On the matters of faiths, beliefs, sciences and worldviews.

When Langston was twelve years old, he was saved. His aunt assumed this meant Langston had seen Jesus, but for Langston himself it was a bit different.

My aunt told me that when you were saved you saw a light, and something happened to you inside! And Jesus came into your life! And God was with you from then on! She said you could see and hear and feel Jesus in your soul. I believed her. I had heard a great many old people say the same thing and it seemed to me they ought to know. So I sat there calmly in the hot, crowded church, waiting for Jesus to come to me.

The whole essay can be found here, and I recommend it greatly.

This interesting little story makes it abundantly clear what the differences are between believers and skeptics.

Two people return to their long neglected garden and find, among the weeds, that a few of the old plants are surprisingly vigorous. One says to the other, ‘It must be that a gardener has been coming and doing something about these weeds.’ The other disagrees and an argument ensues. They pitch their tents and set a watch. No gardener is ever seen. The believer wonders if there is an invisible gardener, so they patrol with bloodhounds but the bloodhounds never give a cry. Yet the believer remains unconvinced, and insists that the gardener is invisible, has no scent and gives no sound. The sceptic doesn’t agree, and asks how a so-called invisible, intangible, elusive gardener differ from an imaginary gardener, or even no gardener at all.

The Parable of the Invisible Gardener was originally told by British philosopher John Wisdom. It highlights the lack of necessity of falsifiability in believer’s minds, and how faith can be adapted to explain away any and all problems that threaten one’s own theories. Where skeptics must, often against their will, accept fact, someone who takes something on faith must not. They can simply decide to believe whatever they want, regardless of proof or evidence.

Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition.

- Adam Smith (1723-90) Scottish economist. The Wealth of Nations, 1776.

Good news, everyone! Texan school kids won’t be forced to consider “alternatives” as if they are equally valid compared to established, actually scientific, theories.

Yes, the scientific method encourages questioning and skepticism, but for a whole other reason than proposed by Creationism/ID supporters. Those people have already reached their conclusion beforehand, and they’re actually also telling you not to question that conclusion. Instead, they question the scientific conclusion, as well as the methods used, in order to validate their own, unquestioned, hypothesis. This isn’t scientific, and this is why Intelligent Design isn’t science.

Evolution is not “just a theory”. Creationism and Intelligent Design, however, are.

So I just finished watching Ben Stein’s horrible documentary on Intelligent Design, “Expelled: No Intelligent Allowed“, and about how there’s a big conspiracy in the scientific society to suppress any and all mentions of ideas that challenge the theory of evolution. I spent most of the 90 minutes yawning, and shaking my head at the TV, but here are a few things that I wanted to highlight for those who’ve watched this film and think it’s important.

Unarguably the most important criticism of this film is the fact that it contains no facts. The entire 90 minutes consist of Stein (or someone else) interviewing people who feel they’ve been wronged by science, and are left without jobs or, in some cases, without the possibility of ever even getting a new job in their field. Sure, there’s a valid point in investigating the circumstances of these people’s claims to have been ostracized from science in general, I’ll admit that much. But does Stein even do that? No, of course not. The few cases he even felt the need to investigate were done sloppily so, and without any depth or reasoning whatsoever. He’s content with the assumption that these people lost their jobs because of their opinions.

The validity of the hypothesis of Intelligent Design, then. Does Stein actually bother to find out if it really is what proponents claim it is? No, not that either. He assumes, throughout the entire film, that the mere fact that the idea of Intelligent Design exists means it is on equal ground to the theory of evolution in any debate over the two. He disregards the scientific scrutiny either due to gross ignorance in the subject, or malicious intent.

For 90 minutes, the people he interviews talk about holes in the theory of evolution, gaps in many fields of science, great controversy and all kinds of disturbing notions. Disturbing, had they been true, that is, and which is something that he doesn’t bother at all to verify. When asking about one certain idea of how life might have evolved from non-life, he dismisses the answer simply because he doesn’t understand it. Admittedly, the interviewee didn’t exactly make himself very clear, but doesn’t that just mean that Stein should have sought a more detailed explanation elsewhere? Of course, he didn’t.

Near the end, he interviewed Richard Dawkins and asked some pretty much non-essential questions that had nothing to do with anything else in his film, and had some very telling reactions to his answers. At 1hr and 31 minutes he seems baffled at the idea that Dawkins rejects all possible gods (by contrast, Dawkins is also equally baffled at the reaction to his answer). The problem here is one that is central to those who call themselves ignosticists rather than atheists or agnostics, and that is that it is meaningless to discuss the existence of a term you’ve not yet clearly defined the meaning of. In the same interview, Dawkins tries to explain the possibility of Intelligent Design by creator that itself is a product of natural evolution, and it is doubtless this that confuses Stein. He goes so far as to express his confusion in a voice-over during the interview clip. What he probably doesn’t understand is Dawkins’ definition of God in scientific terms, as applied to the context of Intelligent Design. The idea of an intelligent designer is plausible even within evolution if that designer itself was a product of evolution. However, science can not, and will not, ever allow the idea that the designer is “magic” and came out of nowhere. This is not a fault in science, but rather it is the very point of science.

Overall, the film left me rather irritated. The intent of the film was to show that the freedom to express ideas and have them taken seriously is under attack. What he didn’t mention, however, is that Intelligent Design is an idea that has only ever been expressed, but never scientifically verified by either side. Surely Stein isn’t proposing that we assign equal scientific value to any idea proposed, no matter how ridiculous? Of course not, he only proposes this when it comes to the thinly disguised version of Creationism, a religious and non-scientific movement, that is renamed and rebranded as Intelligent Design. Even early on in the film, Stein wants to assign credibility to ID’s secular validity by stating how many theistic religions there are that accept it and back it up. Surely, finding a single atheist to support ID would have been more constructive, but I also suspect that it would have been much, much harder.

By all means, watch this film if you want to. Just keep your mind alert while you do, and I guarantee that you won’t miss the glaring holes, gaps and fallacies in the arguments that he presents, nor the suspiciously missing facts to support the very claim of validity for Intelligent Design that he’s repeatedly making through the 90 minutes of it.