Kitty Kitty

I had a kitty cat once, but he died or something. My cat would walk around, eat stuff and sometimes would allow himself to be petted; the usual cat stuff. Sometimes he would meow and I would tell him to shut up and he would become greatly offended and meow again; repeat. He was a great cat; although, perfectly ordinary. Now this cat, I've named him Mittens, is very strange.

The cat isn't strange of its own accord, but is because of that of its owner. I'm sure that there are some ethical complications of tying balloons to a cat. Did the cat ask for balloons? Probably not, unless you know something about cats that others don't. It is a very cute picture and the cat seems to be alive. I suppose it's OK to tie balloons to a cat, probably shouldn't do it too often though. After a while the strings would probably cut off some circulation and make the cat's legs fall asleep.

Maybe we should be concerned for the dresser, kitten scratches can be quite unsightly.

Something to be Wary About

I have a lot of time on my hands at the moment and I've been spending some of it on Richard Dawkins' website. It's a great website and it's amazing how much stuff Dawkins puts on it for free, there's an archive full of stuff. Anyway, I just read a correspondence between Edwin Cartlidge who was (or is) a journalist for the Templeton Foundation and two notable atheists. The Templeton Foundation puts on an annual conference in Cambridge where they attempt to bring science and religion together. Edwin Cartlidge emailed both Anthony Grayling and Daniel Dennett asking them to speak at the event; they both declined. I found something Daniel Dennett said interesting:

"Many years ago I made the mistake of participating, with some very good scientists, in a conference that pitted us against astrologers and other new age fakes. I learned to my dismay that even though we thoroughly dismantled the opposition, many in the audience ended up, paradoxically, with an increased esteem for astrologers! As one person explained to me “I figured that if you scientists were willing to work this hard to refute it, there must be something to it!” Isn’t it obvious to you that the Templeton Foundation is eager to create the very same response in its readers? Do you really feel comfortable being complicit with that project?"

This is something that Christians should be wary of: A false sense of superiority. One example would be Ray Comfort's attempts to get into a debate with Richard Dawkins. Comfort is not interested in discussing theology, he is only interested in debasing science to "prove" Dawkins wrong. While I would like to see the spectacle that such a debate would bring, it is much better that Dawkins steer clear of it for risk of validating Comfort's feeble attempts.

Link to RDF post: Correspondence Regarding the Templeton Foundation.

Oh, Brave New World

"Because our world is not the same as Othello's world. You can't make flivvers without steel - and you can't make tragedies without social instability. The world's stable now. People are happy; they get what they want, and they never want what they can't get. They're not afraid of death; they're blissfully ignorant of passion and old age; they're plagues with no mothers or fathers; they've got no wives, or children, or lovers to feel strongly about; they're so conditioned that they practically can't help behaving as they ought to behave. And if anything should go wrong, there's soma. Which you go and chuck out of the window in the name of liberty, Mr. Savage. Liberty!" He laughed. '"Expecting Deltas to know what liberty is! And now expecting them to understand Othello! My good boy!"

-Aldous Huxley

Ray Comfort

Ray Comfort is a... well, lets just says he's not very good at whatever it is he does. This afternoon I read through a blog. On this blog was another blog by Ray Comfort and that blog, the second not the first, was incredibly irritating. Comfort has a penchant for keeping old arguments going long after they have been proven false and yes he has been proven false a number of times. Here is the link to the blog about another blog, here, Ray Comfort's has been removed and so is only available on the link above.

One thing I did find a little surprising is that Comfort quoted more of Darwin than I expected him to. I have seen this quote used before and it stopped sooner. Here it is:

“To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of Spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree."

That's where it usually stops, but he goes on.

"When it was first said that the sun stood still and the world turned round, the common sense of mankind declared the doctrine false; but the old saying of Vox populi, vox Dei ['the voice of the people = the voice of God'], as every philosopher knows, cannot be trusted in science. Reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a simple and imperfect eye to one complex and perfect can be shown to exist, each grade being useful to its possessor, as is certain the case; if further, the eye ever varies and the variations be inherited, as is likewise certainly the case; and if such variations should be useful to any animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, should not be considered as subversive of the theory.”

I'm not sure why Comfort would quote more because Darwin doesn't seem to be helping his case much. The last bit of the quote, "should not be considered as subversive," answers Comforts argument. The argument for Irreducible Complexity is an argument from theists that proposes that some structures in the natural world can not be broken down into smaller parts and thus can not have come about by the process of natural selection. This argument is very much a stall. Irreducible Complexity says God exists because the alternative hasn't sorted itself out yet, but the problem for theists is that it inevitably will. In fact one of IC's main arguments, the bacterial flagellum, has been reduced. You can watch an interesting video here where Kenneth Miller talks about this big problem for the IC guys. So really, if you can't understand evolution that doesn't mean it's wrong, it means it's strange and strangeness is what our universe is known for.