Year: 2010

I quite understand, except for one thing – why did they hire a psychic in Bangalore? Are there no psychics in Lincolnshire? That seems most unikely. It’s a mystical sort of place, Lincs – it must be crawling with psychics.

Now I know what you’re going to say – they’re psychics – they don’t have to be on the spot – der. It’s spiritual. It’s not all grubbily of the earth earthy; it’s immaterial, it’s floaty, it’s non-geographical. The psychic could be on Pluto; it wouldn’t matter. Thought travels through space and time, it does not need bodies or proximity. I know. I get all that. But what about the convenience of the people who are stuck in Lincolnshire? Surely it would be easier for them to chat with a psychic who was right there than with one who was in a completely different time zone.

On the other hand, I suppose the thinking is that if you’re going to use a psychic you might as well use the best, and obviously the best psychics are all in India. Fair enough. Forget I said anything.

Karl Giberson is a honcho at BioLogos. BioLogos is about “Science and Faith in Dialogue,” about Science & the Sacred. Francis Collins is a scientist, Karl Giberson is a scientist. Karl Giberson explains why he has reservations about Intelligent Design.

BioLogos enthusiastically endorses the idea that the universe is intelligently designed and we certainly believe that the creator of the universe is intelligent. We consider the evidence regarding the fine-tuning of the universe to be provocative and compelling. Our reservations about ID certainly do not derive from any rejection of the rationality of the universe.

The rationality of the universe? What’s rational about the universe? It’s too big, for one thing. It’s too cold for another, too full of surprises for another, too hard to breathe in for one more. What’s so rational? And…rational according to what criteria? Ours? Obviously not. God’s? But that just begs the question.

Anyway. What I really wonder is what he means by saying “we certainly believe that the creator of the universe is intelligent.” What can any human mean by that? What do we mean by “intelligent”?

We mean “intelligent according to us,” of course. We’re human beings, saying human things, seeing things from a human perspective. “Intelligence” is something we attribute to ourselves and perhaps in small amounts to some other animals. It’s something we name as existing in some of the evolved animals in the organic top layer of this one planet. Does it seem at all likely that the same quality could exist in an entity that “designed” and “created” the universe? Not to me it doesn’t. We recognize something we call “intelligence” in entities of a certain size with a certain amount of brain tissue. The universe doesn’t seem to be the kind of thing that could be “designed” and “created” by a similar entity magnified enough times to be bigger than the universe (you have to be bigger to be outside it, because you have to be outside it before you can design and create it). It’s not enough to be bigger than Texas, or bigger than the earth, or bigger than Jupiter – bigger than the universe is a whole different order of bigger. Does it make sense to think we can make educated guesses about what kind of personal qualities – intelligence, courage, politeness – an entity of that size might have?

I don’t think it does. I think it’s just a packet of words that people mouth, without really thinking about them properly. If they actually thought about them, the oddities would slow them down. It’s very easy to say we certainly believe that the creator of the universe is intelligent, but making sense of it is another matter.

Rand Paul, Kentucky’s “Tea Party” nominee for the Senate, is opposed to the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo says why that’s not just a principled libertarian view:

To a degree the argument Paul is making is something like saying that I don’t like rape or murder, I just don’t believe in a police force to prevent it or a judiciary to punish the offenders. The reason we, albeit imperfectly, have equality before the law and in the society at large (in terms of public accommodations and so forth) on racial grounds in the whole of the United States is because of federal legislation that forced that to be the case. The reason we don’t have white and colored drinking fountains or pools for whites only

is because of federal legislation that forced that to be the case.

And we know all that because that’s how it played out during the 1950s and 60s. There was activism, there were protests and marches and freedom rides, and they got things going, but they weren’t enough. They faced overwhelming state force, and they would have lost if the federal government hadn’t – slowly and reluctantly under Eisenhower and Kennedy, with more commitment under Johnson – joined in. Libertarianism wouldn’t have worked, at least not nearly as fast.