sings: To Julia, by Robert Herrick/ musical setting by Roger Quilter

As you will soon find out, Mike not only enjoys singing, but he loves to study and think about the philosophical, theological and cultural significance of the music he sings (another one of those guys who enjoys using both sides of his brain). He will be a regular contributor here at IDArts sharing some of his insights on classical music in general, and opera in particular. We asked Mike to introduce himself by sharing a few thoughts about intelligent design and music:

Intelligent Music

“In school I had a good start in the sciences, but my head was turned by a number of distractions. Music was always among them. Fortunately I went to college when education in the liberal arts included an introduction to what used to be considered the standard repertoire in music. The first time I heard Mozart, I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. I had learned to sing in church, so getting through the choir audition at the University of Oregon wasn’t difficult. But who would have thought the odd Viennese composer with his powdered wig had written music that could send me into orbit? Mozart was an unexpected gift from…

Well, I was a Christian. I assumed there was divine elegance somewhere in the universe, so yes, Mozart’s music, especially his liturgical works are, in a sense, gifts from God, but I hadn’t imagined the return address of the sender would be included. The choir was warming up for a performance the first time I heard the overtone series in a big major chord. I was stunned. This harmony was infinite and reflected some magnificence at the source of everything.

Art can be many things, but for centuries it was intended to convey the truth about human existence and the cosmos. Now we often think of art as self expression. Many works of contemporary art are cries of despair or rage. Deconstructionist critics advertise themselves as liberators from the old culture of oppression based on religion, race, gender, or class. Feminist critics will tell you that listening to Beethoven is like being abused by a man. It’s no accident that an era that generally doesn’t acknowledge design in the universe finds little to celebrate in art and music created by artists who believed in both design and the designer.

When you’ve heard the ring of truth, a lot of modern art seems to be simply a reflection of a nihilistic point of view. In many ways music has saved me from contemporary culture that disregards design in the universe and in human nature. In my musical studies I found evidence of design in every chord progression and in the clear moral conflicts of operatic dramas. The materialistic premises that are programmed into us in the present era dissolved in the presence of art emanating from design, purpose and order.

Science includes many marvels, but these marvels are based on discovered order in nature that can be controlled only through understanding of the form and relationships that exist. I make a living as a computer programmer. The logic that I find in Mozart works just as well in an entity relationship model used to persist and rematerialize data. The science that now seems a threat to the old understanding of the world could not exist in absence of the cultures of the past. Everything we now take for granted is built on the work of our predecessors. Christians, Jews, and Muslims in earlier centuries expected to find lawful order in nature because they believed in a God who spoke the rationally comprehensible order into existence.

If you have read this far in my introduction, you may be interested in more of what I’ve discovered in the music of the past. Musicologists approach music through its structure. I’m a singer, so most of my effort has gone into vocal study and understanding drama on the operatic stage. I have some observations that I’ll be discussing in this forum. I say discussing because, though I’ve begun with a monologue, I’d like to get your opinions as we proceed. Some of the old landmarks in this musical culture are overgrown after generations of neglect, but the most important works of literature have often been used in operatic plots. The Faust legend has been with us for many centuries. Evidently bartering with Satan is of some interest in every era as evidenced by the recent box office hit movie Ghost Rider. The tale of Faust has been set to music by many composers. We’ll begin with Gounod’s version and listen to some excerpts. If I can’t convince you of the importance of this music for time and eternity, maybe while listening to it you will hear for yourself.”

ID Arts Podcast Part 1

ID Arts Podcast Part 2