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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Salon.com seems to delight in giving its soapbox to one religious apologist after another. How about devoting some bandwidth to the secularists, atheists, and agnostics? If you look at the responses to articles like this, you'll see we're a pretty big part of your readership and we aren't particularly impressed by the persistent appearances of easily-debunked drivel and flakey nonsense.
God or gods - if He/She/They exist - is/are way beyond the explanations that can be provided by science, which is, after all, the 'explanation of everything that is NOT God/gods' in this universe; and God is that which is 'beyond science'. Science does not (and should not) attempt to explain what is inexplicable.
On the other hand - to my mind at least - the religious explanations (of every faith, of every colour) have failed even more than have those of science to explain what is/are God/gods. This is not to claim that we should do away with religions: let those who need them have them. But the religions and the religious should not try to enforce their faith on those of no faith; just as those of no faith should not impose their lack of belief on those who do believe.
We could perhaps at best say that God is what lies within the gaps of our understanding. We ceaselessly fill in the gaps (because that is our nature) - and those particular gaps or 'god-spaces' disappear; but new gaps keep appearing.
In that limited sense, Stuart Kauffman is being quite reasonable (to my view): God is simply that which is unexplained (and possibly inexplicable).
Thus, most such debates about God/not-God are just empty argumentation, as we are seeing right here.
If God exists, he probably doesn't...
GSC
Species ending? It's our call
By Frank Keegan
11/16/08
Relax general. Cheer up. Things shall get worse, but they could get better. The choice is ours.
Hearing a vice chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff utter the words “species ending” about our near future should be enough to wake us all.
Gen. James E. Cartwright uttered the phrase recently during the inaugural Johns Hopkins University Leaders + Legends lecture. He spoke on “Leading Organizational Change to Meet New Challenges.”
What challenges? Financial crises, climate change, weapons of mass destruction widely and readily available to rogue states and lunatic groups. Is that all? No.
“Competition (for scarce world resources) inevitably will lead to conflict,” Cartwright said. “Are we at a tipping point? Yes. Will we have control? No.”
Generals are interested because when leaders of state, commerce and church mess up, armed forces have to clean up.
Cartwright’s love and admiration for the men and women who fight for us if things go wrong is palpable. Figuring out when and where the next conflict breaks out, and how best to combat it, is what generals are supposed to do.
Now they also try to figure out why, and ways to prevent it. For example, a 2004 Department of Defense study determined global warming is the No. 1 threat to the security of the United States. How can that be if there is no such thing?
Just because history proves we turn upon ourselves when stressed with a ferocity unequaled by any other species, is there any reason to think this time will be different?
Nope, according to Cartwright. The stress level is rising, fast. Along with heating things up, we inflict upon ourselves an increasing host of things — from radioactive isotopes to organic chemicals to new and emerging diseases — never before endured by humans.
Family by family, friend by friend we now begin to see the price we pay for our toxic past. We have not seen the worst of it. Our despoiling of our narrow ecological niche leaves us little room for survival.
We are learning the real price of living it up instead of eating bread from the sweat of our brow. We arrogantly believe “the laws of Nature and Nature’s God” beseeched in our Declaration of Independence somehow do not apply to us.
Environmentalists weep about saving Earth when actually our planet is not at risk. We are. Other species come and go. Why not us?
Don’t worry about biodiversity. While exterminating thousands of species, we create opportunities for others. Cockroaches and rats are doing very well. Doing even better are myriad bacteria and viruses. For example, we’ve created perfect environments for growth and spread of staphylococcus and influenza, and the willfully ignorant and criminal negligence of our political and spiritual leaders helped HIV propagate around the globe in less than a decade. Thanks.
Sure, if we ceased all carbon dioxide emissions now it would take only 100,000 years to return to pre-industrial levels.
And those new substances -- we cannot even count them all -- we poison the born and unborn with will continue to kill us for millennia, especially if we use them as weapons.
But we and we alone hold the power to begin undoing what we have done. The hard fact is environmental responsibility is good business, creating jobs, adding real value and paying long-term dividends.
Environmental atrocities are bad business, merely deferring costs that accrue and compound -- costs we cannot refuse to pay. Our ecological deficit is orders of magnitude larger than our fiscal debts, though both grow from our same inherent flaws.
We can pay down both at the same time if we have the wisdom and will to take control.
If we do we can thrive and prosper. If we don’t, Gen. Cartwright is correct. We’re doomed.
Frank Keegan is editor of The Baltimore Examiner.
I think the great divide between believers and agnostics/atheists is illustrated quite well by this interview, even though neither participant acknowledges it.
Sure, science (which is absolutely reductionist) has limits on what it can reveal. It cannot tell us anything at all about the super-natural, be it God or the miraculous soul, which would likely be a good analogy for Kauffman's creative agency, which he says obviously exists and yet is clearly non-scientific.
The divide arises when those limits of science are discussed. The liberal scientist says, "OK, beyond this lies the unknown," whereas the believer invents something to fill the darkness.
I think Kauffman is just one of those scientifically literate people who doesn't actually think scientifically... who, when he reaches the edge of what is scientifically knowable (and therefore what is knowable, imo) he can't admit that saying "I don't know" is the only justifiable answer to questions outside that boundary.
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
Once seen as a lunatic fringe, reactionary anti-women groups are courting respectability
Salon headlines in your mailbox
