manicstreetpreacher encourages you to listen to a mature debate on an emotional topic.
The 23 January 2010 edition of Premier Christian Radio’s Unbelievable? featured a debate between pro-choice humanist Liberal Democrat MP Evan Harris and pro-life Christian Sarah Macken of the Alive + Kicking group. It was from a few years ago at a time when the show took live phone calls from listeners.
It is an extremely level-headed discussion of a very thorny issue and I cannot recommend it enough. I am pro-choice and therefore I would hand the debate to Evan Harris, who is a prominent voice of the National Secular Society, but only because I agree with his position. Sarah Macken articulated her position extremely well and said plenty to get me thinking.
Abortion is a difficult issue and I struggle with it greatly. Evan Harris did very well to convey the moral minefield of the topic and is a superb spokesman for humanists and secularists everywhere. Abortion is hardly a wonderful thing that we need to be encouraging more of, but it is alas the least worst option. Rather like democracy as a form of government, as Winston Churchill once said.
At some level, I believe in the concept of the “unborn child” and that every gestating foetus should be given a chance in life. But I also believe in a woman’s right to choose, simply because the alternative is worse. Women are still going to want to abort unwanted pregnancies. If it is illegal, it will be driven underground and become the happy hunting ground of backstreet abortionists who will botch the process, perhaps without aborting the foetus successfully and causing lasting harm to both mother and child. The original Michael Caine version of Alfie presents a powerful portrayal of this.
I am equally certain that Paul Hill, a Christian minister who murdered an abortion clinic doctor in the USA, was far more evil than the doctor he killed could ever reasonably be considered. Hill’s victim terminated foetuses at the request of their mothers. Foetuses that could not feel pain like we can, who had no memories, no emotions, no wife, no children, no friends, no relatives to mourn them. I admit that it is an awful choice to make, but I do so without hesitation.
However, if there is a God, he is the greatest abortionist. Many pregnant women suffer from miscarriages. Sometimes it is a very apparent, obvious and painful process, both physically and mentally; very often though the woman doesn’t even realise that they were pregnant in the first place. That believers consider God alone has the right to dictate who lives and who dies is what Nietzsche described as “slave morality”: you give praise and thanks constantly to your master, no matter how meagre the scraps he allows to fall from his table and call it benevolence. I for one am relieved that there is very little evidence to believe it. The world would be a much worse place if it were true.
Moral issues are complex and need to be assessed on their likely or actual consequences rather than being predetermined according to an absolute standard. This doesn’t mean that morals are relative according to cultural and historical context. I believe we can distil objective moral standards as our knowledge and experience of our thoughts and actions increases.
Perhaps it would be wonderful if there were a list of rules set in stone somewhere in the metaphysical universe, but I simply don’t see any evidence for it. We just have to feel our around, sometimes getting it right, sometimes making mistakes, always striving for a state of moral perfection regardless of whether that will ever be achieved in reality.
manicstreetpreacher is RAOTFL at Charlie Brooker’s latest successful aim at the nail’s head.
The UK government’s recent pointless upgrading of its terror threat monitor status to “severe” was an inexplicable and bizarre episode to put it mildly. I am wondering what they were trying to spin out of the headlines. Fortunately, Charlie Brooker’s inspired Newswipe gave it the treatment it deserved in a segment aptly titled “The Week in Bullshit”.
Brooker’s superb takedown of prime time news and comment shows has also produced this inspired dissection of pro-forma news reports.
manicstreetpreacher is looking forward to “overdosing” on placebos in two weeks!
A few weeks ago I reported on The Merseyside Skeptics Society’s involvement with the 10:23 Campaign to put pressure on Alliance Boots to withdraw sales of homeopathic remedies following an incredible admission by Paul Bennett, professional standards director for Boots, to the Commons Science and Technology Committee in November 2009 that the company knows full well that the “treatment” has no appreciable effect, but they continue to stock it simply because customers buy it.
If homeopathy has any effect whatsoever, theoretically, it should be possible to “overdose” on it. To prove beyond doubt that this is not the case, the 10:23 Campaign – so called after the level of dilution that most homeopathic practitioners use in their potions – will be staging a series of swallowing events outside Boots stores in several cities throughout the UK at 10:23am on 30 January 2010: Edinburgh, Manchester, Bristol, Liverpool, Glasgow, Birmingham, Southampton and London, with sympathy protests in Australia, Canada and the United States.
At 10:23am on January 30th, more than three hundred homeopathy sceptics nationwide will be taking part in a mass homeopathic “overdose” in protest at Boots’ continued endorsement and sale of homeopathic remedies, and to raise public awareness about the fact that homeopathic remedies have nothing in them.
Sceptics and consumer rights activists will publicly swallow an entire bottle of homeopathic “pillules” to demonstrate that these “’remedies”, prepared according to a long-discredited 18th century ritual, are nothing but sugar pills.
The protest will raise public awareness about the reality of homeopathy, and put further pressure on Boots to live up to its responsibilities as the “scientist on the high street” and stop selling treatments which do not work.
If you want to get involved with the event, contact your nearest skeptics in the pub organisation. National press enquiries should be directed to Martin Robbins (press@1023.org.uk)
Martin Robbins, a spokesman for the society, said: “The remedies themselves may not be directly harmful, but there is a real danger in misleading customers into thinking that homeopathy is somehow equivalent to real medicine.
“Patients may believe that they are treating themselves or their children adequately, and delay seeking appropriate treatment; or they may receive dangerous advice after consulting with homeopaths rather than their GPs.”
He added: “The ‘overdose’ is a dramatic way of demonstrating to the public that these remedies have literally nothing in them. If eating an entire box of homeopathic sleeping pills fails to send one person to sleep, then how on Earth can their sale be justified?”
The group expects at least 300 people to take part. I hope to be at the London “overdose”.
manicstreetpreacher never ceased to be amazed that each side in a war always claims to have God on their side.
BBC News reports that arms supplier, Trijion, who supply coalition forces in Afghanistan, and had a deal with the US Defense Department for $66m (£40.3m) in 2009 alone, inscribe codes references of verses in the Good Book on their rifles:
The markings include “2COR4:6” and “JN8:12”, relating to verses in the books of Corinthians II and John.
Trijicon, the US-based manufacturer, was founded by a devout Christian, and says it runs to “Biblical standards”.
But military officials in the US and UK have expressed concern over the way the markings will be perceived.
The company has added the references to its sights for many years, but the issue surfaced only recently when soldiers complained to an advocacy group…
John 8:12 reads: “When Jesus spoke again to the people, he said, ‘I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.”
The nod to part of the second letter of Paul to the Corinthians, found on the company’s Reflex sight, references the text: “For God, who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ.”…
The company states on its website: “We believe that America is great when its people are good. This goodness has been based on biblical standards throughout our history and we will strive to follow those morals.”
Reminds me of a classic “alternative prayer” offered up by one of history’s finest heretics:
The War Prayer
O Lord our God, help us to tear their bodies to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded.
manicstreetpreacher assesses the latest pathetic attempts by believers at squaring the ultimate circle.
Further to my recent post on Pat Robertson’s theory behind the Haitian earthquake, I notice that the world’s more “moderate” believers are trying to make sense of how an all-powerful, all-good, all-loving, omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent God would allow all this to happen. Evil Burnee, Paul S Jenkins, has posted to some well and truly dire attempts by the faithful to dream up excuses for their imaginary God, such as on Thought for the Day when “theodicy’s guilty vacuity was brought to a new low” by Giles Fraser:
…at a moment like this, I prefer to leave the arguments to others. For me this is a time quietly to light a candle for the people of Haiti, and to offer them up to God in my prayers. May the souls of the departed rest in peace.
The Earth’s thin shell was quaking and cracking millions of years before human sinners evolved, and it will still be wrenched and convulsed long after we are gone. These geological dislocations have no human-behavioural cause. The believers should relax; no educated person is going to ask their numerous gods “why” such disasters occur. A fault is not the same as a sin.
However, the believers can resist anything except temptation. Where would they be if such important and frightening things had natural and rational explanations? They want the gods to be blamed. After the titanic eruption of Krakatoa in 1883, the Muslims of Indonesia launched a hugely successful campaign to recruit terrified local people to Islamic repentance. Following the more recent Asian tsunami of 2004, religious figures jostled to provide every possible “explanation” of tectonic events in terms of mere human conduct.
It reminds me of the time that ultraconservative Catholic hack (and seemingly now a human punch bag for the Hitch!) Dinesh D’Souza attempted to make religious capital out of the Virginia Tech massacre of April 2007 with this god-awful post on his AOL blog:
Notice something interesting about the aftermath of the Virginia Tech shootings? Atheists are nowhere to be found. Every time there is a public gathering there is talk of God and divine mercy and spiritual healing. Even secular people like the poet Nikki Giovanni use language that is heavily drenched with religious symbolism and meaning…
To no one’s surprise, [Richard] Dawkins has not been invited to speak to the grieving Virginia Tech community. What this tells me is that if it’s difficult to know where God is when bad things happen, it is even more difficult for atheism to deal with the problem of evil. The reason is that in a purely materialist universe, immaterial things like good and evil and souls simply do not exist. For scientific atheists like Dawkins, Cho’s shooting of all those people can be understood in this way – molecules acting upon molecules.
If this is the best that modern science has to offer us, I think we need something more than modern science.
Have no fear by visiting the piece itself: it’s well worth reading virtually every commenter tear D’Souza a new one! The post also found its way onto RichardDawkins.net where the responses there were not exactly complimentary either…
One good thing that did come out of D’Souza’s reprehensible piece of trash was this beautiful response by an atheist professor at Virginia tech:
We atheists do not believe in gods, or angels, or demons, or souls that endure, or a meeting place after all is said and done where more can be said and done and the point of it all revealed. We don’t believe in the possibility of redemption after our lives, but the necessity of compassion in our lives. We believe in people, in their joys and pains, in their good ideas and their wit and wisdom. We believe in human rights and dignity, and we know what it is for those to be trampled on by brutes and vandals. We may believe that the universe is pitilessly indifferent but we know that friends and strangers alike most certainly are not. We despise atrocity, not because a god tells us that it is wrong, but because if not massacre then nothing could be wrong…
I am to be found on the drillfield with a candle in my hand. “Amazing Grace” is a beautiful song, and I can sing it for its beauty and its peacefulness. I don’t believe in any god, but I do believe in those people who have struggled through pain and found beauty and peace in their religion. I am not at odds with them any more than I am at odds with Americans when we sing the “Star-Spangled Banner” just because I am not American. I can sing “Lean on Me” and chant for the Hokies in just the same way and for just the same reason…
With or without a belief in a god, with or without your asinine bigotry, we will make progress, we will breathe life back into our university, I will succeed in explaining this or that point, slowly, eventually, in a ham-handed way, at risk of tears half-way through, my students will come to feel comfortable again in a classroom with no windows or escape route, and hell yes we will prevail.
You see Mr D’Souza, I am an atheist professor at Virginia Tech and a man of great faith. Not faith in your god. Faith in my people.
As wonderful as that article is, I can do no better than this beautiful poem by former Christian preacher turned atheist, Joe Holman:
I am God. I know your pain.
I was there for every trial you’ve ever faced.
I was there when you fell and hurt your knee at the age of three.
I was there when you were shunned on the playground more recently.
I was there when your mother was in the hospital. I stood by and watched as the doctors worked to save her life. I appreciated the prayers you sent Me to spare her.
I was there when mother died, as her immortal spirit drifted back to Me.
I was there when your family mourned her loss and cried with unceasing tears.
I was there when your father passed, when he forgot who you were, when you closed the lid to his casket.
I was there when dear Aunt Olga was diagnosed with ovarian cancer.
I was there when she bravely went through test after test until her condition was finally confirmed.
I was there when she lost her will to live. I watched as the family pleaded with her to continue treatment and not to give up; I waited where her tears fell.
I was there when your Uncle Hank died.
I was there when you told your first lie.
I was around the first time you touched yourself; on that day, all the angels cried; on that day, you lost your innocence.
I was there, in the corner of your room, watching you sin. I testified to your inner-man that you fell short of My Glory, as a sinner, an impure and fallen man, another of Adam’s reproachful sons, wicked from birth.
I was there when young Ben, your childhood friend, was killed in the car wreck. I was in the driver’s seat of the other car, watching, looking on as a drunken man fell asleep at the wheel. I did not wake him, but said: “Sleep, you foolish man. Sleep.”
I was there when your best friend from high school decided to take his own life. My holy eyes saw the blood from his slit wrists run down through the cracks of the hard wood floor.
I was there when you wept at his funeral. Jesus wept too.
I was there when you sobbed uncontrollably, leaning on the casket of your bosom friend, pushing away the comforts of your spouse.
I was there when your youngest child was born, when it was said of the doctors: “Your son’s spine did not form correctly. He will never walk and will need surgery to live.”
I was there when the doctors performed the operation.
I was there as their hands took the scalpels, as every incision, every cut into his newborn flesh was made.
I was there, and I am here. I am God: “and, lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world. Amen.” (Matthew 28: 20)
When the Asian tsunami struck on Boxing Day 2004, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, was famously misquoted in a screaming headline by The Sunday Telegraph as saying that the disaster had made him doubt the existence of God. Williams of course immediately pointed out that this was a ploy on the newspaper’s part to grab the reader’s attention: the Archbishop was actually addressing his flock’s concerns with so much suffering.
A pity. For a moment there I thought that a clergyman had finally said what we heretics had known all along: shit just happens.
Greater Manchester Humanists are holding a Q & A event on Tuesday, 2 February 2010, 7:00 – 8:30pm at Friends Meeting House, Mount Street, Manchester M2 5NS.
manicstreetpreacher rolls his eyes at the latest verdict of divine retribution.
Crackpot US televangelist demagogue and all round nasty piece of work, the “reverend” Pat Robertson last week dubbed the recent earthquake in Haiti as “a blessing in disguise” and was God’s punishment for the Haitian slaves’ revolt against their French colonial masters in 1791 which only succeeded because they entered into “a pact with the devil”. Robertson made his comments on his ghastly outlet of religious bigotry The 700 Club on 13 January 2010:
Something happened a long time ago in Haiti, and people might not want to talk about it… They were under the heel of the French. You know, Napoleon III, or whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, we will serve you if you’ll get us free from the French. True story. And so, the devil said, okay it’s a deal. And they kicked the French out, you know, the Haitians revolted and got themselves free. But ever since they have been cursed by one thing after the other, desperately poor. That island of Hispaniola is one island. It’s cut down the middle. On the one side is Haiti, on the other side is the Dominican Republic. Dominican Republic is, is, prosperous, healthy, full of resorts, etc. Haiti is in desperate poverty. Same island, uh, they need to have, and we need to pray for them, a great turning to God. Out of this tragedy, I’m optimistic something good may come, but right now we’re helping the suffering people and the suffering is unimaginable.
This is not the first time the “good reverend” has made a link between seismology and morality. In 2005, the Dover District school board who forced Intelligent Design into school textbooks and were sued by several students’ parents in the Kitzmiller –v- Dover District P A “Intelligent Design trial” were voted out of office by the schools’ parents before the judgment was handed down by the court. Robertson told the town of Dover not to expect the protection of God if something bad happened in their neighbour because they had forced God out of their lives:
I’d like to say to the good citizens of Dover: if there is a disaster in your area, don’t turn to God, you just rejected Him from your city. And don’t wonder why he hasn’t helped you when problems begin, if they begin. I’m not saying they will, but if they do, just remember, you just voted God out of your city. And if that’s the case, don’t ask for His help because He might not be there.
In a written statement, Robertson later “clarified” his comments:
God is tolerant and loving, but we can’t keep sticking our finger in His eye forever. If they have future problems in Dover, I recommend they call on Charles Darwin. Maybe he can help them.
This is just the latest episode in religion’s love affair with natural disaster. Many fundamentalist Christians saw Hurricane Katrina as a punishment from God for our sin and rebellion from God. Odd that the historic red-light district was left relatively unscathed, just as the fact that the largest and most devastating earthquake in San Francisco was in 1906: decades before it ceased being a heterosexual city.
Of course Robertson himself was credited (if that’s the right word) with saying that Hurricane Katrina was God’s punishment on New Orleans since it is the hometown of lesbian actress Ellen DeGeneres who was hosting the upcoming Emmy Awards ceremony that year. Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion speculates whether this story could be true given Robertson’s track record. However, it is most likely an invention of the website Dateline: Hollywood that has passed into urban myth.
Let’s not forget that former Bishop of Carlisle, the Right Reverend Graham Dow pronounced the summer 2007 North Yorkshire floods as:
[A] strong and definite judgment because the world has been arrogant in going its own way. We are reaping the consequences of our moral degradation, as well as the environmental damage that we have caused.
We are in serious moral trouble because every type of lifestyle is now regarded as legitimate.
In the Bible, institutional power is referred to as “the beast”, which sets itself up to control people and their morals. Our government has been playing the role of God in saying that people are free to act as they want.
The sexual orientation regulations [which give greater rights to gays] are part of a general scene of permissiveness. We are in a situation where we are liable for God’s judgment, which is intended to call us to repentance.
[The problem with] environmental judgment is that it is indiscriminate.
If there was a connection between metrology and morality, and religion has very often argued that there is, I don’t see why the floods hit northern Yorkshire. I can think of some parts of London where they would have done a lot more good.
Writing in The Independent, Thomas Sutcliffe compared the Bishop of Carlisle to the attempted suicide bomber who drove a truckload of explosives into the side of Glasgow Airport at the same time as the floods:
That wannabe martyr – his 72 expectant virgins currently tapping their fingers impatiently in Paradise – had a head wreathed in fire and a Molotov cocktail in his hand. The Bishop of Carlisle is a diocesan bishop in the Church of England, not a sect commonly associated with acts of terror, while the as-yet-unnamed jihadi is, one guesses, an adherent of Wahabi Islam, a sect which very much is. And yet, on a spiritual level, it seems that they do share one thing. They both believe in a vindictive God…
The logic of this seems to suggest that God is prepared to kill innocent people in order to get his message across. And if the Bishop is right, it isn’t just us that God is disappointed with. He’s furious with the people of Pakistan, where serious flooding has left 900,000 homeless, and Afghanistan, where 80 have died in recent storms, and Kansas and Texas, too, where floods have devastated communities and left people homeless. Then again, with a killer this “indiscriminate” about collateral damage, only a bishop could be sure what the message is.
Of course, there are important differences between the bishop and the Glasgow attacker. The bishop restricts himself to condoning the actions of a terrorist God, while the human fireball appointed himself as a direct tool of divine wrath. It’s hardly a distinction to be sneezed at in these dangerous times. But it’s not quite enough to quell the sense that the bishop finds himself in a distant intellectual kinship with the suicide bomber – both worshippers of a God who communicates through the deaths of innocents.
One of the objections I constantly come up against in debates is the argument from “that’s not my God or my religion you’re attacking” from believers who accuse atheists of taking scripture too much at face value. Religious moderates may not take stories such as Noah’s Ark and Sodom and Gomorrah literally, but there are plenty of hardcore religious believers who do! They are the people who clearly believe in Richard Dawkins’ assessment of the God of the Old Testament: “arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”
And they are the people I would rather be kept out of my newspapers or on my television set.
Afterthought
While proofing this piece, I came across Miranda Celeste Hale’s superb response to Rex Murphy’s piece on the National Post website. Murphy had condemned Robertson for providing Dawkins and Hitchens with more ammunition:
He, Robertson, fulfils every agitated secularist’s caricature of a “dedicated” Christian. If Pat Robertson didn’t exist, Richard Dawkins (with a little midwifery from Christopher Hitchens) would have to give birth to him.
Hale’s rejoinder to Murphy beautifully captures the “Oh, atheists just pick on the worst case example” card from religious moderates I eluded to above:
Robertson is no caricature. Quite the opposite, in fact: he embodies and espouses the contents of the Bible on a daily basis. Self-proclaimed “enlightened” Christians can try to deny this all they like. They can claim to be the “real Christians,” the ones who understand that the Bible, when interpreted “correctly,” teaches that God is actually a loving and benevolent deity. In a self-serving manner, these Murphy-ites choose to ignore the violent, sadistic, and cruel nature of the God of the Old Testament, arguing that Robertson and his ilk just don’t get it and that they provide a convenient and easy target for those writers and commentators who are brave enough to question and criticize the automatic and undeserved privilege, respect, and power that is granted to Christianity in public and political discourse. This claim allows Murphy to casually dismiss with a wave of his smug hand the multitude of completely valid criticisms that these writers (and many others) have made…
How, exactly, does Murphy know who is a “real” Christian and who is not? If Murphy is going to play the “real Christian” game, then I’ll play, too: if anyone’s a “real” Christian, it’s Pat Robertson, the living, breathing embodiment of the Bible. The Murphy-ites can deny it until they are blue in the face, but the simple fact is that Robertson perfectly personifies and unashamedly displays the contemptible attitudes and the nasty characteristics of their shared imaginary friend.
Try as they might, those who claim to be “enlightened”, “real” Christians cannot, in the end, distance themselves from the vile and vicious God of their “Good Book” without practicing a galling level of intellectual dishonesty. In that sense, Robertson is the honest one here. He’s an utterly contemptible and awful person to be sure, but it cannot be said that he does not practice exactly what he preaches.
manicstreetpreacher shares an all time classic from one of the Four Horseman.
Lately I have been referring rather to a lot to this effing genius put-down by “New Atheist” Sam Harris (Homepage / The Reason Project) in reply to the argument from religious moderates that while their faith may be unproven and potentially false, it still provides great meaning and purpose in the lives of ordinary people.
It is perfectly absurd for religious moderates to suggest that a rational human being can believe in God simply because this belief makes him happy, relieves his fear of death or gives his life meaning. The absurdity becomes obvious the moment we swap the notion of God for some other consoling proposition: Imagine, for instance, that a man wants to believe that there is a diamond buried somewhere in his yard that is the size of a refrigerator. No doubt it would feel uncommonly good to believe this. Just imagine what would happen if he then followed the example of religious moderates and maintained this belief along pragmatic lines: When asked why he thinks that there is a diamond in his yard that is thousands of times larger than any yet discovered, he says things like, “This belief gives my life meaning,” or “My family and I enjoy digging for it on Sundays,” or “I wouldn’t want to live in a universe where there wasn’t a diamond buried in my backyard that is the size of a refrigerator.” Clearly these responses are inadequate. But they are worse than that. They are the responses of a madman or an idiot.
The full lecture, entitled “The View from the End of the World”, given for The Long Now Foundation, 9 December 2005 can be heard below
manicstreetpreacher is pleased to report that NonStampCollector has done it again!
At the end of last year, I compiled the best of Aussie YouTube genius, NonStampCollector. I am thrilled that the turning of the new decade has only enhanced his satirical skills when it comes to all things theocratus lunaticras. Watch the video below which reconstructs a typical creationist interview with an atheist evolutionary scientist. P Z Myers has described it as “Every creationist argument I’ve ever had” and the video has also been posted on RichardDawkins.net.
Enjoy:
The clip is based on P Z Myer’s infamous radio debate in 2008 against Discovery Institute hack Geoffrey Simmons: someone with doctoral qualifications who didn’t know the scientific meaning of the word theory, and used it as a pejorative. Quite a few elements of the script clearly came from that exchange (whales, ignorance, etc.). See the relevant threads on Pharyngula and RichardDawkins.net: apparently there was a thread briefly posted on William Dembski’s blog Uncommon Descent where the commenters handed the debate to Myers, even though they disagreed with his point of view!
manicstreetpreacher just needs to clear something up.
ID proponent William Dembski continues to give me a free readership on his Uncommon Common Descent blog by attacking my post on his appearance on Premier Christian Radio’s Unbelievable? (700 views and counting! ). Firstly, Denyse O’ Leary vilified me for my take on the importance (or lack!) of probabilities in biology. Now, Dembski himself has posted a response denying that Darwin knew about the complexities of the cell, accusing your humble servant of “re-writing history”:
A blogger who goes by “Manic Street Preacher” sent me three unsolicited emails about his reaction to the debate, which was not positive…
I finally had a look at what this blogger wrote. I can’t say I was impressed with the argumentation or erudition, but I do have to credit him for chutzpah…
I don’t mean to be argumentative, but the insides of the cells depicted here do look to me like blobs. But qualitative interpretations like this aside, the fact is that Darwin had no conception of molecular biology or the intricate nano-engineering that Michael Behe, for instance, describes in the cell. Moreover, it’s straightforward to examine the actual history of the scientific understanding of the cell to realize that the cell in Darwin’s time was conceived as simple, indeed so simple that it could spontaneously generate. Jonathan Wells and I describe some of this in HOW TO BE AN INTELLECTUALLY FULFILLED ATHEIST.
But perhaps the easiest way to see that “Manic Street Preacher” is blowing smoke is to do a search on “Bathybius Haeckelii” – slime dredged up from the ocean floor thought to be the primordial living matter. This proved to be a big embarrassment to Huxley and Haeckel. The details here are unimportant. What is important is that biologist of Huxley’s and Haeckel’s stature thought that life could be so simple as to be the result of this slime.
“Manic Street Preacher” reminds me of Joey Bishop in the movie A GUIDE FOR THE MARRIED MAN [IMDB]. Bishop, caught in flagrante delictu with another woman by his wife, denies all wrong doing (and, if he were a Darwinist, would accuse his wife of infidelity). Eventually, the wife, suitably cowed, accepts the denials and agrees that nothing happened. Well, here at UD we don’t let Darwinists get away with such nonsense. Darwin and his contemporaries didn’t have a clue about the complexity of the cell. History bears this out, Darwinian revisionism notwithstanding.
Aside from being somewhat bemused at being compared to a member of the Rat Pack and an email spammer, I have two retorts to this. Firstly, Dembski ought to have scrolled down to the comments section, where he would have seen that I had linked to this page on zoologist and theistic evolutionist Wesley R Elsberry’s blog which contains excellent references both to creationist and IDiots’ claims that Darwin knew nothing about that complexity of the cell:
Antievolutionists make lots of claims about Charles Darwin, seeking to impeach the authority of someone born 199 years ago today. Given that science moves on and leaves no one’s ideas untouched, one would think that they would stick to negative claims that would stand up to some scrutiny. Again and again, though, we find that they continue to espouse negative claims that are just plain silly, at least to those with even the slightest familiarity with the actual record that Darwin left.
[A] common antievolution claim about Darwin, simply put, [is] that Darwin considered the contents of cells to be “black boxes”, comprised of a simple or homogeneous protoplasm. This is expressed in similar ways by a number of antievolutionists. The following is just a sampling of the available instances.
Scientists use the term “black box” for a system whose inner workings are unknown. To Charles Darwin and his contemporaries, the living cell was a black box because its fundamental mechanisms were completely obscure. We now know that, far from being formed from a kind of simple, uniform protoplasm (as many nineteenth-century scientists believed), every living cell contains many ultrasophisticated molecular machines.
There were other things that Darwin did not know. For example, Darwin assumed that the cell was like a primitive blob of protoplasm that could easily evolve new biological functions. As Behe explains, “To Darwin, then, as to every other scientist of the time, the cell was a black box… The question of how life works was not one that Darwin or his contemporaries could answer.”
To be fair to Darwin, he proposed his theory when scientists knew next to nothing about biochemistry. Living things were “black boxes,” their inside workings a mystery. The cell itself was thought to be nothing more than a blob of jellylike protoplasm. It was easy to draw large-scale scenarios about fins gradually turning into legs, or legs into wings, since no one had a clue how limbs and organs work from the inside. As Behe writes, it is as though we asked how a stereo system is made and someone answered, “by plugging a set of speakers into an amplifier and adding a CD player, radio receiver, and tape deck.”
That’s pretty rich, that “be fair to Darwin” phrase. As Jeffrey Shallit, Professor of Computer Science at University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, commenting on Stephen Meyer’s recent book, Signature in the Cell points out, “This claim has been repeated again and again by creationists, but it is not true. Fergodsake, the nucleus was discovered in 1833.”
Elsberry continues with the opinions of Jay Richards:
In addition, biochemists and biologists have discovered a microscopic world of mesmerizing complexity belying the simple blobs of protoplasm that Darwin imagined.
Elsberry frames matters bluntly:
Antievolutionists don’t go looking at the primary sources to come up with these nuggets; one of them creates a “magic bullet”, and the rest pass it around like a game of “telephone”, sometimes resulting in a garbled mess. As Casey Luskin’s contribution here indicates, the likely source of the BS in this case is Michael Behe.
Why call it BS? Because anybody can disconfirm the claim in seconds with a modern Internet search, and only moderately longer using the past technology scholars have long relied upon for substantiating claims about prior work.
One finds there Darwin’s work on pangenesis, his hypothesis that there existed small particles that he called gemmules, each of which contained the heritable information for some particular trait, and which would combine, somehow, into the gametes. His continued advocacy of this wrong idea was a major failing on his part, but along the way we can see that even though Darwin was wrong about gemmules, he did hold an antithetical view to the claim that everything was simple at the most basic levels of life’s organization:
Notwithstanding the astounding complexity of the processes implied by this hypothesis of pangenesis, yet it seems to me to comprehend the several leading facts better than any other view. On this hypothesis we may fancifully look at each animal and plant as being compounded of many beings, in the same manner as a tree or coral is compounded of many similar beings; but in neither case have these so-called beings had a separate existence. Each of these beings, or parts, is supposed to be capable of throwing off gemmules, which whilst within the organism are capable of self-increase, and which can be separately developed at the part or organ whence they were derived, and can be united, as in the case of hybrids, with other gemmules into a single germ or bud, which reproduces the complete parent form. On this view, each organic being may be looked at as a little universe, formed of a host of different self-propagating organisms, almost as numerous as the stars in heaven, and as minute as they are immense.
Darwin clearly understood the complexity of the cell in this paper:
As, however, a cell is a complex structure, with its investing membrane, nucleus, and nucleolus, a gemmule, as Mr G H Lewes has remarked in his interesting discussion on this subject (Fortnightly Review, Nov. 1, 1868, p. 508), must, perhaps, be a compound one, so as to reproduce all the parts.
Two papers by Darwin published in 1882 demonstrate Darwin’s readiness to experiment in resolving sub-cellular processes, using chemistry and microscopy to aid in the work.
These papers in the primary literature demonstrate vividly that Charles Darwin not only was aware that protoplasm was not homogeneous, but was at the end of his life working toward elucidating exactly what differences within cells existed. As Wesley concludes:
The antievolution “magic bullet” intended to dismiss Darwin is a dud. Sub-cellular structure elucidation was another part of science in which Darwin was an active participant. Darwin’s own preferred hypothesis of heredity, though now discredited, presumed the sort of immense complexity at small scales that antievolutionists falsely claim Darwin had no “imagination” for. Many antievolutionists have willingly participated in passing along this falsehood and urging changes in public school curriculum policy based, in part, on their false and ignorant claims. I find it significant that I have yet to encounter any instance of an antievolution advocate pointing out the actual facts of the case and remonstrating with their colleagues, even though the disconfirming evidence is easy to locate and describe. I can only conclude that antievolutionists in general have no concern for the truth nor for fact-checking even the simplest of their claims. Trusting antievolutionists to help guide policy and form curricula for public schools would be malfeasance, plain and simple…
Secondly, the charge that Darwin did not know anything about the inner workings of the cell is purely an academic point and I corrected Dembski mainly to preserve Darwin’s reputation and correct him on this bogus canard that he and his ilk keep trotting out. There was a great deal that Darwin did not know about and/or where he was plain wrong. Dembski is correct in pointing out that he had no idea about genetic mutations, DNA and molecular biology. However, his theory has been revised, updated and indeed strengthened by the subsequent 150 years of scientific research, experimentation and peer-review by scientists who have had far greater knowledge and far more advanced technology at their disposal.
This is the science that has rid the world of smallpox and flown us to the moon. Even if Dembski and Behe had their way and people accepted that there was an extraterrestrial intelligence behind the complexity we see in nature, even if the unthinkable happened and the designer actually revealed himself in the middle of an international event with the entire world watching and told us directly to be nice to each other, nothing whatsoever would change about the way we do science. We could not even confront the designer and ask him to repair what he makes, like Roy Batty in Ridley Scott’s 1982 sci-fi classic Blade Runner.
We would still have to search for cures to cancer and AIDS as well as updating our vaccinations against constantly evolving viruses (funny how you never hear creationists and IDers shout about the wonderful design of these particular organisms!). Creationism and Intelligent Design contribute nothing to the advancement of science and medicine. If an IDer has ever won the Nobel Prize, they must have hidden it from the judges. If the Discovery Institute is leading the way in the fight against deadly diseases, they are keeping it awfully quiet. Instead, they are concerned with preserving ancient myths in the vain hope that adhering to such beliefs sometimes makes people behave better, as the opening paragraph of the DI’s “Wedge Strategy” document (download PDF) well attests:
The proposition that humans beings are created in the image of God is one of the bedrock principles on which Western civilization was built. Its influence can be detected in most, if not all, of the West’s greatest achievements, including representative democracy, human rights, free enterprise and progress in arts and science.
One piece of scripture that has stuck with this manic street preaching heretic is something St Paul said: “When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see through a glass, darkly.” (1 Corinthians 13: 12 – 13).
). Firstly, Denyse O’ Leary 
