Fun with Darwinists....

I'm having some fun at the Panda's Thumb this evening. I should probably be writing here.

(Ctrll-F: mynym to find me if you are interested.)

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Edit: They shut down comments sections sometimes and did so on that section. I'm not sure on what criteria the decision is made. One further note about little fellows who engage in argument along these lines, "According to Christianity we should expect perfect design, perfection!" Wrong. According to a specifically Christian sort of natural theology one should expect to find remnants of perfection, not perfection.

So one fellow says:

I am also having trouble making some connections [in my neural nets] here [because connections like that would be like lightning bolts from the sky or somethin']...specifically, I am having trouble understanding how the indiscriminant Biological and Cosmological ID ramblings in your posts are even remotely compatible.

Indeed, they are mutually contradictory. The cosmological fine-tuning argument necessarily requires no evidence of further intervention by the designer to account for biological phenomena. Likewise, biological ID necessarily requires a poorly-tuned universe that would not produce and sustain life on its own without the intervention of a designer.

So which is it?

All of that seems to be based on the same notion argued throughout that thread in which a Christian natural theology would predict a sort of anthropic perfection in Nature, cosmologically or biologically. I.e., things are designed perfectly for us to live as biological beings and perfect little anthropic people and so on. Actually Christianity says the opposite about us and about Nature, it is a total worldview. So yes, on the one hand a Christian can argue from the remnants of good design and on the other from a sense of evil.




I suppose these fellows miss the fact that in the very beginning of the scripts of Scripture one son beats another to death and so on. Did the one being murdered call out to God to make things more anthropic, or at least human centered enough to save him from being beaten to death? Did his parents weep for him and wonder how such misanthropy could come to exist in their remaining son and in Nature? Of course, all of this leaves open the fact of which is more misanthropic, Nature or Man. According to some cold toads there is no distinction between Nature and Man, yet they no sooner finish saying that then they have contradicted their Selves.

At any rate, I am no theologian, but suffice it to say that the knowledge of some little fellows about what a Scripturalist natural theology would be seems to approach nil. They just do not know and so their ignorant criticisms about how perfect things ought to be given Scripturalism lacks force. Yet that is what their argument about perfection seems to be based on, i.e. some form of prissy Christianity in which no one could ever be beaten to death because God is the ultimate Nice Guy, just like the prissy Christian believes themselves to be. There is an atheism that seems to be a reaction to that sort of prissy Christianity and it shows itself in this structure of argument: "God is not a Nice Guy, just look around us at all the evil there is! Since God can only be a Nice Guy, kind of like I am, then that means God does not exist. Even if God did exist, if he cannot be made in my Nice Guy image then I won't believe in him. I'm a nice guy, so I know. I could make things better than God but God is a Big Meanie, so I don't believe in him. So take that, God!"

And so on. It's possible to make a satire of it because it is the material of satire. It is a reacionary sort of atheism. And it seems to be what is adhered to by the fellows at the Panda's Thumb, which is why the blog is named the way it is. Things should be better and if only God were as nice a guy as they are then everything would be nice! There is this little problem that they lack the capability to create anything approaching the creation and the little fact of evil in the history of man. In fact, they are just creatures. But quick, look over here so we can all blame Good for Evil once more! We all like to do that sometimes.

I wonder though, who will blame Evil for evil? Ah, but Evil does not exist as more than a metaphor for "Something I don't like." in the modern age...or it does exist in a slithery subtle way, just enough to blame Good for itself. How tricky!

Or not.