Blue Mass Group

Reality-based commentary on politics.

Ebert finally gets around to Ben Stein

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One of my favorite parts, though, is how he deals with the problem of sneaking the word liberal into the film.

Intelligent Design “scientists” in “Expelled” are offended by being called ignorant. When Stein points out that “Catholics and mainstream Protestant groups” have no problem with the theory of Evolution, he is informed by an ID advocate, “liberal Christians side with anybody against Creationists.” Now we have the smoking gun. It is the word  liberal.  What is the word  liberal  doing here? The Theory of Evolution is neither liberal nor conservative. It is simply provable or not.

Follow the link and read the whole thing.

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    • … rules for particle physics.  Not a biological system process.  He wasn’t really talking about God either for that matter.

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      p>It is a common mistake to claim that evolution is random.  It’s actually precisely not random.  It describes a systemic process where some iterations prosper while others don’t.  

    • …

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      p>

      It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.

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      p>Albert Einstein.

        • … mistake the non-belief in God with a lack of spirituality.  ‘I don’t believe in God’, doesn’t quite get that substance.  

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          p>He considered himself an agnostic.  He didn’t believe in a God that intervenes.  In a way, he limited his spirituality to what he could know, and what he knew about the universe was that it’s workings can be contemplated as sublime:  “A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, of the manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which are only accessible to our reason in their most elementary forms-it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute the truly religious attitude; in this sense, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man.”  He took this sublime spiritual contemplation at it’s face and not as evidence for God’s existence one way or another.  

        • Einstein was elusive.

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          p>

          I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings.*

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          p>Wikipedia says that “Spinoza viewed God and Nature as two names for the same reality”.

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          p>

          The word god is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this. … For me the Jewish religion like all others is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people. As far as my experience goes, they are no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything ‘chosen’ about them.

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          p>Wikiquote for Einstein.

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          p>How would I categorize Einstein?  I think it is clear that he is very squarely in the naturalistic camp, though and rejected the super natural.  There are many readings of Einstein’s religious views and I don’t think there is a concise consensus as far as agnostic/atheist/pantheist labeling.

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          p>———-
          *There is another quote refering to Spinoza and pantheism, but its veracity is debated.

    • in a public school science classroom. The idea of Intelligent Design is useless as a practical scientific tool, and its introduction into a public school, as part of the science curriculum, as much a violation of church/state separation as school prayer. It is not a scientific theory, as far as I can see.

      • Really, the entirety of evolutionary biology answers the “how” question, but not the “why” question.  Why did it all start?  Why did we proceed from “primordial soup” to something living in the primordial soup?  Why did the something wind up with DNA and RNA?

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        p>These questions are simply beyond science, and are the provence of religion or metaphysics.

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        p>I have no problem with a public school teacher stating forthrightly that we have absolutely no idea how the ball got rolling, but we know quite a bit about how the ball rolled once it got started, full stop.  Everything else can be handled by a more appropriate teaching authority.

        • Why? Because simple systems iterate into complex ones. Simple as that.

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          p>I don’t need to believe that some invisible sky-god brought it about for his amusement to understand the why. Why is, well, it happened because it did, because it was the next step. End of story.

        • … you mean by ‘why’.  ‘Why did we wind up with DNA and RNA?’ isn’t beyond science.  DNA and RNA are excellent at specific functions for an organism.  As Darwin hat theorized, systems that are on the right side of selection get to propagate.  As to the origins of DNA and RNA, scientists are actually hard at work on that one too.  The movie actually tried to make some of the leading theories (crystalline mutation) look silly.  

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          p>Now if you mean ‘why’ with regard to meaning (personal or universal), well yeah… science only tries to describe what is, not meaning.  

          • Science has its own broad assumptions and organizing theories that appear to take positions on “whys” as well as “hows,” in my opinion.

            • … but it opens up any of its assumptions to testing and evidence.  Simply put, evidence can overturn even the most ingrained dogma in science.    

        • With his theory of the four causes, Aristotle points out that the question “Why?” operates on multiple levels. The question “Why did it start?” could have an answer just like “Why did the car start?”, a simple mechanical answer that is the same as the answer to “How?”

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          p>But often when people ask “Why?” they’re looking for the ends, the purpose, the conscious intention behind something. For example, it is unsatisfying to answer the question, “Why did you vote for Bush?” with a mechanical description of levers on voting machines.

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          p>However, what makes us think that there was any purpose or conscious intention behind the Big Bang? To blow up the question a bit more, what makes us even think that an Infinite God would have anything resembling what we very finite creatures point to as “our consciousness”, much less those elements of consciousness like purpose, intention, and goal?

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          p>That seems infinitely presumptuous, no?  

  2. My favorite came at the end.

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    p>Stein says of his trip to Nazi concentration camps, places that Stein claims came about as a direct result of Daewinism, that “[i]t’s difficult to describe how it felt to walk through such a haunting place”. Ebert replies:

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    p>

    It is not difficult for me to describe how you made me feel by exploiting the deaths of millions of Jews in support of your argument for a peripheral Christian belief. It fills me with contempt.

  3. Together with Christian-based inconsistent Intelligent Design there are other other Creationist theories. The Flying Spaghetti Monster theory has no inconsistencies!

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